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 CONTENTS
6 MAY 2024

5 6 10 13 14

OPINION NOTEBOOK INSIDER GAME, SETH AND MATCH OPEN ESSAY

Muslim-first Congress The Gukesh effect Why Kiran Nadar matters The trials of collecting material
By Minhaz Merchant on Indian chess By Suhel Seth on the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
By Madhavankutty Pillai By C Christine Fair

18 ON TOP OF HIS GAME

18 How Modi wins the young influentials
—and the smart vote
By PR Ramesh

26 SPARE THE EVM PLEASE

Look who’s losing faith in democracy
By Rajeev Deshpande

28 MODI’S DOOSRA
In what could be a pivotal moment in the
election, the prime minister links Congress’
redistribution stance to its pursuit of quotas
for Muslims at the cost of OBCs
By Rajeev Deshpande
32 SOCIALIST MIRAGE
Policies that encourage redistribution
have a poor track record and Congress’
leftward lurch is more a vision
of class war than empowerment
By Siddharth Singh

36 THE SWARAJ AURA

In New Delhi, BJP candidate
26 28 Bansuri Swaraj taps into the legacy of her
mother and the youth vote
By Amita Shah

40 BJP’S MISSION KASHMIR

The Lok Sabha polls in the Union territory
are the means to achieve a favourable condition
in the Assembly election
36 44 By Rahul Pandita

44 BETTING ON BENGALURU
Women and welfare play key roles in
India’s IT capital
By V Shoba

48 52 56 59 60 62 65 66

‘I STILL IN PRAISE OF STATES WHAT IFS A MANIFESTO THE RACHEL STREAMING STARGAZER
GET TO SAY WHAT THE PROVINCIAL OF UNREST A dystopian FOR AI USERS PAPERS SMART By Kaveree Bamzai
I WANT TO SAY’ Why small-town writers, Neel Mukherjee novel that moves Is Artificial A London
Dibakar Banerjee like William Shakespeare speaks about between fate Intelligence exhibition
talks about the or DH Lawrence, are equal choices made and possibility changing what explores the life
sequel to his to their more urban peers and deferred in By Madhulika Liddle it means to and legacy of
breakout hit By Sumana Roy his new novel be human? Ranjit Singh
By Kaveree Bamzai By Nandini Nair By Ullekh NP By Rachel Dwyer

Cover Photo by PIB

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

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 3


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 (Bengaluru),
Nandini Nair, Sudeep Paul
ART DIRECTOR Jyoti K Singh
SENIOR EDITORS Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia
(Mumbai), Moinak Mitra, Aditya Iyer
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Antara Raghavan
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Vijay K Soni (Web)
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SENIOR COPY EDITOR Neelabh Raj
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SENIOR DESIGNERS Anup Banerjee,
Veer Pal Singh
PHOTO EDITOR Raul Irani
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CFO Raas Taneja
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NATIONAL HEAD -CIRCULATION
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HEAD–PRODUCTION Maneesh Tyagi
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Volume 16 Issue 18
For the week April 30-May 6, 2024
Total no of pages 68
4 6 MAY 2024
OPEN MAIL
editor@openmedianetwork.in
& LETTER OF THE WEEK
The attack on author Salman Rushdie in 2022 was
one of the most tragic events of the year even as the
world reeled under the coronavirus pandemic (‘The
Wounded Happiness of Salman Rushdie’ April 29,
2024). No one would have expected the attack
to take place, especially decades after the late
Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie
for his book, The Satanic Verses, and that too when
he was about to give a lecture on the safety of exiled
writers. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
is Rushdie’s memoir about the stabbing—more than
a dozen knife wounds and over in 27 seconds—and
a testament to his survival and endurance. In the
memoir, Rushdie points out that 27 seconds are country. India has not seen
enough to recite a Shakespeare sonnet, including his such a detailed report that
favourite Sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing covers various reforms.
like the sun’). Delving into the details of all the wounds The theme of the manifesto
he suffered, Rushdie does not forget to bring his wits revolves around “Modi ki
into the fold—one of his first thoughts was that his Guarantee”, symbolising
Ralph Lauren suit had to face the brunt of the violence. the trust the public now
This memoir is Rushdie’s second, the first one being places in Prime Minister
Joseph Anton. That was about his life in hiding due to Narendra Modi.
death threats, and the second about them taking place. Jayanthy Subramaniam
Devanshu Banerjee
SENSEX RISING
Strong domestic
ENTERING THE SOUTH win in the Lok Sabha polls macroeconomic
It is because of an aggressive but its vote share will rise fundamentals and 8.4
and ambitious push that substantially, enabling it to per cent growth in
BJP could increase its tally perform much better in the October-December quarter
in Lok Sabha from just two 2026 Assembly election in surpassing forecasts have
seats in 1984 to a whopping Tamil Nadu. led the market to cross
303 seats in 2019 (‘The Kangayam R Narasimhan the 75000-mark (‘Sensex
Saffron Dare’, April 29, 2024). @75000’, April 29, 2024).
This Lok Sabha election, BJP VISION FOR A BETTER INDIA And the fact that the
is continuing for this push BJP’s manifesto for the market is expecting the
through the aggressive and 2024 Lok Saba election Modi government to retain
enterprising K Annamalai should not be taken lightly power at the Centre after the
in Tamil Nadu. It has left no as it focuses on the vision polls has likely made this
stone unturned to challenge for a better India (‘BJP’s milestone possible. Analysts
the two Dravidian majors Manifesto Surprise’, April are being cautious about
in the state—DMK and 29, 2024). And unlike continuation of the bull-run
AIADMK—to emerge as the allegations levelled as they expect an average
the third political force. by the opposition, the performance in the January-
Annamalai has dug up old Constitution is not at all March quarter in most of the
records to show that late in danger if BJP comes to sectors. The market may be
DMK patriarch power again. But if the rallying on expected political
K Karunanidhi had saffron party is able to stability post elections and
allegedly colluded with achieve even one-third or a focus on infrastructure
Congress to hand over half of what it is promising and capital expenditure. But
the Katchatheevu island in its manifesto in five what actually will happen is
to Sri Lanka. It is unclear years, it would bring about to be seen.
how many seats BJP would a great change in the Bal Govind
 OPINION Minhaz Merchant

Muslim-First Congress
Secularism needs to be inclusive and put India first

T
HE CONGRESS MANIFESTO mentions “minorities” first. It has to be India-first.
48 times. It does not mention “Muslim” even once. The third error Congress and its allies made is allowing
Why so coy? Congress doesn’t hide its Muslim-first corruption to sideline development during their years in
politics. It revels in it. But those who drafted the manifesto, power. It drove Feroze Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s grandfather,
led by P Chidambaram, are politically astute. They recognise to challenge father-in-law Jawaharlal Nehru in Lok Sabha
that in today’s polarised environment, discretion is the in 1957 over corruption in the Mundhra-LIC case. The ex-
better part of semantic valour. posé of the scam by Feroze Gandhi (a Parsi who earlier used
“Minorities” is anyway code for Muslims who comprise to spell his name Gandhy) led to the resignation of then
over 15 per cent of the Indian population. Christians are Finance Minister TT Krishnamachari.
2.3 per cent, Sikhs 1.7 per cent, and Parsis 0.05 per cent. Corruption wound itself like a poisonous snake around
There’s electoral wisdom in downplaying the Congress’ India’s development agenda. Defence deals were compro-
Muslim-first bias. mised and infrastructure projects stalled. Voters see the differ-
Voters in Wayanad, from where Rahul Gandhi will contest, ence today. Despite inheriting a low-growth, high-inflation
understand why the word Muslim is absent from the manifes- economy in May 2014 and losing two years to a devastating
to. When asked, they chuckle: “Rahul bhai doesn’t need to say once-in-a-century pandemic, the last decade has been marked
it. We know why he left Amethi and came here.” by unprecedented development.
Why did he? Because Muslims and The fourth strategic error Congress
Christians form over 50 per cent of the and its allies made is executing a tim-
Wayanad electorate. A safer seat for a For decades, India’s id foreign policy that compromised the
Congress dynast would be hard to find. national interest. On Nehru’s watch,
electorate has been
The Congress manifesto is well writ- India gifted China a veto-carrying seat
ten. It speaks to its audience with an
spoon-fed the idea that if in the United Nations Security Council
English timbre. BJP’s manifesto is more you codify Hindu (UNSC). Through the 1950s, India lost
earthy. It speaks to its audience with a personal law, you are 38,000 sqkm of its territory in Aksai
Hindi timbre. The 2024 Lok Sabha elec- secular. But if you codify Chin to China. Nehru’s forward poli-
tion is a contest between two contrast- Muslim personal law, you cy on the China border triggered the di-
ing ideas of India. During campaigning, are communal sastrous 1962 war. Chief of Army Staff
Congress and its allies have made four (COAS) General Pran Nath Thapar re-
strategic errors. signed on November 19, 1962 on health
First, doubling down on dynastic politics. An electorate grounds one day before the war ended on November 20.
numbed into normalising a Rabri Devi becoming chief Indira Gandhi was forced by a refugee influx from East
minister when her husband is jailed, will quietly accept a Pakistan to act decisively in 1971. To her credit, she left tac-
Sunita Kejriwal becoming chief minister when her husband tics and timings to the Indian Army led by General (later
is jailed. Field Marshal) Sam Manekshaw.
The second error Congress and its allies have made is de- India’s assertive diplomacy with both the West (over
liberate falsification of the true meaning of secularism. For Russia-Ukraine) and China (holding firm for four years
decades, India’s electorate has been spoon-fed the idea that along the LAC) contrasts with how the national interest was
if you codify Hindu personal law, you are secular. But if you frequently sacrificed in the past at the altar of political expe-
codify Muslim personal law, you are communal. diency. After the November 2008 terror attack on Mumbai,
Decades of minorityism led to the rise of majoritarian- the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi government did little
ism. Congress, SP, RJD, NC and TMC used minorities to stay except exchange dossiers with Pakistan for six years.
in power. When the counter-reaction came, it led to Hindu- India’s Uri and Balakot strikes in 2016 and 2019 deep in-
first politics that swept BJP to power in 2014. side Pakistan signalled a paradigm shift in combatting ter-
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was, however, quick to rorism. The Inder Kumar Gujral government had shut
realise that majoritarianism can only be delivered to the down India’s covert operations capability in 1997. It has tak-
electorate in small doses. Secularism needs to be redefined en over 20 years to revive that capability as recent events in
as genuinely inclusive. It cannot be Muslim-first or Hindu- Pakistan and elsewhere have shown.

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 5

 OPENINGS
NOTEBOOK

The Gukesh Effect on Indian Chess

T
HE FIDE CANDIDATES Tournament in chess is held he was 13, he had crossed 2500. And at present he is at 2743.
to select the player who competes against the world He became an international master in 2018 and the very next
champion. It is the toughest competition in the sport, year he became a grandmaster. He was just 12 then. These are
short of the world championship itself. This time the not easy titles to get and the very competitive nature of chess
lineup, as usual, had the greatest players of the era. There was demands that only those who start very young, before they
Fabiano Caruana, who had already played for the world cham- are ten, and have extraordinary drive and talent, can become
pionship once, and even though he was finally defeated by a grandmaster. Even by all the above factors, Gukesh was an
Magnus Carlsen (still the best but he decided that he wouldn’t overachiever. He was the second youngest player to become a
participate in the world chess championship anymore some grandmaster. Seventeen days earlier and he would have been
years back), he had not lost a single game till the tie breaker. the youngest.And now he is the youngest to win the Candi-
There was Hikaru Nakamura, the most popular chess streamer dates Tournament.
in the world who is known to be an extraordinary talent in It requires a lot of long-term planning and resources. Guke-
all time formats. There was Ian Nepomniachtchi, who had sh’s father, for instance, had to give up his practice as a doctor
won the last two Candidates Tournament, only to falter both to focus on his son’s career. However, what is also necessary is
times at the world championship, first to Carlsen and then to for the soil to be fertile for such ambitions to succeed and that is
the current champion Ding Liren. There were a total of eight where the Indian chess story comes in. When Gukesh became
competitors and Dommaraju Gukesh wasn’t even among the the second youngest grandmaster, the title of the youngest was
favourites to win the event. But he did it almost seamlessly, held by Sergey Karjakin. But in 2021 that was finally over-
leading the pack most of the times and, except for one defeat, turned by another 12-year-old grandmaster and he too was an
finally managing to inch through by half a point. Gukesh’s Indian, Abhimanyu Mishra.
victory, however, glossed over another The Indian chess player most in the
remarkable element in the tournament news last year was R Praggnanandhaa
this year—of the eight who competed,
three were Indians. His performance
Gukesh said he wouldn’t who had defeated Carlsen in a number
of short format games. Praggnanand-
was a resonance of India’s rise as a have been anywhere haa, who became a grandmaster when
chess superpower. near where he was if he was 12 years and 10 months old,
To appreciate it, we need to take it hadn’t been for was one of the three Indians in the
a look at his career. Gukesh is only Candidates Tournament this time as
17 years old now, but he had started Viswanathan Anand’s well. India at present has 84 grandmas-
showing signs of being a chess prodigy inspiration and training ters. In 1987, it had none. And the
when no more than a little boy. On the he received from next year, 1988, it had one,
international chess federation FIDE’s the former world Viswanathan Anand, and he was more
website, there are ratings and typi- or less responsible for the chess revolu-
cally chess players fall between 1000 champion’s chess tion that would eventually come to
and 2800 in the classical long-form academy. Much of the pass in the country.
version of the game. Carlsen still has big leap that saw the Anand’s is a story which is perhaps
the highest ratings at 2830. When
Gukesh was seven years old, his rating
likes of Gukesh and even more remarkable than that of
Gukesh. When you have so many
was somewhere around 1200. A year R Praggnanandhaa grandmasters, the odds favour one
later, he was 1600. He was only nine has come in the or the other eventually making it
when he crossed 2000, marking him last decade to the top. But Anand went on to
out as a serious prospect. By the time become the World Champion after

6 6 MAY 2024
 D Gukesh at the 2024 FIDE
Candidates Tournament
in Toronto, April 22, 2024
being India’s first grandmaster and that means he didn’t have
any of the infrastructure or experience of seniors to bank on.
For instance, if you want to be a world beater you need to be
trained by the best in the world. If they didn’t exist in India,
there would be the effort and finances required to go to them
in an era when the Internet wasn’t available. Anand once
remembered in a media article that he only took up formal
coaching after he had qualified for the Candidates in 1990 and
that he was lucky in that chess theory, largely driven by com-
puters and databases, was yet to become a basic requirement
to be a professional player. His rise up to be a grandmaster was
self-driven but his becoming the World Champion changed
generations to come. He became a role model for many to take
up chess and then combined with the prosperity that Indians
were witnessing post liberalisation, many of these players
who rose to the professional level, began to start coaching
youngsters and the circle kept growing. That is why
Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest of all times, posted on X
after Gukesh’s victory, “Congratulations! The Indian earth-
quake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic
plates in the chess world as the 17 year old Gukesh D will face
the Chinese champion Ding Liren for the highest title. The
“children” of Vishy Anand are on the loose!’ Gukesh himself
said, in a press conference after the victory, that he wouldn’t
have been anywhere near where he was if it hadn’t been for
6 MAY 2024
Courtesy FIDE
Anand’s inspiration and the training he received from the for-
mer world champion’s chess academy. Much of the big leap
that saw the likes of Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa came in the
last decade. We now have a bevy of chess superstars and that
only means more youngsters flocking to take up the game.
What makes Gukesh’s victory enticing for India is that
he has a real chance of winning the world championship.
If Carlsen would still be playing then the scales would be
unbalanced, because many still consider him unbeatable in a
world championship. But Gukesh faces Ding Liren, who even
though highly rated, is beatable. The world chess champion-
ship will be played later this year and it will be a gruelling
format of 14 games. Both candidates will spend months holed
up with a team of grandmasters thinking of their moves and
that of their opponent’s. It is an exhausting process, which
contributed to Carlsen deciding to not play any longer even
though he was on top and was expected to win. Liren is 31
years old and has experience on his side. But so did almost all
of Gukesh’s competitors in the Candidates Tournament. Even
Carlsen had said he couldn’t imagine Gukesh winning the
event. But then his opinion changed and by the final match
Carlsen was saying that Gukesh was stronger than any of
them had thought.
By MADHAVANKUTTY PILLAI
www.openthemagazine.com 7
 OPENINGS
IN MEMORIAM SUDHIR KAKAR (1938-2024)
THE MIND READER
The polymath demystified the Indian
psyche like nobody else did
T HOSE WHO WERE closely associated with Sudhir Kakar for long
have repeatedly insisted that to say the man was a genius is an
understatement. He was a polymath—and they do not make the likes
of him anymore—who left a deep imprint in multiple subjects he had
mastered over time and across cultures. Engineer, economist, novel-
ist, and a noted psychoanalyst, Kakar wore multiple hats, because all
of them fit him well. As an author, his shift from non-fiction to fiction
came late, when he was in his sixties, but he did well regardless, treat-
ing us to his fertile imagination. He went on to influence and inspire
different people in different ways. To some of us, he may have been the
ultimate explorer of sexuality in the most uninhibited fashion, break-
ing taboos built around what is politically correct and what isn’t. He
dug deep into history or picked up contexts from wherever he could lay
his hands on to mesmerise his readers with originality.
His stellar book, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, had an
erotic cover that was designed to sell sex. The book, as the title suggests,
covered sexual hunger, women in Indian epics, Mahatma Gandhi’s “war
on his wants”, and a vast range of other topics that could stir controversy
at any point of time. As a scholar, he was an equal-opportunity offender
who provoked everyone and left many embarrassed over holding on to
pre-conceived notions about life and culture. Kakar was proud to do so
because he didn’t write for the faint-hearted. He was also critical of certain
political projects and the thrust certain movements had placed on violence,
subjugation, and marginalisation.
A clinical practitioner, he took things in his stride and wrote books that
delved into the Indian psyche in a way very few people at home did, then or
now. He was, in that sense, the quintessential public intellectual who dared
GETTY IMAGES
8 6 MAY 2024
to speak out, forever willing to court controversies.
According to Professor Rita Kothari, a bilingual
author, translator and Professor of English, and
the head of the Department of English at Ashoka
University who has closely followed his works from
his initial days, “He (Kakar) was the go-to person
for psychoanalysis in India. Anyone who wants to
study India’s psychic life cannot afford to ignore his
works. He taught us about forms of intimacy buried
in Indian literature and families. He also examined
violence in the Indian context. There is nobody
who comes anywhere close to him in that field. His
contributions are very fundamental.”
Born in Nainital, now in Uttarakhand,
Kakar completed his engineering from Gujarat
University. An alumnus of Delhi’s Modern School,
the University of Vienna, and the University of
Frankfurt’s Sigmund Freud Institute, Kakar had
taught at the Indian Institute of Technology in
Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management,
besides various foreign institutions, before
relocating to Goa, aged 64, in 2003.
Kakar’s very first novel, The Ascetic of Desire,
attracted rave reviews for its interpretation of the
character Vatsyayana, the author of Kamasutra, who
in the novel was born in a brothel where his mother
and aunt were courtesans. He was an original. A
New York Times review of the book from 2000 said,
“Always an elegant stylist, Sudhir Kakar has written
a sensual work that is alive with historical detail and
provocative ideas about the world’s most fascinating
subject.” For Kakar, it was important to write that
work because he was talking about sex in its golden
age in India while living in a time when any mention
of sex invoked conflicted emotions of fear, guilt
and longing. He proved himself to be a master in
using films, myths, and literature to develop his
views about intimacy and psychology in which,
according to him, imagination played a crucial role –
something Vatsyayana would have wholeheartedly
agreed with.
Kakar had a great skill for familiarising people
with dense subjects such as his interest in culture and
psychoanalysis and their connection. Nothing about
Kakar was one-dimensional. He was a visionary who
refused to compromise on intellectual honesty. He
has written extensively on how Indians view their
culture and in different contexts. For instance, he has
analysed how Indians thought of their culture while
being in India and when they were abroad.
He leaves behind a rich legacy: his
unputdownable books.
By ULLEKH NP
 ANGLE
NO TRUMP CARD
On the tenuous
relationship between
justice and order
By MADHAVANKUTTY PILLAI
A COURT CASE IN the US right
now has the potential to send the
world in a tizzy, come judgment day.
The case is being argued before a jury,
which means a few men and women
will decide on something that has ram-
ifications for countries and continents
and, in their own nation, consequences
that might cleave an already divided
population even further. They will
hold whether former President Donald
Trump is guilty or not. The case deals
with election campaign fraud based
on legal technicalities. That is not as
straightforward as murder or conven-
tional corruption and falls in a grey
zone of public perception. There are
three other criminal cases also against
him, all similarly to do with politics.
If Trump is held guilty then it could
signal chaos. He is the presidential
nominee for the Republican Party
and at present is leading in most polls,
making him the favourite in the race.
If he is convicted, he will still contest,
probably making him even more
popular among his supporters. If he
loses, they will blame it on the ‘fake’
cases filed against him. The president
of the US is the most powerful man in
the world. Who wins decides policies
that have ramifications right from the
ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel,
to global trade, to how many visas
Indians working in IT firms get.
Such a case also brings to the fore
the tenuous nature of the idea of
justice. The president of the US is im-
mune from prosecution for any crime
6 MAY 2024
in office. The reason for it is precisely
because the stakes are too high to send
such an office bearer to jail. That is
why democracies are cautious about
putting political leaders in jail until
the evidence is overwhelming and it is
expected that itself will make the pub-
lic see reason and not overreact. But
when it is more or less certain that the
overreaction will happen, what should
a country do? Can it let popularity and
the potential for disorder trump the
idea of justice? It ought to be a straight-
forward answer. Justice should be
sacrosanct in principle.
Even Trump supporters would
agree, except that they would argue
that what their leader is facing
is not justice at all but a system
being manoeuvred to drive him
out of the presidential race. They
would point to the history of
political vendettas.
The pragmatic option would be
to wait till the elections are over and
if he loses then to proceed with the
conviction. If he wins, then they would
have to wait four more years until he
is out of office but there would be the
appearance and the implementation
of justice. The timing of the case is just
about the worst possible moment and
only serves to confirm the conspiracy
to his supporters. Normally stable
societies are expected to have systems
that self-correct to prevent collapses,
but this is one of those moments when
the ball is rolling inexorably towards
something ominous.
IDEAS
ALAMY
THE 747 BOWS OUT
The last of Air India’s Boeing 747s, the
“Queen of the Skies”, recently took off
from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj International Airport on
presumably its last journey, triggering
a wave of nostalgia. According to
reports, its journey to the US, where it
is expected to be cannibalised for parts,
was one of the most tracked flights on
a popular website that displays real-
time aircraft positions. The 747, from
the moment it took to the skies about
half-a-century ago, has transformed
the global aviation industry. Its wide
body and increased capacity made
air travel affordable. The attachment
with the aircraft was particularly
strong in India. It became a symbol
of luxury for India’s growing middle
and upper classes, was often used by
presidents and prime ministers, and
was frequently pressed into service
when mass evacuations needed to be
carried out. But like elsewhere across
the globe, the aircraft had started
to become increasingly redundant.
Soaring fuel costs and the emergence of
more fuel-efficient airplanes numbered
its days. Boeing had rolled off its last 747
two years ago. Air India had just four
of these planes in its inventory, and for
some time they had found a second life
as freighters. But not anymore.
WORD’S WORTH
‘Nostalgia
is a seductive liar’
GEORGE BALL
FORMER AMERICAN DIPLOMAT
www.openthemagazine.com 9
INSIDER
NAVEEN BABU’S DUAL CONCH

S
EEKING A DUAL vote
for the Biju Janata
Dal (BJD), Odisha
Chief Minister
Naveen Patnaik featured in a
video holding up two conch
shells, the party symbol. In a
play on the Bharatiya Janata
Party’s “dual engine sarkar”, the
BJD veteran sought the support
of voters for the “dual shanko”
(conch shells)—one for MLA
candidates and another for the
MP seats. Dressed in a simple
cotton shirt and a plain brown lungi,
the chief minister’s appeal to voters for
their blessings is intended to put him
at the front of the party’s campaigns.
There are several other videos of
Patnaik seeking support for specific
candidates against a background
featuring the party symbol. In the
hunt for a record sixth term as chief
minister—which he may get—Patnaik
is facing what might be his toughest
electoral battle. BJP has posed a strong
challenge for all the 21 parliamentary
seats and its ranks have grown with
senior BJD leaders switching sides.
While BJD retains the lead for the
Assembly election, its numbers might
dip. The party is worried about its
tally shrinking drastically. Patnaik’s
physical limitations have been clear for
some time now, but he comes across as
sharp and focussed. At the age of 77, he
is the BJD mascot, pulling in votes for
his party and the last word in its affairs.
Though there is no quarter
given between BJD and BJP, and
in fact the saffron party’s state
leaders were dead opposed to a
seat-sharing formula between
the parties, the rivalry lacks the
bitterness and acrimony evident
in BJP versus the I.N.D.I.A. bloc
electoral contests. This is in part
due to Patnaik’s refusal to attack
BJP and Prime Minister
Narendra Modi in a personal
way or by accusing the Union
government of political
vendetta and undercutting democracy.
Patnaik’s pitch is straightforward.
He presents himself as a person with
no attachments and presents BJD as
the natural choice for the people for
the state and as its representative in
Parliament. The appeal has
been enduring despite Patnaik
becoming an increasingly reclusive
figure with access guarded by
a small group of insiders who
surround him.

Annamalai Campaign Continues

W ith voting over in Tamil Nadu, BJP leader K Annamalai is not waiting
for the results to be out. He has campaigned in Karnataka where he
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2G scam to recount how the opposition parties misused agencies when
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makes the case that the same would happen again if the alliance got the
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much sought after campaigner and the BJP poll managers intend to use
JKOGZVGPUKXGN[KP5QWVJ+PFKCQXGTVJGPGZVHGYYGGMU

10 6 MAY 2024
 Illustrations by SAURABH SINGH

Punjab Farm Unions at It Again

I n their recent efforts to reprise the farm agita-
tion from petering out, some of Punjab’s left-
oriented farm unions are trying to corner BJP
candidates. One group sought to oppose former
diplomat Taranjit Singh Sandhu’s entry into a
village near Amritsar. The protests appear po-
litically motivated just as the attempt to revive
EKNATH SHINDE the farm stir was, timed ahead of the elections

REVEALS A PLOT and intended to damage the Modi government

which, however, did not rise to the bait. Senior

+ n a recent media interview,

/CJCTCUJVTC%JKGH/KPKUVGT
CPF5JKX5GPCNGCFGT
ministers kept meeting the unions and offering various “deals” that makes it
evident that the Centre is not looking for a showdown. At the same time, strong
'MPCVJ5JKPFGUCKFJKUGTUVYJKNG police deployment at the Punjab-Haryana border foiled attempts by agitators
DQUU7FFJCX6JCEMGTC[RNCPPGF to march towards Delhi. Now, the unions are again trying to insert themselves
to arrest senior BJP leaders when into the elections. But their dismal record in the 2022 Punjab Assembly election
the latter was chief minister. where their candidates failed to win any seats means that their influence is
5JKPFGYCUTGHGTTKPIVQVJGVKOG limited to a few headlines.
YJGP6JCEMGTC[YCUKPQHƓEGCPF
the state government ordered an
investigation into alleged phone
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&KTGEVQT)GPGTCNQH2QNKEG
A Lesson in Law
4CUJOK5JWMNCFWTKPIJGTUVKPV
as chief of the state intelligence
FGRCTVOGPVKP6JG5GPC0%2
A law student who approached the Delhi High Court seeking
“special interim bail” for Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal
learnt the cost of uninformed activism the hard way. The court not
%QPITGUUIQXGTPOGPVJCFCEEWUGF
only rejected the petition but wondered if the stu-
VJGQHƓEGTQHKNNGICNN[VCRRKPI
phones of opposition leaders. dent was paying sufficient attention to studies
6JGUVQT[JCUCFKHHGTGPVVGNNKPI as the plea was misconceived and went against
VJQWIJ5JWMNCũUCEVKQPUYGTG legal principles—that the law cannot be ap-
CEEQTFKPIVQ/CJCTCUJVTC&GRWV[ plied differently for persons in high offices. The
%JKGH/KPKUVGT&GXGPFTC(CFPCXKU court was particularly miffed by the petitioner
aimed at uncovering corruption in
transfers in the police department.
claiming a “veto” in the case, and noted this
He had, as the leader of opposition seemed to indicate an exaggerated
then, provided details of the sense of oneself.
intercepted phone calls when the
6JCEMGTC[NGF/CJCTCUJVTC8KMCU
#IJCFK /8# IQXGTPOGPVYCUKP
power, leading to an uproar. When
VJG/8#IQXGTPOGPVYGPVCHVGT
No Tears over Opposition Arrests
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URGEWNCVKQPVJCV(CFPCXKUYQWNF
also be arrested as he had held the
T he not unexpected refusal of the Election Commission to intervene in ongo-
ing cases and arrests by law enforcement agencies has created a difficult
situation for opposition parties affected by such investigations. The problem has
home portfolio when he was the been compounded by the reluctance of courts to grant bail in many cases and
EJKGHOKPKUVGT+PHCEVVJGRQNKEG
SWGUVKQPGFJKOKP/CTEJ#U
their observations only serving to reinforce the impression that the investiga-
KVVWTPGFQWVVJG/8#IQXGTPOGPV tions have uncovered corruption. The opposition parties feel aggrieved that
YCUQWUVGFKPCPFNCUV[GCT their leaders have been targeted, but this does not seem to resonate with voters.
VJG$QODC[*KIJ%QWTVSWCUJGF In fact, public sentiment largely is one of either indifference or support for ac-
VYQ(+4UCICKPUV5JWMNC9JKNG tion against corruption. And while there is no discernible sympathy factor, the
5JKPFGũUENCKOUECPDGUGGPKPC
I.N.D.I.A. bloc rallies, such as the recent one in Ranchi, saw the corruption cases
political light, the circumstantial
evidence supports the view that the against Aam Admi Party (AAP) and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leaders
RJQPGVCRRKPIECUGEQWNFJCXGNGF becoming the focus of speeches. But this does not seem a useful political strategy
VQCOCLQTEQPVTQXGTU[CPFCUVTKMG as voters do not seem impressed by the ‘political vendetta’ narrative and the alli-
against BJP leaders. ance is stuck with the theme.

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 11

 UNPARALLELED
UNBIASED
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 GAME, SETH AND MATCH Suhel Seth

Why Kiran Nadar Matters

How to amplify India’s soft power internationally

T
HE VENICE BIENNALE recently celebrated the importance of Biennales, such as the one in Venice?
its 60th anniversary. Global icons, art lovers, How long will we be ostrich-like? How long will we
gallerists, and common men and women behave as if the world is desperate to seek us out? No one
descended on Venice as always. To savour the world of gives a toss about us. We don’t matter unless we make an
creativity; to absorb the changes; and to be inspired by all effort. Jokers like some of these ministers must shed their
that was said and a lot that was unsaid. Country pavilions arrogance. Every time I visit the Biennale, I feel let down
were the cynosure of all eyes as they always are. This by those in the Ministry of Culture. They are mere event
time round, the Ethiopian Pavilion even had a demo of managers who manage ridiculously bling events. They
a coffee ceremony. Venezuela had a don’t have a bone of refinement
country pavilion, too, as did Senegal. in them.
Obviously, all the powerful nations Which is why Kiran Nadar
were represented through their matters. She matters because, from
national pavilions. From the US to India, she is the only one who
Germany to China and the UK, not to has supported South Asian art
mention France and even Egypt. Israel in the manner she has. She kept
had art inside and protesters outside. that art both in currency and on
India was absent. Like it always display. The patronage that Kiran
is. As a country. We had no national has provided to the arts needs to
pavilion, and yet we don’t tire of be lauded and replicated, but the
extolling the virtues of our artistic problem is she is alone. And despite
legacy and civilisational glory. We no state support, she is on track
are a shame to this legacy today. to build a private museum like
The prime minister has done no other: a space that will blend
yeoman service in putting India on the uniqueness of the MoMA and
the global map on India’s terms, but THE PATRONAGE THAT KIRAN the Lincoln Center in the heart of
he is constantly being let down by HAS PROVIDED TO THE ARTS Delhi. At Venice this year, Kiran
the few who head ministries, such launched the new logo of the Kiran
as the Ministry of Culture and the
NEEDS TO BE LAUDED AND
Nadar Museum of Art: KNMA—
Ministry of Tourism. They actually REPLICATED, BUT THE an event that took Venice by storm,
don’t belong there. The bureaucrats PROBLEM IS SHE IS ALONE. AND since on display was the world of
running the Ministry of Culture DESPITE NO STATE SUPPORT, MF Husain who our country had
should be made accountable for this SHE IS ON TRACK TO BUILD A sent into exile. The immersive
national shame. that KNMA put up of Husain was
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
PRIVATE MUSEUM LIKE among the finest I have ever seen
knows best what soft power can do. NO OTHER and leaves the Van Gogh immersive
Or, for that matter, how to amplify in the shade. The event began
it. He does it very well as he did with with the kind of music that is both
yoga, but then how much can you expect one man to do? uplifting and representative of this young, modern, and
Deviants like Indira Gandhi made people believe that changing India.
art was for the elite forgetting that at the end of it all, art Private enterprise will have to do what the
is the only thing that unites and delights. But then, what government should also be doing. But I am glad we
would these pea-brained people in government know have the likes of Kiran Nadar who will go on regardless.
about this? We are good at exporting stupid songs, which And tell the world that India matters with or without a
mean nothing to the Oscars, and then telling the world national pavilion. And thanks to Kiran Nadar, we could
how evolved we are. turn national shame into national pride. Just as we did at
How long will some people in government ignore Venice 2024. Q

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 13

 OPEN ESSAY

By C CHRISTINE FAIR

THE TERROR OF
WRITING ON TERROR
The trials of collecting material on the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba

M
OST OF MY BOOK projects have more than one decade to effectuate because my scholarly projects involve
painstaking review of primary source materials which have taken me several years to collect. However, no
project has taken as long to fructify as my most recent book The Literature of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba: Deadly
Lines of Control (2023), with Saifina Ustaad. The collection of material for this book began in a cold February in
Lahore in 1996 when I stumbled onto an Islamist bookstore, with a wall where there hung a calendar depict-
ing the global capitals on fire. When I asked the avuncular proprietor about the story told by the calendar, he
gently explained the images which depicted global capitals on fire. Even the United Nations was burning!
And the group whose hands were implied to have done the burning? Zafar Iqbal’s Markaz al-Dawah Irshad
(MDI, Center for Preaching and Guidance), indicated by a nifty logo that included an erect Kalashnikov rising from a book, which is
evidently the Quran, amidst a rising sun.
Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz Saeed were both professors from the Islamic Studies Department of Lahore Engineering University who
founded Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD, Organisation for Preaching), which initially was a small group engaged in tabligh (proselytisa-
tion) and dawah (missionary work) with the purported intent of promulgating the Ahl-e-Hadees creed. In 1986, Zaki-ur-Rehman
Lakhvi’s Salafist militia Lashkar-e-Tayyaba amalgamated with Saeed and Iqbal’s JuD to form the Markaz al-Dawah Irshad. When I
encountered this artefact, this merger had not yet transpired.
I had collected material for this project on virtually every trip I undertook to Pakistan from 2004 onward.
Sometimes, I asked others to collect the material. But as is fairly well-known, Pakistan’s notorious ISI procured some version of
my book Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (2014) before it went to press and a very nasty confrontation ensued,
which effectively resulted in my inability to return to the country. However, work collecting material continued. One day while
briefing a fairly senior US intelligence official about my ongoing work which attests to the continued activities of the organisation
despite Pakistan’s numerous attestations to the contrary, I told her my well-kept secret: I was obtaining them through inter-library
loan, usually from the US Library of Congress.
It turns out that American libraries house many of LeT’s most important writings thanks to a programme that began in 1962: the
so-called PL-480 programme, named after the eponymous public law which allowed the US Library of Congress to use rupees from In-
dian purchases of American agricultural products to buy Indian books. Through this programme, libraries throughout the US have
acquired books from South Asia. A few years later, in 1965, a field office was opened in Karachi to oversee the acquisition of Pakistani
publications. While the PL-480 programme was discontinued long ago, the Library of Congress in Washington continues to employ
the same institutional infrastructure to acquire publications from Pakistan and India under the rechristened South Asia Cooperative
Acquisitions Project. We are extremely grateful to the Library of Congress, the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago,
and the other libraries across the US that purchased these publications through this programme and made them available to us and
other scholars through our institutions’ inter-library loan programmes. We are particularly grateful to Georgetown University’s

14 6 MAY 2024
 A Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
training camp in Pakistan

GETTY IMAGES

WE LOOKED FOR VOLUMES THAT DELINEATE WHAT LASHKAR-E-TAYYABA/

JAMAAT-UD-DAWA SAYS IT DOES AS AN ORGANISATION, WHAT EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL
POLITICAL IMPERATIVES SHAPE THE ORGANISATION’S BEHAVIOUR IN AND BEYOND
PAKISTAN, HOW THE ORGANISATION RECRUITS AND RETAINS FIGHTERS,
AND HOW IT CULTIVATES A LARGER COMMUNITY OF SUPPORT

Lauinger Library, which never failed to produce a book we
required through inter-library loan. (Unfortunately, my dog ate
one and it had to be replaced.) As one US government official
quipped when we explained the sources of our material, “There
is no better way to keep terrorist literature out of the hands of
would-be terrorists than putting it in a library.”
Once we assembled the collection, we next examined the vol-
umes to determine which texts best addressed the overarching
questions posed for this and a related scholarly effort. Specifi-
cally, we looked for volumes that delineate what LeT/JuD says
it does as an organisation, what external and internal political
imperatives shape the organisation’s behaviour in and beyond
Pakistan, how the organisation recruits and retains fighters, and
how it cultivates a larger community of support. We also sought
volumes that discussed the fighters of LeT, what motivates
them, and who are the families that empower and enable them.
Once we selected the critical texts, we perused the volumes
and identified key sections within them for translation. Unless
noted elsewhere, Ustaad translated the works while Fair edited
and annotated them as required for context or clarity.
But perhaps the hardest hurdle was the issue of copyright.
Every book project has its own story to tell. But, in our experi-
ences, perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this
project entailed considerable legal footwork. Dar-ul-Andalus
usually places a prefatory statement in the front page of books
(not pamphlets or posters) indicating that the rights of the
publisher are protected. While these statements never specify
that the government of Pakistan protects the rights of the
publisher, this is generally assumed to be the case. In most of
the books, there was a clear statement of copyright which the
organisation’s singular and dedicated publisher, Dar-al-Anda-
lus, published. The question was raised whether our efforts to
publish translations of these volumes would violate copyright
laws. At one point, my publisher floated the idea that I write
to the organisation—which was a clearly identified, foreign
terrorist organisation—on my employer’s letterhead request-
ing permission to translate and publish their works without
compensation. The thought of calling up my university’s legal
counsel with this absurd proposition made me reject it nearly
as soon as it was floated.
However, I did have to seek legal counsel and ultimately
clearance on this matter. I also had to consult the US office

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 15

 OPEN ESSAY
An Islamist calendar depicting global capitals on fire
which oversees copyright and fair use. There an official politely
walked me through Section 107 of the US Copyright Act,
explaining there are four factors that must be considered when
evaluating the question of fair use of the material we pres-
ent, in translation, in this volume. He noted that scholars and
librarians, among others, generally focus upon one concern,
the “amount” of materials that are used; however, this singular
focus upon one aspect does violence to the overall intent of the
law as well as the three of crucial considerations. Specifically,
these four considerations include:
Purpose and character of the use. This pertains to whether the
use is of a commercial venture or is for nonprofit educational
purposes and whether the work has been transformed.
Nature of the copyrighted work. This consideration relates
to the extent to which the work that was used conforms to
a copyright’s intention of encouraging creative expression.
For example, using an imaginative work (For example, novel,
movie, or song) is less likely to be considered fair use than an
item intended to be factual work.
Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole. This is the most difficult factor to
anticipate because some courts have determined that the use of
16
an entire work is fair while under some circumstances, courts
have deemed using even a small amount of a copyrighted work
not to be fair because the selection comprised the “heart” of
the work.
Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work. In evaluating this consideration, courts
review whether, and to what extent, the use injures the extant
or potential market for the copyright owner’s original work. In
other words, would the unlicensed work diminish the market
for the original (such as by displacing sales).
Here we address each of these four concerns as it pertains
to this project. Regarding the purpose and character of this vol-
ume, there was unanimous agreement among our interlocutors
(including legal consultations) that the purpose and character
of this volume differ from that of the original. Whereas the
original material is generally intended to increase sympathy for
the organisation, recruit cadres and raise funds, we are trying to
illuminate the thinking of the organisation to pre-empt its abil-
ity to do precisely these things. Thus, our effort should be seen as
an effort to neutralise the intentions of the original.
Regarding the nature of the copyrighted work, most of the
work here can be considered exegetical or logical, considering
the way in which the organisation explains its beliefs or actions
or relationships to the Pakistani state or other groups. Most
of the works we use here are not ‘imaginative’ works, such as
novels, movies or songs, even though the organisation does
issue such works. As noted, such materials were excluded from
our selection process ab initio.
Regarding the effect of our use upon the potential market
for or value of the copyrighted work, it has been the collective
opinion that this volume is unlikely to influence the market of
the originals because they are published in Urdu and because
this book will not be sold in Pakistan.
Finally, turning to the “amount and substantiality of the
portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”, it
was a consensus among the officials with whom we spoke that
we are likely on firm ground.
Ultimately, after much legal consultation, our publisher
went ahead with the project. But for quite some time, it seemed
that it was touch-and-go. While we awaited the final word, a
quip of one of the American officials I consulted kept ringing
through my head. When I explained the legal concerns of
my New York-based publisher, he quipped, “Let me get this
straight. You think these Islamist terrorists are going to file a
case with the Southern District of New York? If they do, can I
split the reward with you for helping capture these guys? We’ll
both ‘f**k off and retire.’ Is it wrong that a part of me still hopes
for such an outcome?
C Christine Fair is a professor at Georgetown University in the
Security Studies Center. She is the author of Cuisines of the Axis of
Evil and Other Irritating States; Fighting to the End:
The Pakistan Army’s Way of War; and In Their Own Words:
Understanding the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
6 MAY 2024
 OPEN THE MOST SOUGHT
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C O V E R S T O RY

ON TOP OF
HIS GAME
HOW MODI WINS
THE YOUNG INFLUENTIALS—
AND THE SMART VOTE By PR RAMESH

18 6 MAY 2024
Modi with India’s
top gamers
in New Delhi,
April 13, 2024

Photo PIB
 C O V E R S T O RY

E
ARLY IN MARCH THIS YEAR, PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI
interacted with some of the country’s top-notch digital influencers at an award
ceremony held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. He asked them to tap their
sway to spread awareness about certain social objectives that include fitness,
the importance of sleep, local products, and so on, in addition to their speciali-
sations that ranged from political podcasts to travel. His reasoning was, to bor-
row the expression martial arts icon Bruce Lee had used to describe his style of
fighting, simple and total—which is that the online medium has excelled print
and other avenues as the indisputable tool for quick and consummate dissemination of information to
the masses, especially in India, home to the second-highest number of Internet users in the world at 78
crore, more than twice the population of the US. His goal was to make the most of their appeal among
people and for them to be the force multiplier for his grand makeover of India, rather than throwing
his weight behind archaic purveyors of theories masquerading as academics.
That Modi is apprised of the power of the Internet and social media much more than any Indian
politician—and perhaps even abroad—is a given. After all, he was the first among prominent politi-
cians to bypass the media and embrace social media, especially out of necessity, which they say is the
mother of invention. Demonised by the legacy media for almost 10 years from 2002, he had found
redemption in what would soon become the finest communication tool so far to speak directly to the
people and be his own messenger. In short, the campaign spearhead of the ruling BJP knows only too
well about the infinite potential of social media and technology, having battened down the hatches
and navigated a toxic and concerted campaign targeted at him in the media for far too long until the
rules of engagement changed and gave him an edge in a country where he is seeking a third term as
prime minister. The ongoing seven-phased poll has a voter base of close to 97 crore, making it higher
than the combined population of 27 European Union member states. Of these, 1.8 crore people are
first-time voters, and 19.7 crore in their 20s.
Without an iota of doubt, digital media has overtaken print media as the go-to medium for elec-
tion publicity this time round thanks to a massive shift from traditional reference points, a knowl-
edge that had dawned upon Modi much earlier. People are taking their cultural cues and keeping
themselves abreast of local as well as global developments not exactly from traditional fronts, but,
in fact, from alternative sources of information. This shift is driven by a raft of reasons. Polarised
polity is one. When even truths and validity are contested, when ‘facts’ and ‘alternative facts’ enjoy
respectability among mutually antagonistic groups, what is knowledge itself has become a source
of dispute. In this context, people do not want to be dependent on the ‘respected’ and ‘storied’ reposi-
tories of information because they suffer from trust deficits. And for all the scorn heaped by so-called
intellectuals on YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and other online platforms populated
by a large chunk of the country’s population, a growing section of people are falling back on posts,
videos, shorts, stories and reels from such new sources that they believe are authentic and exemplify
the democratisation of the information order. This trend is being powered by technological break-
throughs that include increasingly sophisticated smartphones, cheaper data, faster connectivity,
20 6 MAY 2024
 Microsoft cofounder
Bill Gates with
a tea seller in Nagpur
March 1, 2024

THE PRIME MINISTER

SAT FACE-TO-FACE
WITH MICROSOFT
COFOUNDER BILL
GATES RECENTLY
TO DISCUSS
TECHNOLOGY,
INCLUDING AI,
AND HOW IT
CAN BE USED TO
MEET CERTAIN
GOVERNMENTAL
GOALS. DURING
THEIR MEETING, THE
PRIME MINISTER
ALSO ASKED TO
TAKE A SELFIE
THROUGH HIS (NAMO)
APP AND THEN
DEMONSTRATED
TO GATES HOW IT
COULD BE
LOCATED THROUGH
FACE-RECOGNITION
TECHNOLOGY

and a plethora of other factors.
Modi, who is technology-savvy and has a knack for gauging
trends, routinely leverages his monstrously huge social media
reach to launch government schemes and touch base with peo-
ple, both the common man and the high and mighty. He also
has an ear to the ground and is quick to tap into opportunities
to bridge the connection between himself and the citizens. At
the New Delhi ceremony with digital influencers, the medium
became the message as the prime minister stood face-to-face with
whom he believes are opinion leaders, an engagement that has
become a habit for him for a while now. Among those he met
that day was popular podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia, also known
as Beer Biceps (with seven million subscribers on YouTube, he
often does interviews with well-known politicians and celebri-
ties). Others included Shraddha Jain, RJ Raunac, Janhvi Singh,
Kabita Singh, Pankti Pandey, Keerthika Govindasamy,
Maithili Thakur, Gaurav Chaudhary, Ankit Baiyanpuria,
Naman Deshmukh and Kamiya Jani.
Ironically, a section of academia has woken up to this
new reality while many others haven’t. A paper published by
the University of Michigan and co-authored by Sarah Khan,
Rudransh Mukherjee, Joyojeet Pal titled ‘Influencer Collabora-
tion on YouTube: Changing Political Outreach in the 2024 Indian
Elections’ brings to the fore the new trend that had come under
Modi’s radar much earlier. It highlights that in India, which has
the world’s largest YouTube subscriber base with 462 million
users, the digital platform is central to brand-building. The re-
port avers that several influencers boast larger viewership than

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 21

 C O V E R S T O RY

MODI HAD JOINED HANDS WITH FITNESS INFLUENCER ANKIT BAIYANPURIA

AS A CLEANLINESS EXERCISE—WHICH WAS TO COMBINE WORKOUT WITH CLEANING.
OF HIMSELF AND BAIYANPURIA CARRYING BROOMS

Prime Minister
Narendra Modi takes
part in a cleanliness
drive along with
Ankit Baiyanpuria,
October 1, 2023

22 6 MAY 2024
IN WHAT CAN BE DESCRIBED
THE PRIME MINISTER SHARED A VIDEO
AND CLEARING TRASH
PIB
mainstream media networks and boast the ability to dramati-
cally influence the prospects of a product or service that gets
featured on them.
The paper, published in January this year, notes that of the
five most-viewed interviews, three are from the channel of
Allahbadia, or Beer Biceps. “The top five, in order are Beer Bi-
ceps’ interview of Foreign Minister S Jaishankar, Elvish Yadav’s
interaction with [former] Haryana Chief Minister ML Khattar,
Beer Biceps’ interviews with Union Ministers Nitin Gadkari and
Smriti Irani, and the Curly Tales [Kamiya Jani] interview with
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and Nitin Gadkari,” it adds. The
paper goes on to say that BJP completely dominates the landscape.
In its conclusion, it adds that the objective of such collaborations
is not necessarily to win elections, but rather, to win a discursive
battle on what a specific party, politician, or ideology stands for.
“Influencers allow politicians to present an alternate image of
themselves, without the baggage of formality, or the weight of
policy conversation,” the paper states.
The prime minister had understood all this, as is evident from
his outreach to such groups for some years now. He has made it a
habit to meet such groups that include gamers, unsung heroes,
and startups that make a difference, although they don’t make it
to newspaper headlines. This gels with his efforts to democratise
the Padma awards given away by the government that, until he
came in, were mostly awarded to politicians and the usual sus-
pects—he made these awards an opportunity to reward citizens
who genuinely deserved our honours, and often, from the hin-
terland and small towns.
The point to note here in this multi-pronged exercise is that
when nobody has a monopoly over sources of information, peo-
ple find their own guides. Modi has meticulously used such turfs
to drive home his message. He was also keen on out-of-the-box
ways of campaigning. We saw that in the 2014 polls in the form of
3D holograms, which was used earlier only on rare occasions—
one notable was the use of the technology as a tribute to the
departed American rapper Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella
Valley Music and Arts Festival. Modi, too, had used 3D holograms
in the Gujarat Assembly elections in 2012. Now, Modi is using
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reach out to people in their language.
BJP is the first political party to use AI in elections starting with
the last Delhi state Assembly elections. What differentiates Modi
from the rest of the politicians is that he imbibes the spirit of the
medium. It was evident years ago in the inaugural edition of his
programme, Pariksha Pe Charcha, when he stumped everyone by
asking a distressed mother—who was grappling with her son’s
disinterest in studies—whether her son was addicted to an online
game called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).
Modi was equally at home parlaying with a select
group of Indian gamers that included Animesh Agarwal,
Mithilesh Patankar, Payal Dhare, Naman Mathur, and
Anshu Bisht. The gaming community in India, which on average
is growing at close to 20 per cent annually, engages as many as 55
crore people. Modi asked them whether they were interested in
gaming or gambling, and then shared with them details of games

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 23

C O V E R S T O RY

he had learnt by himself before meeting them in April this year.

UNTIL MODI CAME IN, THE Modi had joined hands with fitness influencer
PADMA AWARDS WERE MOSTLY Ankit Baiyanpuria in what can be described as a cleanliness
GIVEN TO POLITICIANS AND exercise—which was to combine workout with cleaning. The
THE USUAL SUSPECTS—HE MADE prime minister shared a video of himself and Baiyanpuria carry-
THESE AWARDS AN OPPORTUNITY ing brooms and clearing trash. Similarly, he had allowed a small
group of women to use his X handle to tell their stories. He did
TO REWARD CITIZENS WHO so after posting the following on X: “Greetings on International
GENUINELY DESERVED OUR Women’s Day! We salute the spirit and accomplishments of our
HONOURS, AND OFTEN, FROM THE Nari Shakti. As I said a few days ago, I’m signing off. Through the
HINTERLAND AND SMALL TOWNS day, seven women achievers will share their life journeys and per-
haps interact with you through my social media accounts,” he said.

President Droupadi Murmu

presents the Padma Shri
to Madhubani painter Shanti Devi,
April 22, 2024
T HE PRIME MINISTER also sat face-to-face with Microsoft
cofounder Bill Gates recently to discuss technology, includ-
ing AI, and how it can be used to meet certain governmental goals.
Speaking to Gates, Modi said, “AI is very important. Sometimes,
I jokingly say that in our country, we call our mother ‘Ai [pro-
nounced as aayee]’. Now, I say that when a child is born, he says
‘aayee’ as well as AI. Children have become so advanced.” During
their meeting, the geek prime minister also asked to take a selfie
through his (NaMo) app and then demonstrated to Gates how it
could be located through face-recognition technology.
Such a trend may be global, but the opportunity that it offers
in a country where two-thirds of the population is under 35 is sim-
ply huge, and Modi knows it. While other political leaders may be
finding support from the like-minded or the already converted,
Modi is the church that can find new adherents. What is adding
to Modi’s firepower is that he is finding recruits who tend to see
the man decades senior to them as one of them.
Data also backs Modi’s assessment of the situation. As high as
65 per cent of India’s population is under 35, and over 90 per cent
of this group use smartphones. Many of them find Modi’s talks
inspiring and relatable.
A survey of their social media handles proves that in sharp
contrast to Modi, most opposition politicians, especially Con-
gress leader Rahul Gandhi, do not share and promote ideas and
themes that strike a chord with the aspiring Indian. This stark
distinction is true of today’s young influencers, the likes of whom
Modi had met, and the old-fashioned and often bitter scholars
whom Gandhi Junior rubs shoulders with.
As opposed to Modi who brings up discussions on technology
and entrepreneurship among the rural folk on his social media ac-
counts, Gandhi resorts to misery-mongering and constant airing
of grievances besides personal attacks on Modi. At a time when
launching tirades against Modi is known to boomerang thanks to
hispopularityandendearingpresence,Gandhicontinuestobeatit,
muchtohisanguishandatthedisadvantageofunderestimatingthe
halo the prime minister has acquired over time, especially online.
Modi sticks mostly to subjects that are of interest to those
who wish to move up the social ladder and ensure upward social
mobility for their children. This is why he deftly picks up sub-
jects such as the startup ecosystem in India, easy access to credit,
PIB

24 6 MAY 2024

Courtesy AICC
healthy living, technological advances across sectors, and how
scientific know-how can be used to empower those who have
until recently been confined to the margins.
Rahul Gandhi, pundits state, laps up subjects that are out
of sync with the middle classes who do not want to give up on
the gains they have made in life and career. It is as though the
Congress leader wants the common man to remain poor and
languish in menial jobs as their forefathers had done. Instead,
Modi, although cognizant of pressing issues concerning the uplift
of disadvantaged communities, is eager to find a solution, rather
than revel in a blame game and refuse to solve the problem at
hand. In the latest debate, Rahul Gandhi has suggested a ‘Robin
Hood idea’ of stealing from the rich to feed the poor. The reported
plan to establish an inheritance tax if elected to power—or rather
the intention to do so—is intimidating not only to the super-rich
but also to the toiling middle classes who fear that upon their
demise, what ought to go to their heirs may be confiscated by the
government. The Nehru-Gandhi scion who often spouts utopian
ideas about wealth redistribution was quoted as saying in Hyder-
abad by the media that once elected to power, “we will conduct a
caste census... to know the exact population and status of back-
ward castes, SCs, STs, minorities and other castes. After that, the
financial and institutional survey will begin. Subsequently, we
will take up the historic assignment to distribute the wealth of
India, jobs, and other welfare schemes to these sections based on
their population.” Although a few of the Congress lightweights
jumped to downplay the statement, adding fuel to the fire,
Sam Pitroda, who is close to Gandhi Junior and is the chairman
of the Indian Overseas Congress, appeared to advocate in favour
of a US-style inheritance. The claims made by Congress later to
6 MAY 2024
A SURVEY OF
Rahul Ga ndhi
on the campaign trail
in Kerala,
April 16, 2024 THEIR SOCIAL
MEDIA HANDLES
PROVES THAT IN
SHARP CONTRAST
TO MODI, MOST
OPPOSITION
POLITICIANS,
ESPECIALLY
CONGRESS LEADER
RAHUL GANDHI, DO
NOT SHARE AND
PROMOTE IDEAS
AND THEMES
THAT STRIKE A
CHORD WITH THE
ASPIRING INDIAN
distance themselves from Pitroda have not clicked amidst the
raging debate on a wealth survey proposed by Rahul Gandhi, a
subject that even the extreme factions on the left wouldn’t dare
bring up for fear of popular wrath.
Congress and the rest of the opposition harp on skewed pri-
orities—which, as we have seen, include an emphasis on a caste
census that has failed to click even in a caste-obsessed state like
Bihar. The likes of Rahul Gandhi and others, especially in their
social media pronouncements, seem to be stuck in the past, per-
haps in the 1990s, when the caste census was needed because
the government was considered the much-favoured employer.
Career options have now changed in favour of entrepreneurship
and private-sector employment.
Modi uses his digital presence with clinical precision and the
views his posts get are proof of the pudding. His pithy comment,
“Thank you, Chennai! Today was special”, alone got close to 2.5
million views. Some other posts attract views that a politician
typically gets only in 10 or 15 rallies. His Eid Mubarak greetings
were viewed by millions while his shares highlighting temple
visits and Hindu prayers simply went viral, attracting hundreds
of thousands of reposts. His YouTube videos also capture the
public imagination in a way no other politician can do in India.
Modi however doesn’t rest on his laurels: he enhances the digital
footprint of his government’s message to the people by enlisting
those who have become the de facto opinion leaders, replacing
newspaper columnists, TV commentators, and the like.
Modi would have sported the next trend the next time you
checked and found a new set of collaborators too. He has the ad-
vantage of underestimating none and celebrating the adoring
masses’ aspirations.
www.openthemagazine.com 25
SPARE THE
EVM PLEASE
L o o k w h o’s l o s i n g f a i t h i n d e m o c ra c y By RAJEEV DESHPANDE

O
DD AS IT may seem, in the run-up to the 2019 ambitious programmes to construct houses and toilets and
Lok Sabha election, several senior opposition deliver electricity and cooking gas connections to households.
leaders, some ofwhom are currently part of the Journalists fanning out in the countryside reported meeting ben-
I.N.D.I.A. bloc, made the demand for a return eficiaries of these schemes who spoke of the changes in their lives.
to ballot paper a major campaign issue. A tele- The support for BJP translated into votes for the party and Modi
vision channel report noted that West Bengal won a second successive majority with an enhanced margin. At
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s visit to Delhi in August 2018 no point did the result seem a divergence from the public mood.
achieved opposition unity on a “crucial point”—to seek the use of The EVMs are stored in strong rooms under guard and this is the
ballot papers instead of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the case everywhere, including opposition-ruled states. So, if BJP won
national election. The parties reported to be “on board” with the even in non-BJP states, could it be said that this happened under
change included Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Par- the very eye of opposition-led governments? There is no ‘master
ty, Nationalist Congress Party, Rashtriya Janata Party,
Aam Admi Party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham,
Telugu Desam Party, the Left parties and Trinamool
Congress. Even Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ally Shiv
Sena was reported to have doubts about the fairness
of results delivered through EVMs.
Itistellingthatsomekeyproponentsofthereturn-
to-ballot movement are now part of the BJP-led Na-
tionalDemocraticAlliance.Butthatwouldbegetting
ahead of the story. As the 2019 election approached,
many of these leaders went to the Supreme Court
demanding that EVMs be done away with. A senior
Congress leader told the media with all seriousness
that he has received reports about entire families
voting for the party but none of their votes being re-
corded. He helpfully referred to places “like Nagpur
and Uttar Pradesh” to make his point. It is not surpris-
ing that the opposition leaders chose to disregard the
Election Commission’s efforts to demonstrate the in-
tegrity of EVMs, including offering hackers a chance
tomanipulatethemachines.Thefairlyobviouspoint
that EVMs are not connected to any wireless device,
and therefore cannot be hacked, did not impress the
opposition. Nor did the fact that any likely conspiracy
to subvert EVMs would need a vast network of co-
conspirators deter them. In hindsight, what is really
astounding is that the opposition leaders actually
believed that this was an election issue.
While the anti-EVM parties spent time in court,
BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to
voters seeking a validation of the government’s

26
switch’ that can be diddled to remotely issue commands to alter Commission has regularly improved processes while the ma-
EVM results. Before and after the 2019 election, the opposition chines have become less bulky and more suited for Indian condi-
won victories in major states like West Bengal and Karnataka. tions like the current summer.
Here, too, the result was what voters desired. Yet, opposition leaders raise doubts about EVMs during ral-
If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, then the mas- lies, claiming that India’s democracy is under threat as even the
termind is awfully clever. The shadowy figure allows certain results cannot be trusted. This time round, political parties have
parties to win some state Assembly elections but ensures a dif- not gone to court. The task is being carried out by an activist-lawyer
ferent Lok Sabha result. The sheer improbability of the anti- and the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADA). ADA has re-
EVM narrative is staggering. Besieged cently scored a success in persuading the
by the opposition in 2019, the Supreme Supreme Court to scrap the electoral bond
Court ruled there would be a paper trail THE PURPORTED MOTIVE path of funding political parties and order
verification of VVPATs (Voter Verified OF PLEAS AGAINST EVMs disclosure of purchasers and receivers of
Paper Audit Trail) of five booths in each TO MAKE ELECTIONS such bonds. It is another matter that do-
Assembly segment. The EVMs did well
MORE ACCOUNTABLE ing away with the bonds has not made
and there was no mismatch between election funding any more transparent
the trail and the vote count after a physi- IS A RED HERRING. THE as there is no alternative in place. And as
cal count of 20,625 slips. Starting with PETITIONERS CANNOT BE far as disclosures relating to purchasers of
the late 1990s, EVMs began to be used UNAWARE THAT PAPER the bonds go, the anticipated connection
in state elections. Then the 2004 Lok BALLOTS WOULD TAKE between India’s biggest corporates and
Sabha polls saw the machines being the Modi government failed to materi-
used in all parliamentary constituen-
INDIA BACK TO THE alise. For the rest, the alleged connections
cies. EVMs have been a staple of India’s DAYS WHEN PARTIES between bond purchasers and govern-
electoral process. The Election RIGGED ELECTIONS ments are diffused and applies as much
to the opposition. ADA went back to court
with EVMs in its sights.
The Supreme Court has found no merit in the current appeal
against EVMs, pointing out that suspicions and innuendos can-
not substitute facts. It is also possible the court may have drawn
a cautionary lesson from the far-from-satisfactory results of the
electoral bonds ruling. The important point, however, is not that
the court did not pay heed to an ill-founded challenge. The reason
why EVMs are constantly in the crosshairs of a set of activists and
some opposition parties is to undercut the legitimacy of the elec-
tion result they feel could favour BJP. The purported motive to
make elections more accountable is a red herring. The petitioners
cannot be unaware that paper ballots would take India back to
the days when political parties rigged elections in their regions of
influence. Yet, though BJP might be the intended victim, the real
damage is to India’s democracy despite EVMs ensuring results are
available on the day of counting itself. Compare this with days and
even weeks of ballot counting in advanced nations like the US.
It is a matter of relief that the concerted effort to discredit
EVMs has not affected the trust of voters. The trustworthiness of
EVMs does not figure in conversations with voters. This is not an
issue at all. Conversations with people interviewed by the media
in cities, towns and villages are all about the claims and record
of parties vying for office and a keen assessment of current and
future prospects. The first round of polling in 102 parliamentary
constituencies saw a fall of 3 per cent voting as compared to 2019.
Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

But at 66 per cent, the polling is not low by any standards and, bar-
ring a few constituencies, voting passed without incident. India’s
democracy will survive the efforts to defame it. But the parties
who rake up the EVM bogey face a more difficult task. They need
to find a better reason for their lack of electoral success.

www.openthemagazine.com 27
MODI’S
DOOSRA
In what could be a pivotal
moment in the election, the
prime minister links Congress’
redistribution stance to its
pursuit of quotas for Muslims
at the cost of OBCs
By RAJEEV DESHPANDE

A
FTER SEVERAL WEEKS of corre-
spondence, the Karnataka government
responded to questions posed by the Na-
tional Commission of Backward Classes
(NCBC) over the validity of a 4 per cent
quota for Muslims in educational insti-
tutions and government jobs with an ex-
traordinary assertion: communities like
Muslims and Christians cannot be categorised in terms of religion
or caste. The state further asserted that the entire Muslim commu-
nity is deemed backward and therefore eligible for reservations.
A scrutiny of reservations offered by the Karnataka government
makes it clear that quotas are in fact being offered to Muslims on
both counts—as a religious group and on the basis of caste. So, the
communitystandstobenefitundercategorieswheretheyarelisted
as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) under 36 caste affiliations such
as Kasai (butcher), Dhobi (washerman) and Sonar (goldsmiths),
besidesa4percentcatch-allquotawhichwasreinstatedbytheCon-
gress government after it won the May 2023 state Assembly elec-
tion. It did so by reversing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) govern-
ment’s decision to scrap the Muslim-specific provision on grounds
that religion-based reservations are unconstitutional.
The ongoing exchange between NCBC, headed by BJP leader

28 6 MAY 2024
 Prime Minister Narendra Modi in
Banswara, Rajasthan,
March 21, 2024

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 29

Hansraj Ahir, and the Karnataka government flared into promi- Congress spokespersons denied that the party manifesto or its
nence after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sharp attack on the leader endorsed any plan for redistribution of wealth as alleged by
Congress manifesto and Rahul Gandhi for seeking to redistrib- the prime minister. They said that the party’s agenda is to uplift
ute wealth and resources, particularly to benefit Muslims. The the poor. But politics is often about optics and the cut and thrust
pointed reference that Modi reiterated after raising the issue at of arguments. Congress had picked the comments of Hindutva
a rally in Rajasthan’s tribal Banswara on April 21 has consumed hothead Anant Hegde, denied a ticket in this election, to claim BJP
the poll discourse and could mark a pivotal moment in the 2024 was seeking a super majority of 400 Lok Sabha seats to amend the
election campaign. Modi has charged Congress with seeking to Constitution and snatch the rights of Scheduled Castes and Sched-
undercut the rights of OBCs, Dalits and tribals by re-allocating uled Tribes. It was a damaging charge and Modi and senior BJP
benefits on religious lines to promote its vote bank. The Congress leaders energetically rebutted the allegation, pledging their com-
manifesto’s pledge to address inequality in wealth and income mitment to the Constitution. Modi’s counter-attack flipped the
through changes in policies and Rahul’s April 6 remarks elabo- Congress manifesto onto the opposition party. And unlike the ac-
rating that a financial survey will follow a caste count to deliver cusation that BJP wants to alter the Constitution, there is current
various sections their due. Speaking near Hyderabad, Rahul said, and past evidence of Congress’ attempts to carve out a quota for
“We will do a caste census in the entire nation. We will do an X- Muslims despite repeated setbacks in courts. The Karnataka gov-
ray of the nation…backwards, Dalits, Adivasis, poor from general ernment’s communication with NCBC states that all Muslims are
castes, minorities will know their share. There will be a finan-
cial and institutional survey, we will find out in whose hands is
India’s wealth, in the hands of which class [warg]. After this his- UNLIKE THE ACCUSATION BY CONGRESS THAT
torical step, we will begin revolutionary [krantikari] work.” Modi THERE IS CURRENT AND PAST EVIDENCE OF
seized on the comments, with their strong redistribution over- QUOTA FOR MUSLIMS DESPITE
tones, and linked the Congress pledge to former Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh’s 2006 remarks at a meeting of the National BJP supporters at the prime
Development Council that minorities have the first claim on minister’s rally in Tonk-Sawai
Madhopur, Rajasthan,
resources. “The component plans for Scheduled Castes and Tribes April 23, 2024
will need to be revitalised. We have to devise innovative plans to
ensure that minorities, particularly, the Muslim minority, are
empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development. They
must have the first claim on resources,” Singh had said.
The prime minister’s broadside drew a sharp denial by Con-
gress and a section of commentators argued that Singh had
been quoted partially. Singh’s remarks had, at the time when he
made them, ignited quite a furore and the Prime Minister’s Office
(PMO) had to clarify that his reference included Dalits, tribals,
women and children, not just minorities. Similar explanations
were offered again, but there is no getting away from the specific
mention of minorities and Muslims in Singh’s speech. Rahul’s
detailing of what the caste survey-financial survey scheme will
add up to not only added grist to the BJP mill, it saw Modi warn
voters that Congress’ plans amount to a radical Chairman Mao-
style redistribution of wealth and assets. Hitting an emotive note,
he said family gold and even the mangalsutra worn by married
women will not be safe. Modi’s allegation that Congress intended
to redistribute or redirect resources among Muslims was strongly
criticised by opposition leaders and Congress complained to the
Election Commission that the prime minister violated the law
prohibiting appeals to religion and community during elections.
Modi followed his Banswara speech with another salvo on April
23 at a rally in Tonk where he said Congress wants to reduce SC-
ST reservation and distribute it among Muslims. “The day be-
fore yesterday in Rajasthan, I put forth some truth in front of the
country, and the entire Congress and I.N.D.I.A. alliance went into
a panic. I put forth the truth that Congress is plotting to snatch
your property and distribute it to their special people,” he said.

30 6 MAY 2024
 under reservation Category II-B and are considered as OBCs mak-
ing them eligible for quota benefits. Apart from this 4 per cent
quota, 17 and 19 Muslim castes can access another 4 per cent and
15 per cent reservations under categories I and II-A along with
dozens of other Hindu OBC castes. The Bommai government an-
nounced the scrapping of the Category II-B quota in March last
year, saying non-backward Muslims can access the Economically
Weaker Sections (EWS) reservations. According to NCBC data, the
number of Muslim students who accessed caste-specific reserva-
tions for admission to undergraduate (UG) and post-graduate (PG)
courses in medical colleges in Karnataka in 2021-22 was 85 and 24.
The same for 2022-23 was 75 and 25. The total number of PG medi-
cal seats allotted under these categories was 113 in 2021-22 and
103 in 2022-23. This indicates Muslim OBC candidates accounted
for a significant number of admissions in the Category I and II-A
seats. The number of Muslim candidates admitted for PG studies
BJP WANTS TO ALTER THE CONSTITUTION,
CONGRESS’ ATTEMPTS TO CARVE OUT A
REPEATED SETBACKS IN COURTS
6 MAY 2024
under the catch-all 4 per cent quota was 101 in 2020-21, 140 in 2021-
22 and 102 in 2022-23. It is evident that benefits, including the
4 per cent quota applicable to all Muslims, flowed to the commu-
nity even when BJP was in office and the category was scrapped
just ahead of the Assembly election. It was, as has been noted ear-
lier, reinstated after BJP lost the election and a Congress govern-
ment led by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah assumed office.
T
HE DESIGNATION OF all Muslims as OBCs not only
cuts into the share of non-Muslim backwards but also
hurts the interests of genuine claimants from the minor-
ity community itself. “You can see from the data the extent to
which such religion-based reservations, which are illegal, have
hurt OBCs. Many Muslim candidates, apart from the uncon-
stitutional aspect of the category, would have been ineligible
due to the creamy layer ceiling for OBC reservations,” Ahir told
Open. In a statement released to the media, NCBC said though
the caste system is not permissible in Islam, the Muslim com-
munity is not immune from casteism. “There are various castes
in Muslim society who have been historically underprivileged
and victimised. The religion-based reservation affects and works
against the ethics of social justice for categorically downtrodden
Muslim castes/communities and identified socially and educa-
tionally backward Muslim castes under Category I and II-A,” the
commission states. It concludes that socially and educationally
backwards castes cannot be on par with the rest of their commu-
nity based on religion. This is tantamount to creating an uneven
playing field where the better off will have a headstart in access-
ing reservations meant for the disadvantaged. “We have asked
the Karnataka government on what basis have they declared
the entire Muslim community as backward?” Ahir said. Modi
referred to the actions of the Karnataka government in his speech-
es on April 24 in addition to the attempts of Congress govern-
ments in next-door Andhra Pradesh to legislate reservations for
Muslims. The Andhra Pradesh instance goes back to 1994 when
K Vijayabhaskar Reddy was the chief minister and certain cat-
egories were sought to be included in the OBC list. The initiative
remained unfulfilled when Telugu Desam Party leader
N Chandrababu Naidu became the chief minister but was revived
when YS Rajasekhara Reddy, popularly known as YSR, assumed
the office in 2004 who then carved out a 5 per cent reservation for
Muslims. The decision was struck down by the Andhra Pradesh
High Court leading to YSR setting up a commission and pass-
ing an ordinance that was converted into an Act. This, too, was
quashed by the high court. Yet again, on the basis of the findings of
the commission he had set up, YSR issued another ordinance pro-
viding a 4 per cent quota for 14 categories of Muslims. This time,
the Supreme Court stayed the decision, seeing it as an all too trans-
parent effort to get around the constitutional bar on reservations
on the basis of religion. The matter is still in the Supreme Court.
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government in neighbour-
ing Telangana sought to raise quotas for backward Muslims from
4 per cent to 12 per cent in keeping with their population but the
www.openthemagazine.com 31
 A SOCIA
legislation did not receive the Centre’s assent.
The cases of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh established con-
certed efforts of Congress governments to provide reservations
for Muslims as a community. While categorisation of certain
Muslim castes as OBCs is legal and such lists exist in almost ev-
ery state and even at the Centre, the Congress project is intended Policies that encourage redistribution
to expand the eligibility far beyond what is feasible and consti-
leftward lurch is more a vision of class

tutionally valid. As in the case of Andhra Pradesh, the courts
have been the bulwark against the bids to implement illegal
quotas while Congress’ defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha election
put paid to more ambitious efforts to alter the reservation ma-
trix. A desire to play to the sentiments of minorities animated
the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s stab at
passing the communal violence bill—as it was commonly re-
ferred to—but which was shelved due to a political backlash.
The bill, the brainchild of the National Advisory Council (NAC)
headed by Sonia Gandhi, defined victims of communal violence
as religious and linguistic minorities in any state as also SCs and
STs. In other words, the majority community could not be a
victim of communal violence. By alluding to Congress’ record
of minorityism or, as BJP puts it, vote bank politics, Modi hit
the party on a sensitive node, threatening to set off a counter-
reaction that might severely damage its prospects.
The Congress manifesto and Rahul’s remarks at poll rallies
T
HE SPECTRE OF class war is not new to India’s
politics. Come elections and India witnesses co-
lourful political rhetoric. In the past, socialist poli-
ciesmadenationalisationofbanksamorallyvirtu-
ous exercise. In much of the 1960s, ’70s and even
the’80s,thePlanningCommissionwastestimony
to efforts to fashion social results in accordance to political goals
that identified ‘enemies’ but did not offer solutions. Despite the tri-
umphofliberalisationintheyearsthatfollowedIndia’scomingout
party in 1991, the 2024 election is turning out to be very different.
Congress, in its recently released manifesto, has made economic
promises which when seen alongside the statements made by its
leaders, cannot be ignored as mere vote-attracting devices.
In three key places, the Congress manifesto makes

WHILE CATEGORISATION OF CERTAIN L-R: P Chidambaram, Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge,

Rahul Gandhi and KC Venugopal with copies of Congress’
MUSLIM CASTES AS OBCs IS LEGAL election manifesto at a press conference in New Delhi,
April 5, 2024
AND SUCH LISTS EXIST IN ALMOST
EVERY STATE AND AT THE CENTRE,
THE CONGRESS PROJECT IS INTENDED
TO EXPAND THE ELIGIBILITY FAR
BEYOND WHAT IS FEASIBLE AND
CONSTITUTIONALLY VALID
give form to his “jitni abadi, utna haq” slogan. The shift in rhetoric
from empowerment to redistribution—or even distribution as
Congressleadersargue—movestheparty’sagendamuchbeyond
therights-basedpoliciesUPAadvocated.Thereferencestominori-
ties in the manifesto, which repeatedly speaks of “ensuring” mi-
norities receive their “fair share” in education, healthcare, public
employment, public works contracts, skill development, sport
and cultural activities point to this thinking. Similarly, Congress’
declaration that it will ensure minorities enjoy the freedom of
choice of “dress, food, language and personal laws”—even while
paying lip service to reform of such laws—is an endorsement of
different statutes for marriage, divorce and inheritance. Home
Minister Amit Shah made the point bluntly, saying Congress
backs Sharia in personal laws. By trying to offer a “new deal” to
voters by sharpening its appeal among minorities and forging a
new class coalition, Congress finds itself teetering. The Congress
manifesto and Rahul’s unguarded comments have given BJP just
the opening the party and Modi were waiting for.

AP
32
LIST MIRAGE
have a poor track record and Congress’
war than empowerment
exceptional promises. Some of these promises are kept deliber-
ately vague. But when seen together, they add up to a desire to take
India in a far-left economic direction, something reminiscent
of the 1970s when being wealthy was looked down upon. The
discussion might perhaps have remained somewhat diffused but
the noisy debate unleashed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
accusation that Congress poll pledges amount to a socialist-style
redistribution of wealth with a bias towards Muslims has reig-
nited a fierce argument over the utility of such policies.
Some of these promises are worth recapitulating. In the
section on the economy, the Congress manifesto promises:
“We will address the growing inequality of wealth and income
through suitable changes in policies.” (Paragraph 21, page 28). In
the section on farmers, it states: “We will appoint a Permanent
By SIDDHARTH SINGH
Commission on Agricultural Finance that will report periodically
on the extent of agricultural credit and the need for loan forbear-
ance.” (Paragraph 4, page 17). For women, among other things, the
manifesto promises: “Congress resolves to launch a Mahalakshmi
scheme to provide Rs 1 lakh per year to every poor Indian family as
an unconditional cash transfer. The poor will be identified among
the families at the bottom of the income pyramid.” The very next
paragraph adds: “The amount will be directly transferred to the
bank account of the oldest woman of the household.” (Paragraphs
1 and 2, page 15).
The redistributive impulse of these promises is obvious im-
mediately. Consider the promise of “addressing” inequality. The
manifesto cites a study by the French economist Thomas Piketty
and says, “India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is more
www.openthemagazine.com 33
unequal than even under the British Raj. The share of national
income earned by India’s top 1 per cent is today at its highest
historical levels and is among the highest globally. The rise of
inequality has been particularly pronounced between 2014 and
2023.” The party is clearly undeterred by the implication that it
must bear significant responsibility for India’s inequality, too,
if Piketty’s politically coloured conclusions are indeed correct.
It is well-known that India is an unequal country. But it is also are for individuals and these range from 2.5 per cent (some 34.3
a fact that all fast-growing economies experience rising inequal-
ity before they settle down to more reasonable levels of inequal-
ity. There is no such thing as “perfect equality” unless one lives
in a primitive hunting-gathering economy. But even by India’s
unequal reality, data shows that inequality in India is declining.
Data on the Gini Coefficient—a measure of inequality where
0 indicates perfect equality and 100 perfect
inequality—from two different sources, the
World Bank and State Bank of India (SBI)
Research, shows that inequality in India is
declining. The World Bank data shows that
after rising to a high of 35.9 in 2017, the Gini
Index fell to 32.8 in 2021. This should be con-
sidered against other historical points in the
same data set: 32 in 1983; 32.5 in 1987; 31.6 in
1993. From 2004 to 2011, the Gini Index rose
steadily from 34 to 35.4. The trend highlights
several things. One, higher growth often
leads to higher inequality even as lack of it
can mean stagnant incomes and stubborn MANMOHAN SINGH
poverty. Two, rising inequality was a trend
observed during the UPA years from 2004
IS REMEMBERED
to 2011. Inequality actually fell in two dif- FOR ‘REFORMIST’
ferent phases during the Modi years: from CREDENTIALS BUT
35.4 in 2011 to 34.7 in 2015 and then, after HE PRESIDED OVER
rising, another round of decline from 2017
A GOVERNMENT
until the present time.
The result is that inequality—which is a MORE INTERESTED
product of growth, the ability to make use of IN REDISTRIBUTION
economic opportunities and education—is IN THE PURSUIT OF
not a political variable as the Congress mani- SOCIAL WELFARE
festo states.
The latest data from SBI Research that
THAN ECONOMIC
uses data from income-tax returns shows REFORMS
that the Gini Coefficient has declined from
0.472 during Assessment Year (AY) 2014-15 to 0.402 for AY 2022-23.
(SBI has normalised the Gini Index to 0-1 instead of 0-100 used in
the World Bank data). Clearly, inequality in contemporary India
being “worse than the British Raj” is a rhetorical flourish that is
at odds with credible data.
But the political point from the Congress manifesto and state-
ments made by its leaders is obvious: if elected to power, India
is in for a round of higher taxes—which will fall most heavily
on an already harried middle class, its entrepreneurs and other
wealth generators—something Congress tried in the 1970s with
poor results. That experiment not only killed economic growth in
34
India, impoverishing it for decades before its middle class
emerged from the dark period, but also unleashed the worst au-
thoritarian tendencies as also corruption in the Indian system.
The promise of the Mahalakshmi scheme is not worded
clearly. Its unit of transferring money is the “family” and not the
individual. Reliable numbers of “families” living below the pov-
erty line (BPL) are not available. The available estimates of poverty
million persons based on National Accounts data by Surjit Bhalla)
to 10.2 per cent (140.04 million by Roy and Van der Wilde). Both
estimates are for 2022. There are other estimates as well. It is hard
to calculate the number of BPL “families” from these numbers.
As an illustration, consider the amount necessary to transfer
`1 lakh to 10 million “families” or one crore families. The sum
involved is `1 lakh crore every year.
From a purely political vantage, the
number of poor families at one crore is too
low for any electoral gain: there will be a
strong urge to bump up the number of
‘poor’ by revising poverty lines by includ-
ing ever more goods such as housing, trans-
port, education, and health in the basket of
goods necessary for living. The result will be
a strong upward bias in the money needed
for such politically committed expenditure.
It is a feature of India’s politics that once
such “welfare schemes” are launched, they
cannot be scaled down, let alone shut down.
The most extraordinary—and more con-
crete—promise in the Congress manifesto
relates to loan waivers for farmers. The party
that pioneered periodic loan melas on the
eve of the elections now wants a Permanent
Commission on Agricultural Finance as a
statutory body that will, at regular intervals,
simply put its stamp on loan waivers for
farmers. While couched in ‘sophisticated’
language—the Commission will “report on
loan forbearance”—the intent is clear: loans
extended to farmers will be waived off on a
regular basis.
A more damaging economic policy
measure will be hard to find in the annals
of India’s policymaking. Some of the consequences are obvious.
For one, it will lead to a crisis in banking or farming depending
on how the government handles the issue. If banks are not forced
to lend to farmers, they will simply stop extending loans, for
the risk of default will be close to certainty. This is because the
planned Permanent Commission on Agricultural Finance will
be designed for waiving off loans. The other possibility is that
banks are asked to set aside a portion of their credit specifically
for farmers, a return to the damaging “priority sector lending”
era. That will have ripple effects throughout the Indian economy.
Even now, the promise of loan waivers in state elections has seen
6 MAY 2024
farmers reneging on mortgages in anticipation of the promised the hint was unambiguous that at some point the party could
relief. In Madhya Pradesh, the shortlived Congress government resort to such taxes. Pitroda had also said direct taxes on the
that assumed office in 2018 failed to implement the waiver, and middle class would be increased and that this section of society
hundreds of farmers became defaulters. should be “large-hearted” and bear such taxes.
It is difficult to presage what will transpire but three conse- This led to a furore within days with Prime Minister
quences are obvious. One, it will create difficulties for the bank- Narendra Modi mounting a direct attack on Congress by quoting
ing system to keep the credit-deposit ratio stable. A portion of Pitroda at a rally in Chhattisgarh on April 24. While he did not
the savings of depositors will end up being frittered away and name Pitroda directly, his words made it crystal clear who he was
unless replenished by constant infusions, the profitability of referring to. Within no time, Congress communications in-charge
banks will come under a cloud. There is no dearth of ‘econo- Jairam Ramesh clarified in a post on X that Pitroda was free to say
mists’ who say that banks “generate their own credit”, but the what he wanted to but his statements were not the party’s official
reality is very different from such voodoo economics. In an position. Interestingly, Ramesh did not deny that the party would
economy with open financial markets, savers will take their not engage in further redistributive measures.
deposits elsewhere. Which leads to the second issue: unless This won’t be the first time the party has thought of reintro-
financial repression is undertaken, the ducing inheritance tax and taxing “con-
scheme of waiving off loans will head to a spicuous consumption”. In April 2011,
crisis at some point. Three, it is certain that in a full meeting of the Planning Com-
the Indian economy will stagnate: farmers mission chaired by then Prime Minister
will have no incentives to move to more Manmohan Singh, a senior party leader
productive sectors of the economy. This pointed out that since managing non-plan
will have its own consequences. expenditure was becoming “difficult”, the
What these three promises will do is to tax-to-GDP ratio should be raised. This, the
transfer a massive amount of earnings of leader had said, could be done by imposing
the middle class of India to other sections, an inheritance tax and by taxing “conspicu-
and that too in an unprofitable manner. ous consumption”.
There is no economic rationale for these Historically, estate duty was imposed in
promises but the politics is very apparent. 1953, but was withdrawn in 1985 as it did
A party that doesn’t believe in generating SAM PITRODA, not yield expected gains. In any case, estate
wealth for all sections of Indians wants to duty had a political purpose as it signalled to
indulge in a massive destruction of prosper-
AN ASSOCIATE OF the voters that the government was playing
ity and stagnation of the Indian economy. THE GANDHIS, Robin Hood by taxing the rich and distrib-
TALKED ABOUT uting their wealth to the poor. It is another
INHERITANCE TAX.

S
matter that the estate duty system had a
INCE THE PUBLICATION of
HE SAID TAXES number of loopholes that ensured it went
the manifesto on April 5, there has nowhere or encouraged fraud. This has been
been plenty of controversy over the ON THE MIDDLE the experience with estate duty in almost all
Congress’ ‘wealth redistribution’ promises. CLASS WOULD countries in the world.
Supporters of the party claim that nowhere INCREASE AND Between various statements made by
does the manifesto promise such redistribu- THIS SECTION Congress leaders in the past two months
tion. The three promises in the manifesto and the party’s manifesto, it is clear Congress
highlighted above go a long distance in that
SHOULD BE wants to take India back to a socialist era—
direction. But there is more than the mani- ‘LARGE-HEARTED’ with added embellishments—that prevailed
festo alone. from Independence until 1991 before a bal-
At different points, the party’s senior ance of payments problem forced the PV
leader Rahul Gandhi has talked of “X-raying” the economic struc- Narasimha Rao government to seek help from the International
ture of India in a bid to ascertain who owns what and how much. Monetary Fund (IMF). Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
The party says policies will be shaped on the basis of such data. is remembered for his “reformist” credentials but he presided
But it stops short of saying that wealth will be redistributed from over a government more interested in redistribution in the pur-
the rich to the poor. But the hint is sufficient even if the wording suit of social welfare than furthering economic reforms. This
of what is said is left deliberately vague. was partly due to the influence of the National Advisory Council
Sam Pitroda, an old associate of the Gandhi family who is (NAC), a “super cabinet” headed by Sonia Gandhi and staffed with
based in the US, recently talked about the importance of inheri- leftwing and NGO economists and activists. The party’s 2024
tance tax. As with other leaders of the party, he did not go all the manifesto shows that Congress has moved even more left, with
way to say that such a tax would be reintroduced. But as before, the centrist components of its political DNA no longer visible.

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 35

 I N T H E A RE N A

THE SWARAJ A
In New Delhi, BJP candidate Bansuri Swaraj taps into the legacy of her
Photograph by RAUL IRANI

36 6 MAY 2024

URA
mother and the youth vote
Bansuri Swaraj campaigns in
New Delhi, April 18, 2024
6 MAY 2024
L
By AMITA SHAH
ATE ON A windy April afternoon, at a temple in a
New Delhi locality, a bunch of women and a few men start
gathering. One woman takes a tabla, while some others
pick up some microphones, as they start singing kirtans.
Bansuri Swaraj, their new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Lok Sabha candidate, is expected to arrive any moment.
A while later, Swaraj—wearing a maroon chanderi sa-
ree with a golden border—breezes in chanting “Jai Shri
Ram”. The singing stops. “After 500 years, this is the first Ram Navami when our
Ram Lalla is in the Ram Mandir,” she says.
She then briefly pauses for an elderly woman to take her seat, before con-
tinuing. “I have decided not to ask anything from God. But I want to ask some-
thing from you. I seek your blessings for victory and to be able to complete the
task that I am here to do.” She is then welcomed with glittery scarlet odhnis
(scarfs). A young woman from the crowd complains that once a candidate
wins, they are never accessible to the common people in the constituency.
“I assure you that I will be accessible,” says Bansuri, before starting to sing a
Ram bhajan while holding the microphone, as others chime in. Later, she shows
no hurry, posing for photographs with anyone who wants them, lending a pa-
tient ear to those who have something to say, and promises to be back to have
tea with them soon. She has to get to her next public interaction.
Sitting in the back seat of her car, ready to take questions, Bansuri speaks of
her childhood, her parents, her career and how she entered politics. She could
barelycounttillhundred,shesays,whenshehadutteredherfirstpoliticalslogan
as a child—“kamal ke phoolon se bhar do peti, jeetegi Ambala ki beti (fill the box with
lotus flowers, the winner will be Ambala’s daughter).”
That was for her mother Sushma Swaraj— veteran BJP
leader, Union minister and the first-ever chief minister of
Delhi—when she contested the Ambala Assembly elec-
tion in 1987. Bansuri completed her studies and started DELHI
practising as a lawyer. Neither then, nor later, had she
ever imagined that she will be following in her mother’s NEW DELHI
footsteps in politics.
“It was not on the horizon. I was happy being a law-
yer.” Nearly four years after her mother’s death, she got a
call saying BJP was expanding its legal cell. She joined the party as co-convener
of the legal cell. Later, she was made secretary of the Delhi BJP. But, the big break
cameonMarch2thisyear,whichwasbothunforeseenandchallenging.Bansuri
was watching news on television along with her father that evening, when her
name was announced as the BJP candidate from the high-profile New Delhi seat.
“I did not say anything. I looked at my father and tried to touch his feet but
he said daughters aren’t supposed to do that and wished me luck. I went to
my mother’s portrait and then to pay obeisance before the idols of gods in our
house,” she recalls. That night, she was to attend a post-dinner talk on ‘UCC: Ne-
cessity for Gender Justice, Equality and Fraternity’, organised at JNU by ABVP,
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) student wing. Bansuri wanted to
ensure that she kept her promise to be there. It was after all in ABVP as a student
that she had experienced her first stint in politics. That night in JNU turned out
to be her first political speech, just hours after having been named as a candi-
date for the Lok Sabha election. For her, it was like life having come full circle.
At 40, life has also taken a new turn for her. Like her mother in her silver-
tongued oratory, in her gait, or in the way she wears a saree, Bansuri has stepped
www.openthemagazine.com 37
 I N T H E A RE N A

into the rough and tumble of her first elec- It has been a very positive one and I
tion with ease. Describing Sushma Swaraj have not said a single word which is
as the architect of her personality, she says derogatory against my opponent,” she says.
she has imbibed her values, hard work and Bansuri has her reasons not to be ruffled by
ethics. “Not the one I am wearing today, but I Bharti’s candidature. Even in 2019, a year
do wear my mother’s sarees quite often,” she before Kejriwal won a second term, BJP had
says, smiling. won all seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi. BJP’s
What would have been her mother’s Meenakshi Lekhi, also a lawyer, had won
words of advice for her? Without batting a second consecutive term, with a margin
an eyelid, Bansuri replies, “She would have of over 2.5 lakh votes, defeating Congress’
just asked me to be fearless and unstop- Ajay Maken, while AAP’s Brijesh Goyal
pable. Do everything that I had to do and came third. This time, Congress and AAP
leave the rest in Krishna’s hands. That’s are contesting jointly as part of the I.N.D.I.A.
exactly how she was.” Bansuri is trying to LIKE HER MOTHER bloc. In a bid to avert chances of any anti-in-
hold on to that counsel. She mingles with SUSHMA SWARAJ IN cumbency against its MPs, BJP has replaced
people, getting off the dais, speaking and HER SILVER-TONGUED six of the seven sitting MPs for the upcoming
interacting, and making herself one among ORATORY, IN HER GAIT, polls, with actor-turned-politician Manoj
them. And, she seems to be enjoying it all in
OR IN THE WAY SHE Tiwari being the only one retained to con-
her hometown. test again from the North East Delhi seat.
“If you have called me your beti, then you WEARS A SAREE, Like all BJP candidates, Bansuri, too,
cannot let me go empty-handed. I promise BANSURI HAS STEPPED is banking on the Modi report card. “It
that if I win, as an MP, I will be among you to INTO THE ROUGH AND is stellar. He is the epitome of fulfilment
address your problems. I will never let you TUMBLE OF HER FIRST of promises. Whatever was enunciated
down,” she says addressing a small public in the manifesto earlier, each and every
meeting at Bhagat Singh Park in the Sant
ELECTION WITH EASE promise has been fulfilled, she says citing
Nagar area, after visiting a gurdwara nearby. the abrogation of Article 370, bringing
Showered with rose petals, she greets her hosts before getting off in CAA, building the Ram temple, 33 per cent reservation for
thedais.Wearingcasualblackshoes,shecrossestheredcarpet,step- women in Parliament and state Assemblies as some examples.
ping beyond it onto the muddy ground, as she appeals for votes to Describing BJP’s “Sankalp Patra” for the next five years as futur-
make Narendra Modi the prime minister for a third term, while istic and progressive, she says, “At its core, the mantra is to perform,
reeling out the Union government’s social welfare schemes, poli- reform and transform. There are some revolutionary pledges that
ciesoverthelast10yearsandpromiseskept.Walkingbetweenrows have been enunciated, like infrastructure development, not just in
of chairs, she puts the mic in front of the audience, asking them to physicaltermsbutalsothoseregardingdigitalandsocialinfrastruc-
complete the slogan “ab ki baar?”, and they respond, “Modi sarkar”. ture. With the “Drone Didi” scheme, we are making a tectonic shift
“I have been told that my mother got a post office built here,” in the thinking of people, encouraging a social transformation by
she says. In a place which has refugees from Bangladesh and empowering women in rural India. We are talking about not just
Pakistan, while narrating stories of Partition she has heard from women empowerment but of women-led development.”
her grandfather, she says that a promise from 1947 has been met Asked what she, as an individual, plans to bring to the table,
in 2024 in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), as she contests the election with Modi as the face of the party and
which grants Indian citizenship to religious minorities— the legacy of her mother, Bansuri says she would like to be the em-
Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians—from blem of youth-led and women-centric development. “If I become
neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. a member of Parliament, the first thing would be accessibility,
She brings in a sprinkling of Punjabi, describing herself as a to be available to my constituents. The second will be innova-
Delhi girl, as she speaks mostly in flawless Hindi, articulate like tive out-of-the-box thinking for problem-solving. I am not afraid
her mother, who had even picked up Kannada and had given a of exploring legal avenues for problem-solving.” Taking on the
speech in the language after being pitted against Congress leader Arvind Kejriwal government for “denying” Delhiites the Ayush-
Sonia Gandhi in Karnataka’s Bellary in the 1999 General Elec- man Bharat scheme, a health insurance cover of `5 lakh for its
tion. Though Swaraj lost the election in the Congress bastion, it beneficiaries, she says that the scheme will be extended to every-
became one of her most unforgettable electoral battles. one above 70 years of age, irrespective of their economic strata.
Bansuri faces a formidable opponent in Aam Aadmi Party’s She adds that if elected, she will do everything in her power to
(AAP) Somnath Bharti, a lawyer like her, but who, unlike her, ensure that the scheme is extended to the people of Delhi, even if
has already won three polls in the Delhi Assembly elections, it means filing a case in court.
from the Malviya Nagar seat, in New Delhi. “I am like a horse On the political fallout of Kejriwal being put behind bars in
wearing blinkers. I am only concentrating on my campaign. the Delhi liquor policy case, Bansuri said that the courts have held

38 6 MAY 2024
the arrest to be legal and so the people are not buying the AAP’s
narrative of “fake sympathy”. “The people of Delhi are very smart.
They know that they have been cheated. For a `100 crore kickback,
the people have been deprived of over `2,000 crore. We may be po-
litical opponents, but the courts of this country are independent.
Kejriwal’s petition was not a bail application. It was actually a peti-
tion filed to say that his arrest was illegal, which means that his plea
needed the court to go into every aspect of the investigation and
every piece of evidence. In a bail hearing, the courts don’t go into
the merits of a case. The high court has said Kejriwal was involved
inhispersonalcapacityasconvenerofAAPinreceivingkickbacks.”
Besides Kejriwal, his former deputy Manish Sisodia is also in jail
in the alleged liquor scam. All the New Delhi Assembly constituen-
cies— Karol Bagh, Patel Nagar, Moti Nagar, Delhi Cantonment, Ra-
jinderNagar,NewDelhi,KasturbaNagar,MalviyaNagar,RKPuram
and Greater Kailash— are currently represented by AAP MLAs.
“Bansuri Swaraj has a good chance of winning. Who else
is there? The AAP leaders are all being put in jail. Who will ad-
dress our concerns?” says Varun, a property dealer, who was
sitting amidst the crowd at her public meeting in Sant Nagar.
However, a businessman in Karol Bagh, who did not wish to be
named, disagreed, stating that he was not concerned with who
the candidates are, but was happy with the work done by AAP in
education, particularly in government schools, and in the health
SEC 62
NOIDA
88 20 800 800
sector through mohalla clinics.
“She went to every shop in Khan Market when she came here
a month ago. She has been coming here since her childhood. Ev-
eryone here knows her,” says Harish Goyal, who runs a provision
store in the area. Complaining about woes of traders over taxes, he,
however, sees no alternative to BJP at the Centre. Stopping by at a
pet shop in Khan Market, where she buys stuff for her Labrador
“Laddoo”, Bansuri seeks votes for “Laddoo’s mother”.
Sources in Bansuri’s campaign team say she has started with
small public meetings and will hit the trail in a bigger way as the
May 25 elections in Delhi get closer. Her candidature is bound to
bring BJP under attack over nepotism, a charge the party has used
to target the opposition, particularly Congress. Bansuri, however,
has countered the allegation saying she is in politics not because
of her mother, but her own association with ABVP. “I joined ABVP
in 2001. I got a chance to serve the party for a decade as a lawyer.
This is my 17th year of practising law. I have been running my
own chamber for a decade.”
What is the biggest challenge before her in her first electoral
battle? She laughs and replies, “Sleep deprivation. My day begins
at 7AM and I sleep at 2AM.” On a more serious note, she adds that
there are no challenges, but just hard work and not thinking
about the results. As it gets dark, Bansuri still has more on her
schedule—a media interview and a late-night public meeting.
UPRERAPRJ665479 https://up-rera.in/projects
www.maastersinfra.com
 DISPAT CH

BJP’S MISSION
KASHMIR
The Lok Sabha polls in the Union territory
are just the means to achieve a favourable JAMMU
AND
condition in the proposed Assembly election KASHMIR

By RAHUL PANDITA

AP
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Udhampur, Jammu, April 12, 2024

40 6 MAY 2024
I
N MARCH, PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi
visited the Kashmir Valley for the first time after the
removal of Article 370. From the helipad of the Army
cantonment, his social media accounts first showed
him bowing to the Shiva temple atop the Shankara-
charya Hill seen from a distance. Later, as he addressed
a rally, it was quite a different spectacle from earlier
events, including those in which the Bharatiya Jana-
ta Party (BJP) may have been involved even indirectly. In those
events, people came reluctantly, and even then, to escape the
wrath of militants, they preferred to keep their faces covered.
But, last month, as Modi said Jammu and Kashmir is breathing
freely, there was a big gathering of people listening to him—and
freely, without any attempt to conceal their identity.
This change has happened because the majority Kashmiri
Muslims have understood that it is better to be on the winning
side. Already, there are individuals, previously opposed to BJP
and to Modi in particular, who are now openly singing his paeans
and have suddenly turned ‘patriotic’. There are chances that in BJP workers inaugurate an election
office in Baramulla, January 30, 2024
BJP’s futuristic gameplan in Kashmir, they may get to play a role
AFP
by acting as the party’s proxies in Assembly elections that Modi
and others have promised will happen soon. BEFORE 2019, PEOPLE ATTENDED
But that apart, given that there is resentment that hasn’t found EVENTS RELUCTANTLY, AND TO
an outlet in the last five years, to align temporarily with the win-
ESCAPE THE WRATH OF MILITANTS,
ning side does not necessarily mean that the Kashmiris want BJP
to win. Those who come for rallies will mostly not vote for BJP or THEY PREFERRED TO KEEP THEIR
even become the party’s cadre. BJP has understood this and that is FACES COVERED. BUT, LAST MONTH AT
what has led to their decision of not fielding any candidate from PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI’S
the three Lok Sabha constituencies from the Kashmir region: Sri- GATHERING, THERE WAS A BIG CROWD
nagar, Baramulla and Anantnag-Rajouri. These will go to polls
in May, while the rest two in the Jammu region voted in April.
LISTENING TO HIM—AND FREELY,
On Jammu seats, the party is relying on Brand Modi as they have WITHOUT ANY ATTEMPT TO CONCEAL
done in the past two elections, now coupled with the success on THEIR IDENTITY
Article 370 that had been on the party’s manifesto for decades.
In any case, BJP had fared poorly on the three Kashmir seats in also targeted PDP’s Mehbooba Mufti, questioning why she was
2019 when it had chosen to field its candidates. BJP’s Jammu and opposing BJP when she had been an ally in the past. Hitting out at
Kashmir President Ravinder Raina said this decision (of not fight- BJP, Omar said in a rally in South Kashmir that the saffron party
ing from Kashmir) was keeping in mind the bigger goal and that had no guts to field any candidate in the Kashmir Valley. “If they
on these seats BJP will support parties that are “patriotic”. This win any seats in the Kashmir Valley, I will quit politics,” he said.
is a reiteration of the statement of Amit Shah, who recently in BJP has in the past forged an alliance, separately, with both Kash-
Jammu appealed to Kashmiris to vote for any party other than the miri mainstream parties, the National Conference and the People’s
National Conference (NC), the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Democratic Party. These ties, especially the one with PDP that is
and Congress. He said that in the Valley, BJP would support “pa- largely seen as a pro-separatist party, turned out to be a political
triotic parties”, in other words, parties that are expected to act as disaster. BJP opted out of it, albeit a bit late, by which time consider-
its proxies. Prominent among them is People’s Conference, led by able damage had already happened in Kashmir. After the 2019 Pul-
Sajad Lone, who is contesting from the Baramulla seat. There is wama suicide attack, BJP tightened its grip on Kashmir, leading to
also Apni Party, whose leader Altaf Bukhari is also seen as some- the removal of Article 370 later that year. Since then, as a Union ter-
one propped up by New Delhi. The two have now decided to go ritory, with direct control of the Centre, terrorism has been brought
together, supporting each other ’s candidates in Kashmir. under control. After the removal of Article 370, NC and PDP, along
Lone is pitted against NC’s Omar Abdullah. Both have been at with a few others, formed the Gupkar Alliance to counter BJP in
loggerheads, with NC raising Lone’s links with BJP. In response, the Valley. It asked for “restoration of democracy” in the state.
Lone sarcastically reminded Omar of how he was a minister in But in two years, fissures began to appear in the alliance. As NC
the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at which and PDP failed to arrive at a quid pro quo, they decided to contest
time BJP was “good BJP”, and now the same party was “bad”. Omar the Lok Sabha elections independently in Kashmir Valley, while

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 41

 DISPAT CH
AFTER THE REMOVAL OF ARTICLE 370, NC AND PDP, ALONG WITH A FEW
OTHERS, FORMED THE GUPKAR ALLIANCE TO COUNTER BJP. BUT IN TWO
YEARS, FISSURES BEGAN TO APPEAR IN THE ALLIANCE. AS NC AND PDP
FAILED TO ARRIVE AT A QUID PRO QUO, THEY DECIDED TO CONTEST THE
LOK SABHA ELECTIONS INDEPENDENTLY IN THE KASHMIR VALLEY
AFP
National Conference leaders Omar Abdullah and Farooq Abdullah
along with other party leaders in Srinagar, April 12, 2024
supporting Congress in two seats in the Jammu region. This works
well for BJP as votes against it will get split. For the two seats in
Jammu, BJP is leaving no stone unturned. It deputed its star cam-
paigners like Yogi Adityanath and Amit Shah to campaign for its
candidates, Jitendra Singh and Jugal Kishore, who have won in
both 2014 and 2019 elections. The Congress campaign, in contrast,
looks lacklustre.
Srinagar and Baramulla is understandable, but BJP’s decision
not to contest from Anantnag-Rajouri has made many party work-
ers unhappy. This seat, formed recently after a delimitation process,
is a combination of Kashmir and Jammu regions, on both sides of
the Pir Panjal range. In the last General Election, while Anantnag
saw less than 10 per cent voting, the Jammu part of the new constit-
uency saw over 65 per cent turnout. BJP workers had been hoping
to make a mark here, especially after the Centre chose to give the
Scheduled Tribe status to the Paharis, a linguistic group. This was
supposedtohelpBJP,butitchosenottocontest.SodidGhulamNabi
Azad, the former Congress leader, who has now formed his own
party. He said he was reminded by people that he will be returning
to Delhi through Lok Sabha if he won and did not want to do that.
For BJP, the central issue remains how to go about the state-
hood, which the party top brass has repeatedly promised. From
its prior experience, it knows that repeating the same mistake
(alliance with NC and PDP) is going to make them lose all gains.
Last month, Amit Shah in an interview to a local news organisa-
tion said that the government was considering the removal of the
ArmedForcesSpecialPowersAct(AFSPA)andareductionintroops.
Whilethiscouldbedonekeepinginmindthesecurityscenario,the
real challenge begins when the statehood is restored in the Union
territory. In 2015, after BJP chose to establish a government with
PDP, Kashmir plunged into turmoil. In April that year, a radical
Islamist, Massarat Alam, close to the separatist leader Syed Ali Shah
42
GETTY IMAGES
PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti
in Anantnag, April 18, 2024
Geelani, was given the freedom to organise a big reception and a
rally for his mentor who was returning from Delhi after spending
the harsh winter months. As the crowd passed by the director gen-
eral of police’s office in Srinagar, many among it shouted: “Pakistan
sekyapaigaam,KashmirbanegaPakistan(Whatisthemessagefrom
Pakistan? Kashmir will turn into Pakistan),” and “Jeeve, jeeve Paki-
stan(LonglivePakistan)”.Therallyboostedthespiritsofyoungsters
who had grudgingly accepted that azadi is a mirage. It was around
the same time that the legend of Burhan Wani was created, helped
by journalistic reports from Delhi that declared him the new face of
militancy in Kashmir. In the chaos after Wani’s death, a few Indian
parliamentarians went to Geelani’s door to beg for an audience,
whichwasrefused.PolicesourcesrevealedatthetimethatafterPDP
came to power, it put tremendous pressure on them to go easy on
stone pelters. In many instances, those who had been booked for
serious violations were freed after PDP’s intervention.
In the last few years, the Centre has carefully broken down the
terrorist ecosystem in the Valley. Being a separatist in Kashmir
today comes at a cost, and the Kashmiris in the Valley have been
made aware of this. Those who have even indirectly helped ter-
rorists have had agencies like the National Investigation Agency
(NIA) come to their door. Many among the security grid are not in
favour of granting statehood immediately. They feel that it should
only be done when the last residue of separatism in Kashmir dries
out. But that will take time. BJP insiders also say that the party
will try a mathematical jugglery through which there could be a
possibility of a chief minister from Jammu, preferably a Hindu.
This is where it expects the newly minted “patriots” in Kashmir
to fall in line and help BJP do the unthinkable. Right now, it looks
impossible, but if Modi comes back to power for the third time,
this should not be a task bigger than the one his government un-
dertook in August 2019.
6 MAY 2024
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 I N T H E A RE N A
Home Minister Amit Shah
and BJP’s Bangalore South
candidate Tejasvi Surya
in Bengaluru, April 23, 2024
BETTING ON BEN Women and welfare play key roles in India’s IT capital,
B
ENGALURU MAY BE in the grip of a heat
wave, but the electioneering here appeared
lukewarm until almost the last leg. Days before
half of Karnataka’s 28 Lok Sabha seats went to
polls, Home Minister Amit Shah, on April 23,
conducted a 45-minute roadshow in Bangalore
South, accompanied by Tejasvi Surya, seeking a second term from
the constituency, veteran leaders BS Yediyurappa, R Ashoka and
others. While popular, Surya faces a spirited fight from Congress’
Sowmya Reddy, former Jayanagar MLA and daughter of state
Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy. With 2.2 million voters,
the constituency has consistently voted BJP in the past eight Lok
Sabha elections. The constituency has a large Brahmin popula-
44
tion and was successfully represented by the late Ananth Kumar
for six consecutive terms. Now, Congress is making a bid to wrest
the seat by fielding a woman. “Women voters are with us this
time and Sowmya is going to spring a surprise with a big victory
margin,” claims her father Ramalinga Reddy.
About the same time that Shah was waving to massive crowds
at Swami Vivekananda Circle, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi
Vadra, at a public meeting attended by Deputy Chief Minister
DK Shivakumar and party seniors, accused BJP of being oblivi-
ous to the problems of women. She touched on Congress’ social
guarantees—including free bus travel for women and `1,000 a
month to women heads of households—implemented in the
state after the party secured a comprehensive victory in the As-
6 MAY 2024

GALURU
writes V SHOBA
AFP
sembly election last year, and elaborated on the schemes in the
party manifesto for the Lok Sabha polls. Congress has promised
50 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and an an-
nual grant of `1 lakh to poor women. The party’s pledge to build
an equal-opportunity economy has been interpreted by BJP as a
mission to redistribute wealth among certain sections of society.
While Congress has vehemently denied the allegations, many
middle-class voters in Bengaluru disapprove of the high cost of
the party’s social guarantees and say development has taken a
back seat. “An easier commute is one thing women professionals
like me will vote for, and I am disappointed that the Bengaluru
Suburban Rail Project, which could take a million commuters off
the roads, is proceeding very slowly, with the state and the Centre
6 MAY 2024
taking turns to blame each other. Clearly, it is not a priority for the
sitting BJP MPs in the city,” says R Kalyanavasantha, a 36-year-old
game designer from affluent Basavanagudi in south Bengaluru.
On April 22, Surya, campaigning with Tamil Nadu BJP President
K Annamalai in Jayanagar, assured voters that the Ministry of
Railways was trying to expedite the project.
Of the 14 constituencies in Karnataka that will vote on April
26, Bangalore North, Bangalore South, Bangalore Central and
Bangalore Rural fall in the capital region. Three of them, with
the exception of Bangalore Rural, held by Congress’ DK Suresh,
are with BJP. All three are considered ‘safe’ seats for the saffron
party, but Congress leaders say their party is done playing defence.
“Bengaluru typically elects almost the same number of MLAs
from BJP and Congress, and this is what happened in the 2023
elections, too, so there is no reason the odds should be against us
in the Lok Sabha polls. We have revisited our strategies for seats in
the Bengaluru region this time, and we are sure we will break into
what BJP claims as its fortresses,” says Ramalinga Reddy, adding
that a drive to get more people to vote is expected to yield results
for Congress. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Bangalore South
recorded the lowest voter turnout in the state at 53.48 per cent.
With the poll date falling on a Friday this time, the tech crowd
may well utilise the long weekend for a break outside town.
While Congress has been focusing on local issues, the state
government’s mishandling of the water crisis and alleged
water-for-vote politics could be a major hurdle for the party.
Vruksha Shankar, a 42-year-old product manager with an ITeS
company in south Bengaluru, is determined to vote against
Congress for leaving the people of the city “high and dry”. “They
seized all the tankers, knowing well that there was no water in
our borewells. In our apartment complex, residents were forced
to use paper plates and cups. There were days we ordered Swiggy
because buying water for cooking was so tedious. The stores near-
by were running out of water cans,” says Shankar, who lives with
her husband and two sons in an upscale apartment community
on Kanakapura Road where a three-bedroom flat costs upwards
of `3.5 crore. “We voted for Congress in the Assembly polls and
the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, but they have let people down in the
worst ways.” Kanakapura, represented by DK Shivakumar, is
one of eight Assembly segments in Bangalore Rural Lok Sabha
constituency. The parliamentary constituency is witnessing a
faceoff between his brother DK Suresh, the lone Congress MP
from Karnataka, and BJP’s Dr CN Manjunath, a respected cardi-
ologist and son-in-law of Janata Dal (Secular) patriarch HD Deve
Gowda, with the state’s two prominent Vokkaliga families lock-
ing horns over the seat. “I think there is a great opportunity for
me to bring the change that people want. I am a professional and I
hope people will trust me to work systematically to find solutions
for Bengaluru’s problems—from water, roads and health to lake
revival and habitat restoration. In the rural segments of the con-
stituency, people trust JD(S) with addressing their concerns and
I will have to live up to their expectations,” says Dr Manjunath.
“Be it agriculture or infrastructure, Congress has cut down the
budgetary allocation. Their focus is only on corruption and not on
www.openthemagazine.com 45
 I N T H E A RE N A
Bengaluru people’s concerns. Only the projects of
the Central government are progressing rapidly in
Karnataka,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said,
addressing a public meeting at Palace Grounds on
April 21. He accused Congress of turning India’s
IT city into a ‘tanker city’ and appealed to voters
to support a tech-friendly party, in a message that K ARNATAK A
seemed to resonate with Bengaluru’s tech work-
ers. “We want Modi to come back at the Centre,”
says Avinash Kollur, a 32-year-old software devel-
oper with a startup in Yeshvanthapura, north Ben- BENGALURU
galuru. “Modi’s digital push is what has given our
industry the confidence to build tech products for
the future. Congress is just a status-quo party as far
as the tech industry is concerned.”
Just as BJP, keen to win Bangalore Rural, is focused on urban
segments like Kanakapura and Anekal (SC) that are trending in
favour of Suresh, Congress, too, is hoping for a reversal of fortunes
in Bangalore North, the second-largest Lok Sabha constituency
in India. A former Congress stronghold, it was captured by BJP in
2014 and hasn’t changed hands since. “I am the only one who can
win this seat for Congress,” says MV Rajeev Gowda, the Congress
candidate who is up against BJP’s feisty Shobha Karandlaje. A
former Rajya Sabha MP, Gowda, 60, was a professor of econom-
Congress leader
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra
in Bengaluru, April 23, 2024
46
ics and social sciences and the chairperson of the
Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of
Management Bangalore. Looking weather-worn
in a blue khadi shirt after winding up a campaign
in a low-income Tamil neighbourhood in Pu-
lakeshinagar, Gowda says Congress has many
positives going for it, including “the impact of
Congress’ guarantees, BJP’s corruption and com-
munal agenda, the injustice done to Karnataka in
the devolution of taxes, and Congress’ track record
of being an effective problem-solver—of issues
like water and traffic”. He says this is a potentially
winnable seat, but adds that a successful candidate
needs cross-party appeal which can boost the tradi-
tional Congress vote. “I hope that the large tech workforce in the
constituency will value a former professor trying to make an im-
pact,” Gowda says. Billed as a Vokkaliga constituency, Bangalore
North is as diverse as it gets, encompassing Brahmin-dominated
neighbourhoods like Malleshwaram—Gowda grew up there—
and the reserved (SC) constituency of Pulakeshinagar. With five
MLAs against Congress’ three, the arithmetic in Bangalore North
may seem to favour the BJP-JD(S) combine, but Gowda says the
two sides are equally matched. “The Yeshvanthapura MLA, ST
Somashekhar, was elected from BJP but he is working with us
Congress candidate
DK Suresh campaigns
in Kanakapura,
April 22, 2024
WHILE CONGRESS HAS DENIED
BJP’S ALLEGATIONS THAT IT AIMS
TO REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH AMONG
CERTAIN SECTIONS OF SOCIETY,
MANY MIDDLE-CLASS VOTERS
IN BENGALURU DISAPPROVE
OF THE HIGH COST OF THE PARTY’S
SOCIAL GUARANTEES
6 MAY 2024
BJP’S PC MOHAN
IS UP AGAINST
CONGRESS DEBUTANTE
MANSOOR ALI KHAN IN
BANGALORE CENTRAL
CONSTITUENCY WHERE
BJP DOMINATES
TWO SC ASSEMBLY
SEGMENTS, WITH
CONGRESS HAVING AN
EDGE IN THE REMAINING
SEGMENTS WHERE
MUSLIMS ARE PRESENT
IN LARGE NUMBERS
now. Add to this the fact that Karandlaje is a reject from Udupi-
Chikmagalur and we should be on safe ground.”
“Whoever wins, I hope they put an end to the political apathy
we Dalits of Pulakeshinagar face,” says 46-year-old S Parthiban, a
local Dalit leader who runs an egg business. He stands in front of
a line of stores-on-wheels that he funded himself. “Every succes-
sive government threatens us with eviction and we have to fight
every day for our bread and butter. There is no water, no drainage
in our slums and no safety for women. We have always backed
Congress, but they too have turned a blind eye to our problems.”
Government schemes haven’t reached a big chunk of the voters
here, claims Parthiban.
In Sunkadakatte, Chandramma, a 52-year-old who runs a tiffin
centre, blames BJP for rampant inflation. “Dal is selling for over
`200 and ragi has touched `45. In my 15 years running a business,
this is the first time I have had to pledge my gold bangles. Can free
bus rides and `1,000 a month cancel out the impact of inflation?”
she asks. She haggles with a banana leaves vendor, whose ask-
ing price is `20 per leaf. “I cannot afford to buy 200 leaves. We are
just getting poorer,” she says. But S Hemanth, 39, a co-owner of a
used car dealership in Sunkadakatte, says that Modi is good for
business. “The only suggestion I have is that the government in-
troduce Mudra loans for value-added businesses like ours. Banks
don’t give us loans and private finance companies charge 16-18
per cent interest, eating into our profits,” he says.
Across town, in Agrahara Dasarahalli on Magadi Road which
falls under Bangalore South, M Kempegowda, a 55-year-old auto
driver, says Congress’ policies have cost him his livelihood. “CNG
prices have shot up even as bus travel has been made free for
women. Driving an auto is no longer profitable,” he says. He hopes
Congress will stand by its promise of waiving student loans. His
youngerson,pursuinganMBA,hasa`3lakhloanagainsthisname.
“I do not like religion-politics but when religion comes spiked with
some development, I’ll take it over appeasement politics.”
“Almost all of Congress’ schemes are useless. They are a
6 MAY 2024
BJP’s PC Mohan
campaigns in
Srirampura
distraction from the reality of zero-development,” says
Theertha Vasanth, 37, who runs a sugarcane juice centre in Raja-
rajeshwari Nagar, which falls under the Bangalore Rural constitu-
ency. On summer mornings, a truck laden with sugarcane from
Mandya arrives at her shop, to be pressed into delicious sweet
nectar that the bees cannot seem to get enough of. “The law and
order situation is not good. Women here fear anti-social elements
and the Congress government has taken no action against them
despite representations made by the BJP MLA Munirathna Naidu
on our behalf,” she says. Back home in Mandya, the sentiment is
pro-JD(S), she says. “This is Kumaranna’s [JD-S state President HD
Kumaraswamy] do-or-die battle and everyone is with him,” she
says, referring to the high-profile contest between Kumaraswamy
and Congress’ Venkataramane Gowda, the wealthiest candidate
contesting in Phase 2 of the Lok Sabha polls. Kumaraswamy has
said that he is contesting to ensure Congress cannot “finish off”
JD(S). The Cauvery water crisis has led to lower yields in the state’s
sugarcane belt, at 520 lakh tonnes this year against last year’s 750
lakh tonnes. “NDA is poised to make gains in southern Karnataka,
especially the old Mysore belt,” says Dr Manjunath.
In Bangalore Central, which includes the 4.5 lakh-plus voters
of Mahadevapura, the water crisis has hit the hardest, and this
may reflect in how the constituency votes this time. Property
taxes from this residential zone crossed the `1,000-crore mark this
year, but the area remains plagued by severe water scarcity and
notoriously bad roads and public infrastructure. BJP’s PC Mohan,
seeking a fourth term as MP, is battling anti-incumbency in the
heart of Bengaluru. He is up against Congress debutante Man-
soor Ali Khan in a constituency where BJP dominates the two
SC Assembly segments (Mahadevapura and CV Raman Nagar),
with Congress having an edge in the remaining segments where
Muslims are present in large numbers. With Muslims consti-
tuting 17 per cent of the population in Bangalore Central, and
SCs a close second at 16 per cent, which way the verdict swings
is anyone’s guess.
www.openthemagazine.com 47
 CINEMA

I STILL
GET TO SAY
WHAT I WANT
TO SAY
SALON

Dibakar Banerjee’s sequel

to his breakout hit disguises social
commentary as a thriller.
7KHÀOPPDNHULQFRQYHUVDWLRQZLWK
KAVEREE BAMZAI

H
IS THERAPIST HAS told him he is a risk addict. And that the
only way he can deal with it is by jumping into the void.
So, what does Dibakar Banerjee do after making
Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, a brilliant psychological thriller that
was released immediately after Covid-19 in 2021 with little
fanfare and even less impact? And after spending the following
two years making Tees, about three generations of a Kashmiri Muslim family
that finds itself being erased, only to see its release being blocked by Netflix?
He heeds Ektaa Kapoor’s call to collaborate on a sequel to their clut-
ter-breaking LSD: Love, Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) in 2010 and starts working
on a sequel in the post-truth, post-OTT and post-pandemic universe.
The result is a gobsmacking smorgasbord of the many alternative univers-
es we are currently living in. LSD 2: Love, Sex aur Dhokha 2 tracks three parallel
stories. One is about a transgender actor who has entered a reality show to pay
for an anatomical change. The second is about a transgender janitor who is
seemingly brutally raped, after five semen samples are found on her, and the
third is about a foul-mouthed gamer with six million followers who becomes
a fan favourite after a sex act is accidentally live streamed. The question before

48 6 MAY 2024
“LSD2 IS BRASHER,
LOUDER, MORE COLOURFUL,
AND VISUALLY CRAZIER
THAN LSD”
DIBAKAR BANERJEE filmmaker

GE T T Y IM AGES

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 49

 CINEMA

him is whether he should identify with

the image his fans have of him, or be who
he is. Moreover, is he sure of who he is?
But then identity is the big ques-
tion in Banerjee’s film that combines
handheld camerawork with deepfakes,
facial animation, an AI sequence, and
even characters inside the metaverse. “It
is brasher, louder, more colourful, and
visually crazier than LSD,” says
Banerjee. Like all his films, it is not overt-
ly political, yet it manages to say a lot
about the country we are living in, with
its many parallel worlds. If there is one
universe in which India is a powerful
global force, there is equally another in
which the country is struggling under
the weight of its unfulfilled aspirations.
LSD2 shows us a different version of
youth from the aspirational strugglers
of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s recent hit,
12th Fail. Banerjee’s world has no nobil-
ity. It is a world of Bigg Boss contestants,
barely legal gamers, fluid sexual identi-
ties, and venal personal relationships.
No one is clean, everyone has an agenda.
For Banerjee the choice has always
been clear. After the dejection and “THE INDUSTRY IS NOT STUPID. IT HAS A SMALL SPACE
rejection he faced for Sandeep aur Pinky IT WILL ALWAYS GIVE SPACE TO
Faraar, he went into therapy to under-
stand himself. He realised that he had to
go back to who he was when he first en- bearded and surreptitious looking. The Bunty Chor), is just one tiny cog in the
tered the film industry with the plucky only reason we’re getting a theatrical wheel of careless capitalism, silently and
Khosla ka Ghosla! (2006). “I knew I was release is Ektaa’s goodwill.” She has a efficiently ridding middle-class families
walking on thin ice, struggling with subversive, dark side, he says of Kapoor, of their excessive possessions, from TVs to
deep and existential issues. Who sees a who produced LSD and its sequel. “And jewellery. Its theme song symbolised the
movie, who is allowed to see it? These ideologically, she is non-binary, just like post liberalisation noughties: “CCTV chai-
are political questions,” he says. I am,” he adds. da mainu, LCD bhi chaida main/ Lal Murseri
Laughter in the face of disaster is chaida mainu, Lal Kila bhi chaida mainu (I
his response to shrinking spaces for want a colour TV, an LCD TV, I want a red

S O WHILE HE has not lost the

essence of who he is as a person
and as a filmmaker, he has returned to
the age of low production budgets (so
much so that he had to pitch in with
his own money to bring the film to the
table) and no PR budget, not even for a
hoarding. “We don’t even have money
for T-shirts,” he says with a laugh. “I
have one T-shirt which I had to wear
two days in a row for marketing events.”
With barely any stars in the movie, he is
the face of the movie. “And that is scary,”
he says, “given that I am 53, balding,
self-expression, a tactic fine-tuned over
his many movies. It started with his first
movie, where a middle-class family re-
sponds with an elaborately constructed
fraud to con the conman. Khosla ka Gho-
sla! was based in Delhi, the city where he
grew up, and returned to after dropping
out of the National Institute of Design to
work in advertising. It brought him to
Mumbai, where he continued with the
triumph of the little guy in a system
that is stacked against him. In 2008’s
Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Lucky
(Abhay Deol who played the real-life thief
Mercedes and the Red Fort).”
LSD came in 2010 and reflected the
darker edges of an increasingly unequal
society with its stories of an honour
killing, an MMS scandal and a sting, all
of which were emblematic of the time.
With its raw and raunchy attitude, it
made people sit up and pay attention.
Shanghai (2012) again explored the battle
of the little people against the big corpo-
rations. As the political activist played
by Prosenjit Chatterjee says in the film
so accurately: “They will take the land of
your ancestors and then employ you as

50 6 MAY 2024

FOR MADNESS AND IN ITS SEARCH FOR CREDIBILITY
THE KIND OF THING I DO” DIBAKAR BANERJEE
slaves in the malls and factories that come
up there.”
Banerjee is forever curious about
the world, society, and relationships.
He is also collaborative. Shubham, the
co-writer of LSD2 and of Eeb Allay Ooo
(2019) the film that drew Banerjee’s at-
tention, says the filmmaker expects the
co-writers to get involved in everything
from shot taking to the way they see the
film. “If he is making a drastic change
in the film, he will always ask us. He
doesn’t come with the baggage of his
past work. He is very democratic. That
is a very rare quality for a director like
him. We were aware we were entering a
sensitive area and our ideas of the world
are vastly different. But we were trying
to integrate it into a single canvas. What
was important for me was that I wanted
to take risks, visually, with the sound,
with the characters, and the concept.
We are in a very complicated time and
6 MAY 2024
SCENES FROM LSD 2: LOVE,
SEX AUR DHOKHA 2
telling stories like this is complicated.”
Shubham’s co-writer and director of
Eeb Allay Ooo, Prateek Vats, agrees: “The
writing process was rigorous and all of
us tried to arrive at a common language
without erasing our personal styles. It
wasn’t always easy but quite rewarding
and fulfilling.” Banerjee was more than
willing to meet them halfway or farther.
So is there a place for Banerjee in the
industry as it is, caught between big
budget tentpole movies and middle-of-
the-road streaming movies and series?
Yes, as there is for that other teller of
stark stories, Anurag Kashyap.
“The industry is not stupid. It has
a small space for madness and in its
search for credibility it will always give
space to the kind of thing I do. I am
cheap, I take on risks by becoming a
co-producer, and am willing to absorb
financial losses. They know I will die
trying to make the movie I want to. So
I will be tolerated,” says Banerjee, who
says on LSD2 he was most conscious of
keeping in mind the CBFC, the music
company, and the financiers. “My
biggest joy is subverting the romantic
song by picturising it on the lowest of
the low as it were.”
B ANNERJEE’S WORLDVIEW IS not
judgemental. Manu Rishi Chadha
who wrote the dialogues of Oye Lucky!
Lucky Oye!, apart from acting in it, says:
“When I asked Dibakar why do you
want to create a hero who is a thief in
your film, he said: ‘Mujhe bahut tasty
kahaani lagti hai iski (I find it a very tasty
story).’ Dibakar’s connection with him
was his pain. Ek chor ne achchi zindagi
jeene ki koshish ki aur usse har rishte ne
dhokha diya (A thief tried to live a
stylish life but everyone in his life let
him down).”
Banerjee has always had a strong
sense of characterisation in his movies.
Parvin Dabas, his leading man in Khosla
ka Ghosla!, says: “He is able to create di-
verse characters and give each of them a
life. He spends a lot of time and attention
on each character. His understanding of
the human condition is very detailed. It
elevates his movies.”
And the movies continuously
elevate him, whether it is the online
acceptance of Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar,
the cult status of Detective Byomkesh
Bakshy! (2015) or the posterity of Oye
Lucky! Lucky Oye!. “I’m not complain-
ing,” says Banerjee, who famously
returned his National Award in 2015 in
protest against the appointment of
Gajendra Chauhan as chairman of
The Film and Television Institute of
India (FTII), Pune. “I still get to say what I
want to say,” he adds.
“My life has taught me to not accept
much, and then things happen,” he says.
He’s hanging on by the skin of his
teeth, but he has no intention of going
anywhere without sinking his teeth
into telling us the juiciest stories of his
time, our time. Dark, dangerous and dis-
turbing they may be, they exist because
they echo reality. „
www.openthemagazine.com 51
ESSAY

IN PRAISE OF
THE PROVINCIAL
Why those from small towns, whether it is William Shakespeare
or DH Lawrence, are the equal of their more urban peers
By Sumana Roy

Illustration by SAURABH SINGH

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DH LAWRENCE

52 6 MAY 2024
A
N UPSTART CROW.” must dye itself into a shade of blue. “Shake-scene”— the
That this should be the first mention of Stratford-upon-Avon guy is so disgusting that Greene refuses
William Shakespeare as a public person in re- to even give him the respect of calling him by his surname;
corded history is always a surprise. It’s 1592, and he excretes a portmanteau word, marrying one half of the
Shakespeare, the son of a glove maker, is about twenty-eight man’s name to his profession, the scene in a play. But that is
years old; Robert Greene, a well-known poet and playwright not all—Shakespeare, or Shake-scene, which would make an
of the time, writes a pamphlet called Greene’s Groats-worth of efficient name for a rapper today, is a “Johannes Factotum,” a
Wit that contains these words: “Yes, trust them not, for there jack of all trades.
is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his All this characterization of Shakespeare is true. He was
Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well indeed writing in a language that would have disturbed the
able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and be- educated and the powerful—he was adding to and remaking
ing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the the English language without caring for any such ambition
onely Shake-scene in a countrie.” or even knowing that he was. It was a practical necessity, not a
Robert Greene is one of the University Wits, a group of deliberate aesthetic choice: a hungry person will put together
men who have gone to university, in Oxford and Cambridge, something—anything—to eat from whatever they find from
and then, coming to London to find jobs as tutors, have gone foraging. When Greene accuses him of borrowing our feath-
on to become playwrights. Christopher Marlowe is the most ers, he is making an accusation against the outsider William.
well known in the group; there are others: George Peele, There are other accusations: of plagiarism and of copying
John Lyly, and the three Thomases—Kyd, Nashe, and Lodge. Marlowe, the most successful of the playwrights. That he
Shakespeare, born in the small town of Stratford-upon- himself is borrowing this metaphor—and expression—from
Avon, hasn’t had the benefit of a proper education. In that Horace would seem ironic, except that Greene would have
sense, he has indeed had to fend for his own learning like a justified it as intellectual lineage.
crow scavenges for food—it is, of course, an ad hoc ethic, of Shakespeare is an outsider—both to London and to
letting the impress of whatever comes his way annotate his lineages, social and intellectual. He is an autodidact, teaching
learning. This autodidacticism is inevitable—he only has, as himself, often by copying, like apprentice artists do. “Imma-
Ben Jonson, another contemporary who was quick to criticize ture poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what
him, said, “small Latin and less Greek.”
Latin and Greek, the foundational
languages of European culture. How WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS—LET US ADMIT IT—A
could such a man have the audacity PROVINCIAL. THE CRUDE ATTACKS ON HIM BY HIS
to write plays, and how would it be CONTEMPORARIES WERE EVIDENTLY BY PEOPLE
possible for the classicist Jonson and
WHO, APART FROM THE OBVIOUS BENEFITS OF
the well-educated University Wits to
tolerate a person like William? CLASS AND EDUCATION, ALSO HAD THE PRIVILEGE
William Shakespeare was—let OF PLACE: OXBRIDGE AND LONDON
us admit it—a provincial. The crude
attacks on him by his contempo-
raries were evidently by people who, apart from the obvious they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at
benefits of class and education, also had the privilege of place: least something different,” T. S. Eliot would say four hundred
Oxbridge and London. Greene’s criticism of him as an upstart years later. Both Shakespeare and his critics at that time
and a crow, a scavenging bird, who “beautified” himself with were doing the same—it is just that the rest of them, because
borrowed feathers, and who used “bumbast”—bombastic of the power that had accrued to them from institutional
language— is not unique. That annoyance and sarcasm rises learning, could lay claim to Horace in a way that William and
to the surface in a Hindi idiom such as “Raju ban gaya gentle- other provincials like him could not. “It was a terrible time
man,” Raju’s become a gentleman. Gentleman is the only in Shakespeare’s life. He hadn’t been writing plays for a long
English word in this Hindi phrase— it’s meant to remind us time. He’d probably been acting for longer. He had also been
of the impropriety of location: just as English doesn’t really adapting other people’s plays, and to get attacked like this
belong to this Hindi phrase, so too the provincial in a city. It’s would be insulting…Theatres were closed for the plague, so
meant to mock the person who has to pretend to be some- he is in a lousy line of work. He isn’t making any money. Then
one they are not—someone who has to “beautify” himself this guy goes after him for plagiarism and bombast.”
with borrowed feathers. William is Raju, trying to become a None of this would have mattered, neither to Shakespeare
gentleman. Greene says “our feathers,” making the superior- nor to us, to literary history, had the provincial not responded
ity clear—it’s a version of the animal tale where the crow to Greene’s criticism through his writing. Plutarch’s Parallel
resorts to borrowing peacock feathers or where the jackal Lives, with its many biographies of Greek and Roman rulers;

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 53

 ESSAY
Holinshed’s Chronicles and in it the histories of England,
Ireland, and Scotland, on which Shakespeare would base—
never faithfully, of course—his historical plays; Boccaccio,
ever-present Boccaccio: his “plots” derived primarily from
these sources. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Bible, particu-
larly its use in The Book of Common Prayer, supplied him
with classical and Christian references. All of this is only to
reiterate that Shakespeare, without the benefit of university
training, was groping and grabbing for anything out of which
he could conjure a play, its particular vocabulary. Everything
was found art, found poem. “It’s weird how he responds to
Greene. He wrote a play called Titus Andronicus—a gory play,
possibly more bombastic than any play then in the London
theatre. It is kind of as [if] he is digging back at Greene: ‘You
want bombast? I’ll show you bombast.’ He wrote Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream, which is a play built up out of so much
borrowed material, borrowed from Chaucer, borrowed from
Ovid. It is a play basically beautified by other people’s feathers.
So I think Greene hit a nerve, but the response was to say, ‘You
want bombast, you want plagiarism? I’ll show you bombast,
I’ll show you plagiarism.’
Reading Shakespeare as a provincial—being able to iden-
tify the irony in the “Tyger’s heart” in Robert Greene’s critique
as actually being a borrowing from Shakespeare’s own play
Henry VI (“O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”), or
understanding what Shakespeare was doing to Thomas Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy in his play Hamlet, or recognizing
Christopher Marlowe’s words in the same play, where
Marlowe himself is remembering Virgil, the poet of Aeneid—
brought moments of epiphanous awareness, of recognising
how provincial energy, working through deprivation and
accidental fits, would gradually grow into an aesthetic. Two
things need to be reported here. The Winter’s Tale, possibly the
last play Shakespeare wrote, is based on Pandosto or
The Triumph of Time, a piece of prose fiction that was written
by Robert Greene. By closing his creative life with an homage
to his harshest critic, Shakespeare was perhaps showing
what borrowing feathers could achieve. The second
thing—three months after the death of Robert Greene, in
December 1592, his publisher and printer Henry Chettle
issued a public apology to the “Upstart Crow” for having
published the Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit.
A
BEARDED UPSTART.”
I reread the phrase and close the book temporarily
to check whether I’m reading the book I think I
am reading, just to confirm that it is not a description of
Shakespeare. It is not. The book is Frances Wilson’s Burning
Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence.
D. H. Lawrence, the writer of stories, poems, and essays,
best known for the novels Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and
The Rainbow (and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which, in places
like ours, Siliguri, lived like a smuggled good, mostly in thin
54
abridged editions), was a boy from Nottingham, and even
though he would exile himself to other cultures and conti-
nents, he would try to find some version of Nottingham every-
where. His mother, Lydia Lawrence, was a “snobbish and un-
happy woman who wrote verse and liked reading”; his father,
Arthur, “was a happy traditionalist who loved the intimacy
of pub and pit.” He spoke in the local dialect, she the King’s
English. “He loathed a fork: it is a modern introduction which
has still scarcely reached common people. [He] preferred . . . a
clasp-knife.” As he writes in the poem ‘Red Herring,’ his father
was a “working man,” a collier, his mother “a superior soul”
who was cut out to play that superior role “in the god-damn
bourgeoisie”; their children, including David himself, were
“little nondescripts,” “in-betweens” who called each other you
indoors, but “outside it was tha and thee.” ….
The provincial’s fear of the metropolitan gaze never left
Lawrence: “I feel frightfully important coming to Cambridge
. . . quite momentous the occasion is to me. I don’t want to be
horribly impressed and intimidated, but am afraid I may be,”
he told Bertrand Russell. Wilson writes about how this world
that “intimidated” him perceived him: “Lawrence told Forster
that he had become ‘classless,’ but this was neither how he
was seen by others nor how he really saw himself. Only
David Garnett told the truth about how Lawrence was per-
ceived among the upper-class literati: he was a ‘mongrel ter-
rier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians,’ he looked
‘underbred,’ his ‘nose was short and lumpy,’ his chin ‘too large
and round like a hairpin,’ and his ‘bright mud-coloured’ hair
was ‘incredibly plebeian.’” He was “the type of plumber’s mate
who goes back to fetch the tools, the weedy runt you find in
every gang of workmen. . . . He was the type who provokes the
most violent class-hatred in this country: the impotent hatred
of the upper classes for the lower.”
As I read this, I felt protective of him—I hoped that
Lawrence hadn’t known of this. A moment later, when I
remembered how Cambridge had “disgusted” him and he had
found the place “dreadful,” I realized that he knew. “Provin-
cial,” “upstart,” “mongrel,” “underbred,” “plebeian”—they
belong to the same family. “Lumpy” and “mud-coloured”—
both marking his relationship to soil, to the earth, to the
underground. The more the upper class characterized him as
an underclass, stressing his relationship of birth to a place and
a people, the more he claimed the “under” for himself. In
The Rainbow, for instance, he imbues the world with a spiri-
tuality as much as the upper class choose the sociological:
“there was something subterranean about him, as if he had an
underworld refuge.”“He saw coal as a ‘symbol of something in
the soul’ and never lost the sense that his real being belonged
to this glossy inner darkness.” It made him angry, this charac-
terization of the unformed provincial, animal-like, clod-like.
In shorthand, he would call them “Europe,” the same Europe
that his contemporary T. S. Eliot used as a shorthand for
civilization: “The root of all my sickness is a sort of rage. I re-
alise now, Europe gets me into an inward rage, that keeps my
6 MAY 2024
bronchials inflamed.” shrank, and his fine full presence waned. He never grew in the
The provincial is a classist category, and some of Lawrence’s least stout, so that, as he sank from his erect, assertive bear-
critics would find it hard to be forgetful of Lawrence’s origins— ing, his physique seemed to contract along with his pride and
it must have been hard for them to see a novelist as the son of moral strength.” Small, “shrinking,” “diminishing,” “shrank,”
a miner. The characters in his novels were described by one as “contract”—Derrida would notice something similar in his
“lower than the lowest animal in the zoo.” Both the noun and father: “stooped.” And yet the boy David was able to see in his
the adjective are telling: the provincial as animal is an internal- father’s torso, “coiled and shrunken by humiliation, a sublime
ized axiom in most cultures, manifesting itself in the idiomatic. superiority, both coming from the place he lived in and dived
“Lower than the lowest” is not just metaphor in Lawrence’s into every morning.”
case—it derives from his father’s location, the underground, Everywhere Lawrence went, he sought this riskiness of
a province inside a province as it were. The son of the miner, provincial living—risk had a radiance for him, the aleatory
touchy as he was, and touchy as the humiliated are, would that he could not associate with the solidified destinies of
have noticed this. He was fierce in distinguishing the dark and upper-class urban life. In Cornwall, which Wilson calls “a
dusty and lively mines from the
underground in the city. The London
Underground was “a tube full of THE PROVINCIAL IS A CLASSIST CATEGORY, AND SOME
spectral, decayed people,” he writes OF DH LAWRENCE’S CRITICS WOULD FIND IT HARD TO BE
in a letter; London, the city, was “a FORGETFUL OF LAWRENCE’S ORIGINS—IT MUST HAVE BEEN
hoary massive underworld, a hoary
ponderous inferno. The
HARD FOR THEM TO SEE A NOVELIST AS THE SON OF A
traffic flows through the rigid grey MINER. THE CHARACTERS IN HIS NOVELS WERE DESCRIBED
streets like the rivers of hell.” BY ONE AS ‘LOWER THAN THE LOWEST ANIMAL IN THE ZOO’
Stung by the response to
The Rainbow, how neither his pub-
lisher Methuen nor his contemporaries defended the right prehistoric version of his birthplace,” he found tin mines;
for the novel to exist and be read—the novel was banned for in Eastwood, the England of Robin Hood, “the cold-blasted
being obscene, unsold copies were confiscated—Lawrence, earth held for him a biblical beauty.” Heaven and hell were,
venturing to leave this place that had banned him for a new after all, very provincial places—insulated and reductive. To
continent and leaning on an America of possibilities, saw it invert the top-bottom and high-low model of class infra-
as a continuation of the underland that had brought some- structure remained Lawrence’s preoccupation in his intel-
one like him into being. In America, “life comes up from the lectual and emotional life: the Breach, where the Lawrences
roots, crude but vital.” It is not hard to see that he is making a lived, became The Bottom in the novel—it was above Hell
connection between two provincial places, for that was what Row. His father’s journey to the underworld and back above
America was then, as its writers Henry James and T. S. Eliot, he saw metaphorically, biblically—it was as much escap-
who were turning to Europe, felt and knew, as he is in striking ism as intellectual justification, that this iteration of days, of
a connection between vitality and the “underworld.” lives such as theirs, had something hidden with possibility
I think of the word upstart used for him, of its etymology— as a seed had inside the earth. Lawrence had turned his back
“one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, on the afterlife very early (“Whatever the unborn and the
importance, or rank, a parvenu, also start-up, from up (adv.) + dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel
start (v.) in the sense of ‘jump, spring, rise’”—and of of being alive in the flesh”)—who knew whether social hier-
Mrs. Lawrence’s words (“We must all rise into the upper archies trailed one after death?—and it was in this life, this
classes! . . . Upper! Upper! Upper!”), and it is the phoenix and only thing available, that one was to experience all the lives
the rising and jumping and moving upward that refuses to imagined, in heaven, hell, and the in-between: “Mrs Morel
leave me. Ursula, in The Rainbow, seems to answer them all: always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her
“Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why husband. He rose from the lower world into purgatory, when
not stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force he came home from the pit, and passed into heaven in the
one’s way up and up when one is at the bottom?” In writing Palmerston Arms.” One of the ways in which this hierarchy
his father in the way he did, diminishing him without taking could be inverted, the constant tug for the up-up-up, was to
away his effervescence and greed for joy, even in something embrace the in-between. „
like the raindrops deflecting from an umbrella, Lawrence
was recounting intergenerational accumulated This is an edited excerpt from Provincials:
humiliation, the smallness of place turned into the Postcards from the Peripheries (Aleph; 320 pages;
equivalence of the smallness of person: “There was a slight `899) by Sumana Roy. Roy is the author of a work of
shrinking, a diminishing in his assurance. Physically even, he non-fiction, a novel and two poetry collections

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 55

 BOOKS
States of Unrest
Neel Mukherjee’s new novel is a quarrel with capitalism. The author speaks
to NANDINI NAIR about choices made and those deferred
N
EEL MUKHERJEE LIVED the first 22 years
of his life in south Calcutta. Diagonally opposite
his home stood a cowshed run by a Bihari
couple. They provided the milk—which arrived
warm, frothing and reminiscent of all things
bovine— to the Mukherjee household. A young Neel hated the
glass of milk he was forced to drink—the smell, the taste, the
texture. But as a child who would skip in and out of the cowshed
in his free time, he soon learned how to milk a cow, poorly at first,
and better with practice. As an adventurous seven-year-old he
even asked a woman to teach him how to make cowpats. When
his mother found out about his cow dung activities, he was
thrashed, not for reasons of hygiene or truancy, but for transgres-
sion; he had crossed a class line. For forty-plus years these memo-
ries stayed with Mukherjee (now aged 54), before making it into
his fifth book, Choice (Hamish Hamilton; 311 pages; `699).
Choice is a triptych of a novel with three sections,
where each stands on its own, while also being
connected. In the first part we meet Ayush and his
economist and wealthy husband Luke, and witness
their battle over morals and values, and how life is
to be lived. The second tells of Emily who witnesses
a hit-and-run and then makes a series of choices
(which to some readers might be unconscionable).
And in the third we move to rural West Bengal, and
the gift of a cow. Mukherjee explains, “I was very
interested in seeing a triptych work within the
novel form, where each tells a story that is complete in itself.
But when you put the three together and step back, they do
not have a different meaning, but they have a more amplified,
richer, deeper meaning. I hope.”
The third section about Sabita, mother to six and eight-
year-old Mira and Sahadeb, and their most recent acquisition,
Gauri the cow, is where Mukherjee’s memories of the cow-
shed make it to page. The cow and its milking are so detailed
with precise descriptions of the “one-two rhythm”, the pull-
ing of teats, the cupping of udders, the squatting on haunches
that any reader would ask the author (“an Indian who lives in
Britain”) if he has milked a cow in real life.
While some parts of Choice, of course, arise from memory, the
novel is much more philosophical than actual. The first two sec-
tions are set in London, the third is entirely based in India. As the
title gives away, here is a book that interrogates the role of choice
in determining our lives. Choice focuses a magnifying glass on a
56
range of issues, from vegetarianism to climate change to econom-
ics to appropriation to the urban-rural divide to migration to
speciesism to the white saviour complex to colonialism. When
so many hot-button issues are packed into a single narrative, it
can often seem heavy handed. But to Mukherjee’s credit, the first
two sections make for compelling stories. These sections are page
turners where the reader wonders how the moral world of the
characters will square off with reality. The story on the indigent
family in West Bengal, however, lacks the same brio, and its
removed tone often makes it ponderous.
This cramming of themes (done so well in the first two
parts) can be explained by Mukherjee’s desire to write a “thick”
novel. He says, “One of my great fears is writing a thin book. By
thin I don’t mean page extent, but thin as in the meanings it
contains and the kind of argument it makes about the world.”
It is a concern echoed even by Virginia Woolf. When he read
about her attempts to “thicken” To the Lighthouse, he
felt a “chime in his chest”.
When I speak to London-based Mukherjee, he
is in Boston where he teaches a course in Creative
Writing at Harvard University. It is morning in his
side of the world, and he apologises that while he has
“tried to be a lark,” he is an “owl,” to explain his grog-
giness. But in his answers, Mukherjee is fully awake.
One could even say he is woke. His previous novel
A State of Freedom (2017) laid bare the contrasts and
inequalities of Indian society. His novels tend to be
philosophical explorations of wealth and privilege, the haves
and the have-nots. His novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was even
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
With a PhD in 16th-century literature and cultural history,
Mukherjee refers to John Milton’s Lycidas, JM Coetzee and
VS Naipaul with equal ease. He has often said that his novels
are in conversation with books that have come before. This
becomes apparent even in his speech. He is both eloquent and
emphatic. Speaking about the “rage of carnivores,” when they
are gently chided that vegetarianism is better for the planet,
he gets especially impassioned. But laughter accompanies his
fervour and so as a listener/reader one pays heed to him.
His path to writing came with its own plot twists. As a patri-
otic Bengali, influenced by the cinema of Satyajit Ray, he at first
wanted to be a filmmaker. While he did get admission into film
studies at top universities in the US, fate had other plans. As he
enjoyed reading, he enrolled at Jadavpur University, which was
6 MAY 2024
 Cour t esy NICK T UCK ER

“ONE OF MY GREAT FEARS IS WRITING A THIN BOOK. BY THIN I DON’T MEAN

PAGE EXTENT, BUT THIN AS IN THE MEANINGS IT CONTAINS AND THE KIND OF
ARGUMENT IT MAKES ABOUT THE WORLD”
Neel Mukherjee, author

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 57

 BOOKS

a 15-minute walk from his Calcutta home. On the insistence this sentiment. When the wife told Mukherjee this, he
of his professors, he applied to Oxford University and went on thought, “Oh, you sad, sad man.” He adds, “I wanted to
to earn a MA from Oxford University and a PhD from write about it in as ironic and as caustic a way as possible.
Cambridge University. Mukherjee sums up his journey, say- What happens when life is economics and economics is
ing, “I came to writing by a series of failures. I have failed to life. I wanted to measure it in the life of an individual who
become a filmmaker. I have failed to become a Renaissance pushes against it, and the results are not great.”
academic. And writing is my last chance.” As a reader one feels both compassion and frustration with
Even with the publication of his fourth novel and having Ayush, as he struggles to reconcile his beliefs with reality. He is a
been recognised by top awards, Mukherjee does not see himself character with “fewer skins,” “fewer filters” who marches to the
as a “successful” writer. He says, “I constantly think of giving beat of a drummer only he can hear. To box him, one might say
up writing, and I feel alienated from the writing world. Success he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Mukherjee pushes
is measured by market values, by which my success is zero or against such medical terms and while describing Ayush’s tics, he
even negative. Or you can measure it by other values, which never names them. He says, “When you medicalise the interior-
will only appear in time.” ity of any character, you instantly close down the resonances.
Mukherjee’s discontent with the publishing industry is People are all very complex. I would like my readers to see his
voiced by Ayush, an insider to the publishing industry, in symptoms as something larger going on inside his soul. He’s
Choice. Ayush knows well that “publishing hides behind the trying to impose some kind of organisation or control on a life
myth of the nobility and indispensability of literature to con- he can no longer have any control over because—to make a
duct what is ultimately business.” very big statement about it—late capitalism has done some-
Choice is essentially a battle cry against capitalism and the thing to the way we make choices and the way we always have
commercial value we accord to all to be feeding into a certain kind of
of life. Capitalism promises endless utility value.”
“CHOICE IS A GREAT
choice. By succumbing to unbroken If Mukherjee’s concerns, through
consumption, by riding the train BUZZWORD FOR ECONOMICS, his novels, are the big philosophical
of development to the station of AND I WANTED TO LOOK AT issues of the day, such as capitalism,
progress, what do we risk losing? THAT IDEA OF CHOICE CLOSELY he is also invested in keeping the
In our search for creature comforts AND HOW THE IDEA OF CHOICE novel novel. He is tired of linear
and material wealth are we morally IS INSEPARABLE FROM THE IDEA plots and conventional storylines.
compromised as citizens? Mukherjee OF CONSTRAINT. I WANT TO LOOK Reading Choice at times feels like
explains, “Choice is a great buzzword AT THE MICRO EFFECTS the opening of a Matryoshka doll,
for economics, and I wanted to look where one doll nestles within an-
CAPITALISM HAS ON THE
at that idea of choice closely and other. Similarly, here we have stories
how the idea of choice is inseparable INTERIORITY OF THE SOUL” within stories.
from the idea of constraint. Is choice Neel Mukherjee The writing of the book, over
always a good thing? It can have five years, as well, was anything but
terrible ramifications in the lives of linear. He first wrote the second sec-
people. We make bad choices all the time. I want to look at the tion on Emily, an early modernist with a love for literature. He
micro effects capitalism has on the interiority of the soul.” started writing this section on the blank back page printout of
This comes out best in the first section where we enter the an assignment by his brightest student, named Emily. He then
life and mind of Ayush. In a series of incremental ways, Ayush wrote the Ayush and Emily section almost simultaneously. He
tightens the screws on his husband Luke and twins, believing completed the tale about Gauri the cow over six weeks in the
that they are living the wrong life. He fixes a timer on the taps and summer of 2022.
lights at home so that he can control the use of resources. He takes Animals often people Mukherjee’s novels. A State of Freedom
money from his children’s education fund (without the knowl- featured a bear and a bear keeper. Choice has pigs, a thinking
edge of Luke) and donates it to climate change charities. As he dog and a sentient cow. While he has tried to turn vegetarian,
tells Luke, “I’m at war. I can’t explain very well. I feel we’ve taken he has failed to do so and “continues to be fallen”. In the novel’s
a wrong turn at some point and it’s too late now and we can’t get opening scene, Ayush shows his five-year-old twins a violent
back to the right path. ...We are in the wrong life.” and blood-soaked movie about the meat business, which has
Choice warns us that as a society we’ve taken a wrong incensed some readers. With his writing, Mukherjee is not
turn. We operate on the premise, “Economics is life, life trying to convert readers to veganism, or to anything for that
is economics.” It is a line that appears with the frequency matter, but as he says, “We pretend that something is the norm
of a mantra in the first section of the book. Mukherjee and the thing to be done, whereas there is another way of look-
heard that sentence from the wife of a famous economist. ing at it.” The life we lead is, after all, about the choices we make
She was a paediatrician, and her husband often espoused and those we don’t. Q

58 6 MAY 2024
 BOOKS

What Ifs LIKE BEING ALIVE TWICE

Dharini Bhaskar

A dystopian novel that moves between fate and possibility Viking

324 Pages | 599
By Madhulika Liddle

HARINI BHASKAR’S Like Being

D
Alive Twice is an unusual novel,
straddling genres and styles with
rare aplomb. Set in a dystopian India,
this is a love story with a difference: a
story that was, and a story that might
have been.
The narrator here is Priyamvada aka
Poppy, who, in Chapter 1, looks back
to seven years ago, when Poppy, her
boyfriend Tariq ‘Tar’ and their friend and
colleague Yana go to a mountain town
for a break. Poppy and Yana know that
Tar means to propose to Poppy. But what
happens, instead, is quite
different. Tar, apprehensive
about his future, suggests
he and Poppy go overseas.
Poppy refuses. There is a
quarrel, and she leaves, to
begin a relationship with
Yuvraj, Yuvi. Yuvi, who
has it all:‘ …parentage that
was uncontroversial; an
educational degree that
would not offend; a past that
did not in any way betray
him…’. Yana ends up with Tar.
But this is not where
it stops; the next chapter
is ‘Seven Years Ago: As it
Could Have Been’. This is
the same scenario, the same
set-up. Tar and Poppy are
in love. There is Yana, and
there is Yuvi. There is even
the disagreement over Tar’s
future—but it does not tear them apart.
Tar proposes, Poppy accepts. They are
all set to be happy.
It is with this pattern that the story
progresses. Year by year, counting down
to the present, each year represented by
two chapters: one that was, the other
that could have been. Both scenarios
are peopled by the same characters:
Poppy, Tar, Yuvi, Yana. Tar’s and Poppy’s
parents and other relatives, people they
know, people they live amidst. The
same restaurants, the same jobs, the
same pieces of décor, the same books
occur in both scenarios—and yet, they
are different. Because in the India of
this book, everybody has Tally cards,
and their Tally score is calculated based
on several criteria: which community
they belong to, what views they voice,
whether they abide by the norms a
strict (very patriarchal) social structure
prescribes. That score governs where
Illustration by SAURABH SINGH
they may live: in posh, carefully
guarded enclaves like Palash Bagh; in
squalid bastis, or, in the most desperate
of circumstances, in Door Mohallah,
a dark, dingy locality with little water
and no hope.
This is a dystopian India, but what
makes it so disturbing is that it could
be an India we will live to see. The
sharp demarcations between who is
esteemed and who is ostracised, between
‘laudable’ actions and those which are
(if not outright criminal) at least liable
to have you punished: these could very
well be part of our future if there isn’t a
revolution. And yet, like Poppy, blissfully
unaware, refusing to acknowledge the
truth even when confronted with it,
most of us are oblivious. The privilege
we are so used to makes us immune. Not
realising, perhaps until it’s too late, that
we are all affected. As Tar’s mother says
at one point: “But tell me, Poppy, when
did stories stop growing?
When did they cease spilling
into one another? When
did we presume—how
dare we presume that the
subjugation of one group
does not impinge on the well-
being of every other?”
Interwoven with poetry
(by American poet
Linda Gregg), Like Being
Twice Alive has moments
of poignancy, of romance,
warmth and comfort. As
it progresses, though, the
veneer is stripped away, the
horrifying truth comes ever
closer to its protagonists.
Dharini Bhaskar’s
writing is sharp and
impactful, her characters
very real, very human.
Poppy, warts and all, makes
for a protagonist one can sympathise
with, and Tar’s fears should be the fears
of all of us: “…Nobody cares. Nobody is
even listening. All that is asked of us—
it’s simple—is that we repeat what the
others are saying.”
Hard-hitting, timely, and unsettling,
this is a book for our times: a reminder of
what could happen. Q

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 59

 BOOKS

A Manifesto for AI Users

,V$UWLÀFLDO,QWHOOLJHQFHFKDQJLQJZKDWLWPHDQVWREHKXPDQ"
By Ullekh NP

M
ADHUMITA MURGIA IS an immunologist who first spawned the whole genre of gig economy on a large scale.
became a journalist more than a decade ago, She met with a technology- and ethics-obsessed crusader who
specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her took UberEats by its horns over its lack of accountability to its
career in the technology beat coincided with the employees by creating an app called UberCheats, an algorithm-
miraculous rise of unknown or undervalued startups to the auditing tool that allowed couriers to track the accurate dis-
ubiquitous entities they have now become. So, it is fair to say tance they had covered—information that UberEats hid from
she chronicled upfront a grand period when the world changed their workers ostensibly to underpay them.
faster than ever before in the history of mankind. When she A gifted storyteller, Murgia is on the shortlist of the inaugu-
started writing for the Financial Times (FT) around 2012, she was ral Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, which will be announced in
goggle-eyed about the pace of growth in life-changing, user- June. She deserves praise for writing a book on AI that is global
friendly technologies, the majority of them in AI. In her own by nature because after all, the impact of AI, as she states, is
admission, she was an “inveterate techno-optimist”. different in different regions of the world. Unlike many others
The Indian-origin author now sees more shades of grey in who go for tokenism, she has cast the net wide, narrating in
this growth story. After all, the power in this sector is concen- style the experiences of her interactions with AI users from
trated in the hands of a few. This explains why she wrote her home in London to Latin America to Asia to Africa and
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI to highlight people beyond. In the process, she addresses several key topics that are
with nuanced relationships with advanced technologies, in- often swept under the carpet, including the agency of users or
cluding generative AI. Unsurprisingly, Murgia, employees of an AI company, and how AI can
the first AI editor at the Financial Times who dramatically alter certain sectors, especially
writes for Wired as well, didn’t want to tell the healthcare and education.
story of AI’s impact from the viewpoint of hot Besides familiarising the reader with the
shots at Big Tech, but through select, interesting works of technology scholars who are far
tales of professional AI users from across the from the mainstream, the author delves deep
world. Her aim: capture the global impact of AI into the lived experiences of people whose
through people working in various segments, stories rarely make it to newspaper headlines
from gig jobs to public health and surveillance although they are highly relatable for any
to education. She writes in the introduction to reader. The key takeaway here is that we may
CODE DEPENDENT
the book, “Each of the lives you will encounter LIVING IN THE not know it and are not interested in AI, but
charts the unintended consequences of AI on SHADOW OF AI AI is interested in us.
an individual’s self-worth, on families, com- Madhumita Murgia In India, Murgia’s book features how
munities, and our wider cultures. Through their Ashita Singh, a physician working in a small
Macmillan
experiences, I hope to answer the question I 336 Pages | 699 village in western India, found AI a boon
started out with: how is Artificial Intelligence in the face of scarce resources, a shortage of
changing what it means to be human?” staff and a lack of awareness. The author is
The link between these people whose however worried about the automation bias
stories we read in the book—who are from different geogra- that typically sets in when the use of the technology becomes
phies and cultural contexts—and AI is that it is algorithms widespread. She asks this question of Singh who replies that
that often determine their lives and there are, without doubt, affordability—to the extent of treatment being free—is what
concomitant uses and biases. For instance, in India, as she went interests her, and that she sees the risk of AI being the master
around looking for AI companies that made a difference and only if the practitioner is not grounded in “good medicine”.
then pursued people who used them, she found a physician It is not that the author is any less optimistic about the uses
who treated her patients using Qure.ai, an AI company com- of technology than she used to be, but her book suggests that
mitted to making healthcare affordable and accessible. The she is more cautious about the lack of empathy and nuance in
gains AI brought in this case were largely momentous. In the leaving everything to AI.
US, Murgia zoomed in on UberEats, a unit of the company that Armin Samii’s struggle to make UberEats accountable

60 6 MAY 2024

IT IS NOT THAT MADHUMITA MURGIA IS ANY LESS OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE
USES OF TECHNOLOGY THAN SHE USED TO BE, BUT CODE DEPENDENT
SUGGESTS THAT SHE IS MORE CAUTIOUS ABOUT THE LACK OF EMPATHY AND
NUANCE IN LEAVING EVERYTHING TO AI
and pay adequate wages to its workers is worth noting in this
context. Through his efforts, he was able to bring together a
group of gig workers from across the world to find hacks and
use algorithms to their advantage besides letting the public
know about the opacity of various AI-based work platforms.
The author narrates how a heightened level of awareness is
“springing up resistance movements” from the UK and US to
Kenya and elsewhere. Couriers and riders have come together
in the recent past to share their bad experiences. The author
discloses, “My interviews with a dozen or so gig workers across
four countries are a drop in the ocean of work being done on
algorithms and work rights.” Things are still not looking bright
for the workforce and uncertainty looms as we ponder the
future of work— amidst high chances of loss of jobs.
There are occasions when people who work towards mak-
ing the world a safer place regret the use of their products and
services for super-surveillance of their citizens by states that
are vindictive towards protesters and dissidents. American
entrepreneur and academic Karl Ricanek is one such early
pioneer who had several decades ago helped the US Navy with
AI technology. Murgia says in her book that “as the technol-
ogy steadily improved, Karl began to develop experimental AI
analytics models to spot physical signs of illnesses like cardio-
vascular disease, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s from a person’s
face.” Ricanek tells Murgia that he had imagined inventing
“a mirror that you could look at each morning that would
tell you (or notify a trusted person) if you are developing
6 MAY 2024
Illustration by SAURABH SINGH
symptoms of degenerative neurological disease”. Ricanek, an
African American, founded a company called Lapetus Solu-
tions to help insurance firms predict life expectancy, and his
systems were used to crack crimes. In one case, police used his
technology to ‘age’ a gangster and identify him based on how
he looked as an adult. But then 9/11 changed everything, and
the technology was used for other purposes, from
stifling opposition to tracking civil-rights protesters.
Ricanek argues that facial-recognition technologies have a
race bias, resulting in the over-policing of vulnerable groups
such as African-American males. False positives too are a
major cause for concern for him, the author reveals in
her interviews.
Coming back to the question of maintaining individual or
collective agency in a world dominated by powerful corpo-
rations, the author comes up with what she describes as a
checklist of guiding questions, “to empower and help reclaim
some agency in the use and control of AI”. It comprises 10
questions. “They are what I have been asking myself every
time I encounter an AI tool. And they’re for you, whoever you
are, whether you’d like to use, protest or simply understand AI
technologies better,” Murgia writes.
This book is a must-read and a manifesto for AI users be-
cause of two reasons: the author’s stories focus on what
happens when AI goes wrong; and then because she argues
that however exceptional an AI tool is, it has utility only when
it preserves human dignity. „
www.openthemagazine.com 61
 THE RACHEL PAPERS Rachel Dwyer

Punjabi by Nature
A London exhibition explores the life and legacy of Ranjit Singh

HIS WEEK, I have This exhibition comes 25 years after the exhibition The Art

T had two major

encounters with
Punjabi culture. One was
of the Sikh Kingdoms at the Victoria and Albert Museum (later
at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum) which marked the
300th anniversary of the founding of the Khalsa. This focused
Imtiaz Ali’s latest film, on Ranjit Singh, as it noted the lack of religious iconography
Amar Singh Chamkila, and that it would be inappropriate to display the Holy Book.
and the other was the Some of the exhibits remain but this exhibition is unusual in
exhibition, Ranjit Singh: that the curator, Davinder Toor, who also wrote the text
Sikh, Warrior, King at in the accompanying catalogue (along with an essay by
the Wallace Collection, William Dalrymple), has lent many of the exhibits.
London. The biopic, Given the warrior nature of Ranjit Singh, the exhibition
where the assassination of popular, yet allegedly lewd folk begins appropriately with a display of armour. This
musicians, is set in the religious and political extremism of normally makes me flee, as I remember castles and
1980s Punjab (and its diaspora), contrasts sharply with the fortresses with geometric displays of these instruments
sophisticated and cosmopolitan Punjab of the Sikh Empire of of death. Here, however, they are truly works of art from
the early 19th century presented in this dazzling exhibition. the first cuirass with an image of Guru Nanak. The helmet
The Sikh Empire has been divided by national and state turbans are designed to accommodate the Sikh topknot,
borders so that one can only marvel now at its extent during but my favourite item was the Turban Fortress (dastar
its zenith under Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839). bunga) of a Nihang warrior, a cotton turban with a gajgah
Priya Atwal’s book Royals and Rebels: The Rise and
Fall of the Sikh Empire (2020) shows how Ranjit
didn’t come out of nowhere but had consolidated
his misl (warrior group) following his
grandfather and father, to take control of other
misls to found his Sikh Empire. He was dubbed
the “Napoleon of the East”, though, unlike the
Corsican, he never surrendered. Ranjit, who
had initially built his army with disbanded East
India Company Maratha mercenaries, deployed
soldiers who had formerly fought for Napoleon
as well as other Euro-American soldiers.
In India, Ranjit Singh is better known as the
Lion of Punjab (please, no Loin jokes) or Sher-e
Punjab, though I was a little baffled why Singh
is translated as “Tiger”. Along with scholarly
works, there are also popular texts on him,
such as in the Amar Chitra Katha series. He is
also featured in two long television serials,
one short film (and probably many more)
as well as popular biographies (including
Khushwant Singh’s Ranjit Singh: Maharaja of the
Punjab, 2001, and Sarbpreet Singh’s The Camel
Merchant of Philadelphia, 2019). It was clear to all
visitors at the exhibition that he is still widely
remembered as Sikh families were having
intense conversations in front of the exhibits.
ALAMY

62 6 MAY 2024
(seizer of elephants) decorated with crescents and bearing
other weapons, including small daggers, tiger claws and
quoits (circular steel blades). There are two beautiful
carvings in (hateful) ivory of Ranjit Singh and General Hari
Singh Nalwa showing them in battle dress holding quoits.
The quoits are intriguing, and others in the display have
gold decorations and inscriptions in Gurmukhi, one of
which is translated in the catalogue: “One infinite creator,
preserver and destroyer, the highest master, most merciful
and sustainer of the world. Remember! Uttering falsehoods
is evil, always desist from such deeds. If you utter lies, you
face great ruin ahead. This life is the time for performing
good deeds. When you die, this time will not be at hand.”
A beautiful object that would slice people and animals
to shreds.
Ranjit Singh’s throne is on display but the Koh-i-Noor,
which he won from the Afghans in 1813, is not. There are
jewels, including the spectacular emerald girdle of Maharaja
Sher Singh, said to be made with the emeralds his father
Ranjit Singh used to decorate his horse harnesses with. The
18 emeralds are set in gold and decorated with diamonds
and pearls. There are three jewelled medals, including the
Auspicious Star of the Punjab (Kaukab-i-Iqbal-i-Punjab), that
Ranjit Singh had made after having seen European medals.
Set with diamonds and/or emeralds, according to class, they
include one Ranjit Singh gave to Sir Claude Wade, and one
belonging to Maharaja Duleep Singh.
Randjiit Sing Baadour, Roi de
Lahore by Alfred de Dreux, in
the Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior,
King exhibition at the Wallace
Collection in London
IN INDIA, RANJIT SINGH
IS BETTER KNOWN AS
THE LION OF PUNJAB OR
SHER-E PUNJAB. ALONG
WITH SCHOLARLY
WORKS ON HIM, HE
IS ALSO FEATURED IN
TELEVISION SERIALS,
ONE SHORT FILM AS
WELL AS POPULAR
BIOGRAPHIES. IT WAS
CLEAR TO ALL OTHER
VISITORS AT THE
EXHIBITION THAT
HE IS STILL WIDELY
REMEMBERED
6 MAY 2024
Although few in number, the textiles are exquisite,
including a pashmina sash (patka) from Kashmir,
embroidered with human and animal figures as well as
Persian verses, its opulence contrasting with a pair of
woollen gloves from Kashmir and samples of Punjabi
cotton cloth.
We are reminded of the wider importance
of Ranjit Singh by a letter on parchment (1835) from
Louis Philippe 1, the King of the French (Empereur des
Français) to Ranjit Singh (Rendjit Sing, Bahador, Padichah
du Pendjab) and a Persian manuscript, Tazkirat al-umara
(Biographies of the Nobles, 1836), researched by Colonel
James Skinner which contains a portrait of Ranjit Singh.
Among the most striking photographs is one by
Felice Beato, of a Sikh Akali from Delhi in 1858. This
Sikh would have been a contemporary of Ranjit Singh.
However, the paintings are the most important part of the
exhibition. The portraits of Ranjit Singh himself show him
realistically (he was one-eyed and had smallpox scars) as well
as unrealistically. The cremation of Ranjit Singh with four
queens and seven servants is moving (though I’m not sure
about the caption: ‘four high-born Rajput wives who have
fearlessly offered themselves to be cremated alive’, or the
choices of the servants, one of whom was barely 12). It isn’t
certain how many wives Ranjit Singh had; estimates range
between 20 and 40, including Hindu and Muslim, as well as
Sikh. There are portraits of his first wife, Rani Mahtab Kaur
and Duleep Singh’s mother, Maharani Jind Kaur.
The vivid picture The royal court of Maharaja
Ranjit Singh (1863-64) draws on over a hundred
other portraits to show his family, ministers and
other members of the court. I found A panoramic
view of the walled city of Lahore (1845-50) equally
fascinating, as it was a depiction of the city after
Ranjit Singh had rebuilt its fortifications. It names
the buildings in English and Urdu, but is also
delightful because of the people and animals,
including many elephants, in the foreground.
It seems unbelievable that the Sikh Empire
vanished within 10 years of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s
death in 1839. After the Anglo-Sikh wars which
ensued, his youngest son, Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh
was moved to Britain. Duleep Singh’s daughter,
Princess Sophia, became a well-known suffragette.
I have been lucky to pay my respects at
Ranjit Singh’s samadhi in Lahore though I am
yet to visit the recently renovated museum in
his summer palace in Amritsar. This fascinating
exhibition that runs until the autumn reminds
the world of one of India’s great heroes. It seems
extraordinary that among all the recent biopics,
there has not been one of the Lion of Punjab,
which could, like this exhibition, show him as a
Sikh, warrior and king.
www.openthemagazine.com 63
67,56
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 S T R E A M I N G S M A R T

Lara Dutta; Jimmy Shergill

in Ranneeti: Balakot & Beyond

%DWWOHÀHOGVRIWKH0LQG
RANNEETI: BALAKOT & BEYOND
Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Lara Dutta
Director: Santosh Singh | Hindi | JioCinema

Y
EH KURSI NAHIN, 130 crore Bharatiyon ka vishwas hai (This is not merely a Why watch it?
chair but the trust of 130 crore Indians),” says the actor playing the Prime Minister You know how it will
in Ranneeti: Balakot & Beyond. “This is not a peacetime mission, this is war,” says end, but the aerial
dog fights and hand-
Ashish Vidyarthi, in a late career resurgence as the National Security Adviser. “Kitne to-hand fights are
Pakistan hai? Ek aman chahta hai to doosra jung (How many Pakistans are there? One wants worth watching
peace, the other wants war),” remarks the RAW agent demoted to a pen pusher, Kashyap Sinha,
played by Jimmy Shergill. Ranneeti is clearly about jung, with ISI represented by a suave
Ashutosh Rana, Of late, Mumbai cinema and web series have been exploring the Pulwama attack and the Balakot
strike in great detail, from Fighter to Article 370 and now Ranneeti. Its agenda is clear. Make heroes of the men and
women behind and in front of the covert and overt wars India has to fight. It does so in spades, with some amount of
self awareness. The RAW agent relegated to the desk is a camphor-smelling and khichdi-eating nervous wreck who has
to clear film scripts and prevent the actors from hamming. The spin wizard is an extra constitutional authority in the
war room dressed in swish sarees and has a posh accent. There are sundry spies and counter spies and several Pakistani
generals and spy masters addressing each other as “Janaab”. We are told repeatedly that modern warfare is all about the
mind. And as much as wars have to be won on the battlefield, they have to be fought in the digital world. It could have
been more cerebral and less celebratory but then it wouldn’t have got made.

I DON’T WATCH THE tu tu main main on TV anymore.”

All the News That’s Fit to Air
THE BROKEN NEWS SEASON 2
Cast: Jaideep Ahlawat, Sonali Bendre, Shriya Pilgaonkar
Director: Vinay Waikul | Hindi | Zee5
Jaideep Ahlawat in The Broken News Season 2
The TV anchors who star in the show are repeatedly
told this by those they interview. If that is not enough, the
one anchor who still believes in truth and impartiality gives
a speech about being remembered for her journalism
long after she is dead. Death of journalism, death of
journalists, electoral bonds, lithium deposits, deepfakes.
The second season of The Broken News doesn’t spare any
contemporary headlines as two rival news channels, with
two rival ideologies, go head-to-head with each other to
capture the minds and hearts of the audience. We know
which side the writer’s sympathies lie but he doesn’t let it
colour his characterisation. The newsroom dynamics are
fairly accurate as is the desire of both
Why watch it? bosses to get back to the field for
Gives you a snacking reporting. Both have understudies
menu of the reality of
whom they groom and growl at in
news channels
equal measure.

6 MAY 2024 www.openthemagazine.com 65

 STARGAZER
KAVEREE BAMZAI
AAISHVARY THACKERAY
ÀForever Yours
It is one of the most beloved plays of
all time but has been recorded just
once. Tumhari Amrita, performed
by Shabana Azmi and the late
Farooq Shaikh, was once an
enormously popular play, not merely
because of its powerful words but
also because of its actors. Yet, there
is only one recording of the play
first performed in 1992, says the
play director Feroz Abbas Khan, and
also only one recording of its last
performance at the Agra Literature
Festival in 2013. “It was against the
backdrop of the Taj Mahal and we
were not sure of the vocal quality, so
we recorded it,” says Khan. That was
also a performance for which Shaikh
asked for a photo, says Khan. “Usually
Farooq wouldn’t bother, but that day
he asked me to send a photograph,”
says Khan. Some wounds do not heal,
he says, talking about Shaikh’s death
just a few days after the play. “They
should not heal,” he adds. Khan,
who directed two grand spectacles,
Mughal-e-Azam: The Musical and The
Great Indian Musical: Civilization to
Nation, has now applied the sparsity
and quietude of Tumhari Amrita to
his new play Letters of Suresh. This
play, written by Indian-American
Rajiv Joseph, chronicles the lives of
four people as they seek a connection
through a series of letters. The
play stars Vir Hirani, a young actor
trained at London’s Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art, and also director
Rajkumar Hirani’s son. Palomi Ghosh
is also in a lead role. “I wanted to
reclaim the power of language,”
says Khan, at a time it has seen such
66
FARAZ ALI
degradation. What next from Khan?
Well, if we’re lucky, we may just have
a reprise of Tumhari Amrita. With an
all-new cast?
ÀKashmir Calling
Obur is one of the five short
films shot on an iPhone for MAMI
(Mumbai Academy of Moving
Image). Directed by Faraz Ali, it tells
the story of a young man who has
lost his mother. Ali and four other
directors Archana Atul Phadke,
Prateek Vats, Saumyananda Sahi
and Saurav Rai were mentored
by filmmakers Vishal Bhardwaj,
Vikramaditya Motwane and
Rohan Sippy. Obur deals with memory
in the age of the digital cloud and the
lives of marginalised people. Shot
mostly with non-actors from Budgam,
the film is as close to real life that it
can get. The young man who plays
Suppu, Aqif, was one of the people
Ali saw at the horse-trading fair in the
village. “We wanted someone like
him who knows how to ride a horse
on that slippery and slushy snow,”
he says. And he looks magnificent
while doing so. Shahnawaz Bhat, who
plays a shopkeeper, is perhaps the
only trained actor in the movie who
works with movie productions as a
casting agent and dialect coach. Jozia
Mir, who plays Suppu’s mother, also
does some local theatre. “There are
a lot of restrictions on what you can
and cannot do culturally,” says Ali,
whose first-feature film Shoebox was
shot in his hometown of Prayagraj in
2021. “There, too, I used local people
as much as possible,” says Ali, who
adds that it really bothers him when
FEROZ ABBAS KHAN
people onscreen do not speak in the
language and accent of the geography
in which they are based. Ali wanted
to explore the relationship of digital
cloud with memory. “The intangible
aspiration of the cloud collides with
the rural reality and the vagaries of
Kashmir’s power supply when you
realise what the boy is chasing is lost
in the vast expanse of ether,” he says,
of the intersection of technology
and tradition. And then there’s the
poignancy of not finding a direct photo
of his mother on his phone when he
does finally retrieve the data. Obur
is at once haunting, funny (with its
irate shopkeeper of the Hollywood
Home Centre and his agitated burkha-
clad assistants) and also tragic as
Suppu steps into adulthood while
organising his mother’s funeral. As a
Kashmiri, I have often cringed at the
way the accent is depicted onscreen
and listening to the actors in Obur
enunciate Hindi and Kashmiri the way
it is spoken in Kashmir was like a balm.
ÀThe Other Thackeray
He’s the other Thackeray who
will soon step into public life, but
unlike cousin Aaditya, it will be in
cinema. Aaishvary Thackeray has
been working hard for five years
with dance and action lessons and
now it seems he is ready for his
close-up. Aaishvary is the son of
Smita Thackeray, social activist,
film producer, and former wife of
Jaidev Thackeray. Both Aaishvary
and Aaditya are grandsons of Shiv
Sena founder Bal Thackeray. The late
strongman’s photographs often pop
up in Aaishvary’s Instagram feed.
6 MAY 2024
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