Dear Swapan, BJP no different from Labour

All that can be said of Swapan Dasgupta is that he writes good English. What he writes about is bunkum -- I am sorry to say that -- if you read his front-page piece in The Pioneer on Sunday. He is all out criticising British PM Brown for trying to cobble up a government with the help of Liberal Democrats. It is going against the wishes of the people, he says, Cameron style. He lambasts Brown for readily agreeing to reform the British electoral process in return for Clegg's support. This is not done, this is not justice, this is not democracy, he laments. Perhaps he thinks Indian readers are idiots. That is why he has conveniently brushed under the carpet what the dead and beaten BJP is doing to somehow remain in circulation. For example, the BJP's attempts to come to power in whatever way in Jharkhand. Or, for that matter, the so-called alliance based on compromises including the BJP's own position on Aydodhya, to cobble up an alliance governmetn at the Centre. He flays Brown for trying to undo a 60-year-old electoral law just to appease the LibDems and without the backup of the electorate. For one, he again conveniently forgets how the BJP thrust upon unsuspecting Indians a 5000-year-old lie or fantasy about Ayodhya. For another, Brown in the same breath said there would be referendum. For yet another, if Dasgupta thinks a mere change of law cannot make the budget deficit of Britain go away, he should be told in equally clear terms that a dumb mound of earth in a place called Ayodhya cannot make India's poverty go away. He looks quite ill wearing the collar of a pedagogue. Best he returns to what he is -- a good journalist -- for which he has always been respected.

IPL corruption: Sharjah it to save the culprits?

I was talking to my brother-in-law, Prasanna Ojha, in Mumbai early Sunday morning. He is a senior banker and avid cricket lover. We didn’t have time to talk things personal as the conversation was mostly around the IPL controversy. Put off by the dirt surrounding the League, Prasanna observed: I think the IPL won’t last long. It’s going the Sharjah way. It will be wound up, if only to protect the real culprits who’ve used the IPL to make and launder dirty money.

Gem of a thought. Original. I was surprised how our Indian media, agog over the IPL controversy, never thought of this angle. After all it is a thought and thoughts more than facts govern journalism, don’t they!

For 15 years everybody who was somebody in the Sharjah circuit made money. There are umpteen reports and investigations into match-fixing and player-buying. Careers of many cricketers were botched up as a result. As luck would have it, a timely bout of strained India-Pakistan relations was just the excuse the culprits needed to kill the golden goose that was Sharjah. Was any official, ever so minor, ever brought to book? No.

So, what’s stopping the real crooks behind IPL to do a Sharjah? Notwithstanding the fact that the franchisees would lose money or that companies and corporations which bought rights of television, logos, tickets, travel, accommodation, etc, would move courts for breach of contracts?

I feel there’s someone everyone’s trying to protect. And this someone is the chap who should be hanged for everything wrong with IPL. And this someone is known to all. The man who painstakingly won the epithet of ‘would-have-been-Prime-Minister’. The man who, it is said, is worth all smugglers put together in black money. The man who has the blood of thousands of farmers who committed suicide. The man who can stop off-loading of grain or other food stuff at Indian ports till such time that local prices shoot up. The man who controls a metropolis. The man who with support of a single-digit number of MPs can blackmail the government. Do I need to name him? Only morons would say yes.

The tax authorities were already on to the IPL dirt even before the present controversy arose. The Shashi Tharoor-Lalit Modi spat, intentional or not, only hastened the inevitable outcome that the IPL books would one day have to be checked. Lalit Modi has a lot to answer for, least for his so-called dictatorial attitude. He is what he is because of his ability to wheel and deal and not because of his short temper.
The question at hand is: Has Lalit Modi fallen out with his mentor, the man described above? On this tenuous answer hangs the future of IPL and a lot more. If yes, there’s going to be a catharsis. If not, let’s all look forward to IPL 2011.

In India where cricket is religion, cricket is politics too. Crass politics at that. Can the present Indian government dare to take a decisive decision on the IPL? A big, fat no. It is too busy in self-preservation. What if Sharad Pawar and the NCP break-away if they are to lose by any decisive government action? On such silly excuses is laid the future of this country! Shame!

But the opposition fares no better. Incidentally, have you heard the BJP cry foul about the corruption charges against IPL? Again, a big, fat no. Instead, the BJP cried hoarse about Tharoor who, in any case, was incidental to the real controversy surrounding IPL. Why?

Because, something the moronic parliamentarians could never do inside the august House – come together on a national issue – they have achieved it to hide the IPL dirt. The ruling Congress, opposition BJP and semi-conductor NCP are all involved with IPL. Rajiv Shukla, Arun Jaitley and of course the Pawar-Patel duo. Why politics, even cricket makes strange bedfellows. It is now left to cricket’s political have-nots, the Left parties, to cry about the real issue of corruption in IPL. But who cares for these guys? If they are honest about wanting to know the truth about IPL, it is only because they have not yet got the opportunity to be dishonest. They share no cake of the IPL pie. That’s all.

With politics in the hands of such corrupts and dimwits, IPL should be able to thrive. The BCCI, which perhaps is the most corrupt body in India, and to that matter the Indian government itself, do not have the balls to emulate the English cricket board. When the investment fraud of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford came to light, the English Cricket Board lost no time in severing all ties with his Stanford Cricket Series.

I have been keenly watching the fables and the fabulous passed off as IPL news in NDTV by Prannoy and his disciples. I studiously ignore Star for the simple reason that its main anchor still can’t sit or stand still and is devoid of basic broadcasting intelligence. Aajtak, on the other hand, continues to be refreshing, what with fresh and still freckled kids replacing professionals to dig out the IPL truth all by themselves with the help of non-exissting sources. (Maybe I really am acute scpetic to feel this way.)

The semi-retired and senile journalists, experts and politicians who make up a large part of the furniture in the NDTV studios continue to confuse the viewers mostly through calculated ignorance. In the last week, all their studio shows focussed only on IPL, just as their news fillers in the advertisement wheel. But at the end of the day, they didn’t amount to anything other than the information put out by agencies or the IPL culprits themselves on social networking sites. The one issue these forms of wood spoke at length was whether the government would go in for a JPC (joint parliamentary committee) to probe the IPL issue. Were they suggesting a way out for the culprits to go scot free, considering these very experts have in the past exposed the JPC for what it really is – the most legal form for hiding the dirt under the carpet? What was laughable was that these guys should be talking of a JPC when even politicians, like Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress, were admitting on record that a JPC is ‘not binding on anyone at all’!

Of course, I must mention Barkha Dutt, whose unrivalled investigation brought her face to face with Pretty Zinta, part-owner of King’s Eleven from Punjab. She asks Zinta leading questions about the latter’s stake in the team and Zinta gives led answers to the effect that she is completely above board. And for some good reason, she also gives a clean chit to Shah Rukh Khan of Kolkata Knight Riders. Was Dutt fronting for Zinta’s real or contrived innocence? It is fair to give all parties in a controversy to have their say. But Dutt appeared desperate to get Zinta to say that she is innocent. Obviously, the ‘Padma’ journalist had done no homework. Otherwise the questions would have been direct and hitting. I think after frauds and sycophants, it will be the turn of the journalists to re-invent the Indian tradition of respecting elders or the powerful, as the case may be, by touching their feet or saying ‘Sir’ and ‘Madame’.

In the end, I doubt if the truth will come out at all. After all, the IPL culprits have the best possible defence batting for them: a cowardly government, a lame duck media, the partnership between the Congress and the BJP in the IPL and, of course, the Indian people who’d rather show the other cheek too, in the Gandhian way, if that would get them a chance to sit in a private box to watch cricket live from the stadium.

If there are any Indians who are exceptions to this ancient vestige of intellectual slavery, let them come out to ensure they are heard above the din of the silence of the lambs.

PS: We’ll have to wait for IPL 2011 to see if the foreign players will be keen to join the league after this scandal. As it is, many senior international players have retired despite auction selections, many top rankers from the 2008 auction have completed their three-year contracts, and very few known faces remain for being auctioned in 2011. Unless the organisers look at our neighbours, who failed to get in in 2010, to fill the slots.

KANU SANYAL: MASTER OF A MIS-TREATED CONCEPT

“Kanu Sanyal is dead…one less headache for India.” A blogger, who should at best remain unnamed for his or her irreverence to history, wrote on the day the last surviving member of the naxalite trio of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, died.
All the three died in penury. Majumdar in penury of thought, Sanyal in penury of conviction and Santhal in penury of action. That should sum up the exercise in gun-class communism in India, now in the throes of capitalism. Or,should it?
It was amusing to read the reviews, analyses and obituaries post-Sanyal’s death. It was as if Naksal Bari (that’s how it is still spelt in the local district gazette) was an error of youth fondly remembered in old age; much akin to the trespasses indulged during the college years and hilariously recalled in later reunions.
Some reviews treated Naksal Bari as merely a symbol of in-fighting between the extreme and moderate communist groups in Bengal. Some others, understandably academics, saw it as a logical successor to the Tebagha and Andhra movements of the 1940s. Some international floaters argued that it was the outcome of the vascillation of the Indian communists between the expansionist Chinese and the revisionist Russians (as the two called each other in the 1960s). But nobody saw it as a live symbol of what is still happening in India: the continuing stamping out of the poor by first the zamindars, then the forward castes and now, the capitalist middle class.
Within the communist system, the traditionalists – CPI and CPM – have always arrogated to themselves the right to rule the poor and nurture them as vote banks, copying the Congress, and saw the ‘naxalites’ as an aberration to be dealt with sternly if their interests – the poor – were interfered with. The late Jyoti Basu, who had no problem in forming Bengal’s first non-Congress coalition with a leader of a rightist Bangla Party as chief minister, equally had no problem in dealing death blows on the Majumdar-Sanyal-Santhal trio (a journalist even called them a ‘triad’, a term usually used to describe criminal gangs in China and Japan!). His funeral was mammoth in scale. I wonder if Sanyal’s family could find even four pall bearers.
A political party evolves its own checks and balances, even against the wishes of its leadership. And more often than not, it is always an extremist group from within which tempers the main party. The Congress, for example, has a brutal history of ordering the killings of Indian citizens, whether in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Bihar, Telangana or the North-East. It would have been more brutal but for its skirmish with the radical policies of Subhash Chandra Bose. The communists, perpetrators of the worst kind of oppression in West Bengal for decades, would have rivaled Pol Pot had they not encountered the ‘naxalite’ leaders in the 1960s; having violently suppressed the movement, the mainline communists could not have themselves nurtured extreme thoughts, if, for nothing, at least for public consumption.
We have seen our politicians shed morality as fast as the youth change their I-pods. We have seen the politicians shamelessly baiting the poor into further ignominy with their ‘India shining’ placards. We have seen the politicians turn themselves into an incestuous class blurring distinctions of ideologies and affiliations, the scent of middle class surpluses mentoring their politics.
They have a lot to learn from Naksal Bari.
Naksal Bari caught the attention of India because of the context in which it was orchestrated. The post-China war, Radio Peking’s open congratulations, and important of all, the ‘revolution’ taking place in a communist-run state. Out of this unique triangulation of contexts, hundreds of Naksal Baris have occurred in other regions in India, but never commanded such attention, prompting the movement’s proponents and opponents alike to increase the stakes. The organized gang represented by the communist-led state won the day; the unorganized ‘naxalites’, even today, trying to conserve energy to fight another day.
The ‘naxalites’, simply put, wanted to teach a powerful nexus a few lessons. The nexus was of the local ‘zamindar’ (biggest of landed gentry) naturally from a forward caste, local ‘daroga’ (sub-inspector), the local ‘sarpanch’ (head of the village) and the local money-lender. Between them they ruled the village on behalf of a similar nexus at the ‘taluk’ level, then the district level, then the state level, then the national level. The ruled were the small traders, small or landless peasants and labourers. Despite their mutual interdependence that an agricultural economy dictated, it was the sheer power wielded by the nexus that subjugated the latter as by natural right.
In 1987, when I was working for The Time of India in Bihar, I was invited by a team of CPI-ML (Liberation) to eyewitness the progress they made in emancipating the villagers from the tyranny of the nexus. I was taken by car, tempo and later on foot, in the middle of the night, to a village in Jehanabad district. It was like a Russian or Chinese commissar accompanying the media to a sanitized village. I heard the labourers say how happy they were because they were employed for at least 70 per cent of the year in contrast to a few weeks some years ago. I took some of the villagers out of the earshot of my ‘guides’. Did they get the minimum wage? No. The big farmer’s accountant took his cut, the money-lender took his interest on the labourer’s loan and finally, the local Liberation members forced a voluntary contribution to keep on helping them achieve their freedom. The women obviously were paid less then men. They told me of organized rapes of themselves or their daughters and daughters-in-law and of the futility in going to the police. The landless peasants, working as labourers, told me they were paid mostly in kind. The going rate of payment in kind had not changed sinced the 1950s in the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa regions: It a bojha (sheaf) for every 21 bojhas, for rabi harvesting; 4 kachi seers (local weight) of paddy during sowing time. In the ‘bojha’ system, the peasant can embrace as much of the standing crop a he or she can at one go: that’s his or hers to chaff the waste and eat. Even here, the farmer’s accountant ensured that the person with the shortest hands was allowed to take the ‘bojha’. My guides told me: “These things happen, but the important thing is they get the ‘bojhas’ in each and every season. We ensure this.” I tried to make them understand that the ‘bojha’ system in the region is as old as the caste system itself. It fell on deaf ears.
Are the ‘naxalites’ to blame for the constancy of payment or are they to be commended for ensuring even such payments are at least regular? In my own presence, the brother of the village’s richest farmer went by on a motorcycle. The peasants, as by custom, stood with their heads bowed even as my guides turned their heads away. As we were returning from the village, my guides led me to a tea shop. I gathered it was owned by the brother-in-law of the local sub-inspector. Apparently, my guides and the policeman were not only of the same caste, but the same ‘biradari’ (community) as well. So much for class-less consciousness. Strange but true, in the 1989 parliamentary elections, when I was touring the Bhojpur area – which was to return India’s first naxalite as a parliamentarian – I came across a couple of my former guides sitting in a brand new campaign jeep and smoking filtered cigarettes and wearing North Star keds.
The problem with ‘naxalism’ was and is the theoretical framework not matching the reality on the ground. What may have worked (?) in Russia or China after first forcing the different peoples to become one uniform mass with uniform thoughts, could not have worked in alien culture like India’s where all the parties – the oppressor, the oppressed and the reformer – shared the same diverse culture and could not exist outside it. “In communist Russia even the most minor of state officials is more powerful than the biggest minister,” the late Vinod Mishra, the Liberation leader of Bihar, once acknowledged to me when I went to meet him in Dhanbad after his late marriage even as his armed, underground outfit was falling apart around him after the Liberation’s decision to take part in parliamentary politics.
It is the socio-cultural dynamics and politics of India – the only Indian characteristic that ironically bridges the rich-poor gap in the country – that is least understood both by the ‘naxalites’ and the officialdom of the state. There are a few who realize that the manner of tackling ‘naxalism’ is not by treating it as a criminal matter to be dealt with by the police. But either they choose to remain silent or are silenced.
Throughout my tenure of five years in Bihar, I tried to follow and understand the ‘naxalite’ movement in the state which began when a lower caste school teacher, Jagdish Mahto, was beaten up by the goons of a forward caste candidate in the 1967 general elections in Ekwari village in Bhojpur district. The incident opened Mahto’s eyes to the oppression around him and Jagdish ‘Master’ was born, who did not shy away from organizing the opporessed into a force, trying to end their subjugation even through violence. For the ‘naxalites’ in retreat from Bengal, this was a God (?) send. His wife, Kamaleswari Devi, told me years after his death: “Yes, he became popular. I am proud of him. But the reality is, nothing has changed.” There are some sub-altern historians in Bihar who shy away from seeing ‘Master’ as a naxalite and instead compare him with what are called social brigans (a la Robin Hood) like Nakshatra Malakar, or the many Yadavs from the ‘diara (riverbank, swampy land) areas of Munger and Patna districts and Sasaram. Perhaps it serves their purpose in dishing out a simple social history of oppression without complicating it by introducing the element of ‘naxalism’.
By mid-1988, the Liberation group of CPI-ML was in the throes of a major argument over the continuance of underground armed struggle in Bihar. They were neither moving forward nor going backward. A revisionist group took things in its hand and started a campaign for the party to come overground. I was the only journalist to have written in detail about this exercise, correctly prophesying (on the basis of some truthful admissions from the concerned horses’ mouths) that the party would enter the political fray in 1989. There were many reactions to my article, one of them a sweet telephone call in my office from someone who introduced himself: “I am Kanu Sanyal, speaking. I am in Dhanbad. I read your report. Let us meet sometime.” The meeting happened after the 1989 elections and by then Vinod Mishra was barely three years away from appearing in public for the first time at a rally in Calcutta.
We talked for three or four hours, at a tea shop on Fraser Road in Patna. Sanyal had come to meet the son of a friend of his, a local journalist. Given the image I had of him as the original ‘naxalite’, I was disappointed by his low-key appearance. He was dressed in a white full shirt, blue trousers and Bata chappals and carrying a black plastic bag. He wouldn’t talk much about the Naksal Bari days, but had much to say about the futility of the entire movement in its current shape. India is too big a country to even be ruled, not to talk of staging a revolution, was the gist of his argument. He was promoting education as the only weapon to fight the factors causing oppression. “The world is changing fast. What we did in those days now looks to me as an affair of an affected youth. Guns are not the solution. Only when the poor are aware of their rights can they do something about it.” And on, he went. His utter dislike of the traditional communists was, of course, apparent as most of his analogies were situated in West Bengal or Tripura.
Did he mean to say that the concept of Indian ‘naxalism’ was a blunder, I asked him. He gave me a serious look. I still remember his words which are appearing in print for the first time here and I quote from a distant memory: “You cannot turn back on Naksal Bari. Or the off-shoots of that movement, however lumpenised they may be today. They have created a stir in the hearts of the poor who now realize that they have not been born to be slaves. In time, more and more of them will realize this. And then a change will come.”
Was Naksal Bari then a catalyst for future change? Don’t try to deconstruct the past, he waved a finger at me. As I shook hands with him, Sanyal gave me a toothy smile and patting my back said: “If you can read Bangla, look up a novel called Mahakaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Babu. It is about my friend, Jangal Santhal, the action man. I was only an organizer and Charu was the ideas man, but Santhal…..”

MULAYAM SINGH YADAV: WRESTLING WITH WOMEN’S WORTH

“Vartmaan swaroop men mahila aarakshan vidheyak pass hua tho sansad men udyogpatiyon evam adhikariyon ki aisi-aisi ladkiyaan aa jayengi jinhe dekhkar ladke peeche se seeti bajayenge.”
(If the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed in its present form, then such daughters of industrialists and officials will enter Parliament who would invite catcalls and whistles from the boys.)
Thus spake Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of India’s senior, surviving socialist leaders and former defence minister of India and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav made this comment while unveiling the statue of India’s biggest socialist ever, the late Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, at the eponymous hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The statement reflects the level of thinking of this insolent male chauvinist who would use or throw women for his political ends without any compunction. He perhaps forgot in the heat of the moment that he himself has in the past encouraged daughters and wives of officers and industrialists and even Bollywood actresses, not to talk of his own daughter-in-law, to enter politics by giving tickets to them in parliamentary or assembly elections.
The statement is nothing new. His anti-women stance came to the fore even earlier too, when, on March 14, Yadav described the Women’s Reservation Bill as an “international conspiracy” to weaken democracy. How would that happen?
The IANS news agency reported: “He was of the view that 33 percent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament…. ‘just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs’?”
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” he added, perhaps not to be seen as a misogynist. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/mulayam-fears-an-all-women-parliament_100334553.html
What is interesting is the venue – the unveiling of Dr. Lohia’s statue – Yadav used to vent his sexist bias. For his information, the web site of Dr. Lohia – whose ardent follower he claims to be – says this about the attitude of India’s pioneering socialist leader towards women:
“More than half of our population comprises women. Their condition is pathetic. Cooking food, breeding children and being a slave to her husband -this is woman's fate. A woman is not considered equal to a man, such is the blind belief sustained through the ages. The law has guaranteed equality to women, but that is only on paper. Equality has not been practiced. Hence jobs must be reserved for women in all walks of life. They must be freed from the tyranny of homework. The latent talent of women should be brought to the limelight. Society does not progress as long as women remain oppressed. Society must be rid of deep-rooted beliefs and old practices. Beginning with women in villages every woman should be given justice. Lohia strove for this cause. According to him the emancipation of women was the foundation of social revolution; without this there can be no prosperity.”http://www.drlohiacentenary.org/index_more.html

Shah Rukh's Khan

I saw ‘My Name Is Khan’ on the second day of its release in Leicester, where I now reside. I wasn’t alone, but with my wife and daughter. It was the 1130pm show and the cinema hall was nearly full. I noticed lots of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims. The Leicester brigade of Ugandan Gujaratis and Singh Sahebs from both sides of the Punjab made up the rest.

The same evening, much of the Asian diaspora was watching the film in several cities in the UK, including Bristol, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bardford, etc. Unlike ever in the past, this film was released in each and every, repeat, each and every cinema house of the small and big towns in the UK. Same story in the US and a host of other countries, I gathered later.

My wife told me Shah Rukh Khan had acted very well. The best, she gushed. I generally don’t disagree with my wife, knowing well how much she adores him. But I said to myself, perhaps SRK himself was diffident about his acting, given the kind of publicity stunts he devised at least two months before the film’s release. My views of the devalued Indian broadcast media are well-known among my friends, but I must say these channels do rise to occasions, such as this, to delve into greater depths of pitiable marketing. The channels breathed, lived, ate, what not, SRK. And all of them were exclusive coverage. NDTV repeated the telecast of Barkha Dutt’s exclusive with SRK almost every hour on the eve of the film’s release. I pitied Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar, even Keshto Mukherji, for never having lived in the age of global live communications. Who knows, Sri 420 would have been the national film of Burkina Faso or Mother India would have been translated into Swahili.

Lest my dislike for SRK become apparent, here are some random thoughts about the film which manufactured controversy (Chomsky listening?) and made a certain cartoonist-turned-petty-politician see red. It is my belief that all the unintended comments of SRK always had an intended target.

The credit goes to him for raking up the Hindu-Muslim controversy that preceded the film’s release. What the stupid chiefs of the various Senas did was to merely react, along predictable lines. But SRK is clever. He was not bothered about a pre-reaction in India alone. He wanted it wherever the Asian diaspora lives, particularly abroad. Remember, the first time anyone heard of the film was when there was a news report that SRK had been subjected to a body search at an airport in the US because his name was…well….Khan!

The first thought that came to my mind was about the war for superiority among religions. Religions cannot co-exist, because their differences are the very basis for their existence. By the same logic, followers of religions cannot co-exist either. But then we human beings are said to be different from animals because we can reason. And this reasoning has left us with certain rules that allow religionists co-exist if they follow certain rules. That’s when politics enters the fray. The father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar – who laid down some of these rules -- may have had his reasons to embrace Buddhism, but that very act was a political one, making it clear that Hinduism practised untouchability and, therefore, Buddhism was superior. This was less than a century ago. The Hinduism-Islam feud goes back centuries. So the case with Islam and Christianity, and so on.

In this backdrop, when the preamble of the Indian Constitution says that India is a ‘secular’ republic, it is only attesting the fact that people of this country practice several religions, and not necessarily that people of this country practice several religions peacefully. There is no peace in conflict. And if there were no conflict, there wouldn’t be so many religions in the first place.

Religious co-existence, to my mind, is a political act, crafted carefully to nurture certain assumptions that characterise a nation or a state. It is not a social tool. Just like poverty. Will you give away part of your wealth to a beggar of your own volition? No. You need to be taxed to take that money away from you to redistribute. Like female infanticide. You need laws to stop you from killing your girl child. Like caste. You need laws to make you co-exist with a person of another caste.

So is the case with religion. Ambedkar was one example. Yesudas is another. Shouldn’t the high priests of Guruvayoor be hanged in public because they have committed the same crime as those who bought the Babri Masjid down? Or, at the very least, shouldn’t they be banned from hearing songs in praise of Lord Krishna sung by Yesudas? Why was Yesudas, a Christian, allowed to sing Hindu songs in the first place? How dare Valmeeki, a lower caste, write the Ramayana? How could we tolerate an Austrian nun in Calcutta? Would there have been four battles of Panipat in all if Akbar had not married Jodha?

See, how complicated this damn talk about religion is? Luckily we have politics which saves us from ourselves and religions, which touts secularism in the face of fundamentalism, nation-building in the face of a violent, religious migration, reservation in the face of caste conflict. Politics is omni-potent. It gives birth to a conflict, it nurtures it, it destroys it. Politics itself is no constant, evolving over time. Like in the present, ‘My Name Is Khan’.

Two things go in his favour, clearly. Bollywood has now reached a stage where a Muslim character in a film need not be a lackey of a Hindu hero and keep proving his loyalty to his community and his country, in that order. Mr. Khan, to that extent, now shares the celluloid pedestal with Mr. Bharat insofar as cinematic reflection of Indian politics is concerned. To that extent, Mr. Khan is the ideal cenotaph for Tamas and Garam Hawa.

Secondly, Mr. Khan introspects about the ills of the misguided among his fellow religionists – perhaps the first of its kind in Indian cinema on Muslim identity – and that give him a place in the hall of flame inhabited by the Meerabais and Munnabhais.

I want to ask SRK why he made the film, other than to make more money. Did he have a political message to convey other than that has been conveying through television and Twitter throughout the pre-release period? Did he think the Indian Muslims would react to the film in the same manner as Muslims in other parts of the world? Perhaps the 9/11 backdrop was created to make the film contemporaneous to Muslims across the globe? I don’t know if SRK had a message to convey, because he has not said so other than mouthing secularist phrases as explanations.

Given the political campaign that preceded the film’s release, it has to have a message. But what? I tried watching the film seriously for clues. For instance, Khan’s failure to meet President Bush, Khan’s natural affinity for Afro-Americans, his (un)intentional travels through the southern states like Arizona and Georgia, his insistence on being called Khan even by his wife instead of by his first name, Rizvan, the absence of the ubiquitous mark on the forehead of every practising Muslim (as shown without fail in Indian films!). But most important of all, the character of Khan and his message, ‘I am Khan, but I am not a terrorist’, preferring to hide himself inside the body of an autistic person who with his mannerisms disarms any overt criticism of what Khan has to say.

In the end, is it a film to educate people about Asperger’s Syndrome (because the titles carry an explanation about it), or how religion can disharmonise relations between inter-religious couples, or about the western mistrust of the followers of Islam, or of the true Islam that preaches peace as much as any other religion? I know one thing. There’s nothing apolitical about it.

SRK should know. He owes the Indian television audiences at least that much for overwhelming us with his presence all these months. As the film ended, I didn’t know who stood tall. SRK or Khan?

Otherwise, it’s just another Bollywood film.

Keralites alone sex-starved? Not all Indians?

Communist muffs on a war path against sex is akin to Shiv Sena hoodlums running amok on Valentine’s day. Both are same sides – ideologically and politically -- of the same coin. But that is a different topic.
What is my concern is a person like Paul Zachariah’s description of the current Mallu polity as ‘sex-starved’. But when was Kerala sex-sated, ever? Or, for that matter, India?
Music director Vinu Thomas says in an interview: “When people elsewhere think of Kerala, they invariably speak about adult films. I tell you the real reason behind this. Ours is a small state, with limited income. The film industry too is weak, but highly talented. Adult movies are a periodic development based on the available resources and financial viability. Call it easy money making, assured returns or like that.”
The first adult rated Mallu film was Kalayan Rathriyil, directed by IV Sasi. The second adult film, Avalude Ravukal, is also directed by him. That was in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, came Sathrathil Oru Ratri, directed by Sankaran Nair. This film became extremely popular at that time and was shown in all the ‘adult’ movie halls of every major town and city in India. I saw this film in the Light House theatre in Hyderabad in 1978. Light House was considered a ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ theatre by my parents, like all parents in the country. Anyway, coming to the point, during what is called the golden period of Mallu cinema – late 1970s to early 1990s – there were hardly any ‘dirty’ movies out of Kerala. But the phenomenon returned in the form of ‘Shakeela films’ after the turn of the century. The highs and lows of the adult film history run parallel to the fate of the film industry there: ‘dirty’ films being dished out whenever the mainstream cinema started making flops.
Sex has no political bedfellow. Sex sells. That’s all.
The issue today is not whether moral policing is good or bad. The issue is that today, sex is out of the closet, not just in the slums and chawls where it has always been in the open, but in the moralistic, casteist, orthodox, middle class Indian homes where the ‘first night’ meant, till recently, sex without frills or foreplay, a ritual to be completed with the lights out.
My daughter, aged a half over 7, is going to be taught sex education in her school next year. She is in the UK, but there are many schools in India where sex education is part of the curriculum. Thanks to the internet, today’s children know more about sex at their age than those of previous generations.
The main issue is, as Shyam Benegal once said, humans have an interest in different kinds of prurient pleasures and as individuals, they have to find a way to deal with it.
I remember meeting the late Vijay Anand in 2001 or 2002 when he censor board chief. At that time he was considering a request from the Kerala regional board of certification for screening pornographic films in select theatres in an attempt to 'save' mainstream cinema in the state. Anand was very much in its favour, and told me he preferred certifying adult films as ‘x-rated’ and allowing their legal screening in separate theatres than to use scissors (Of course, he exited soon after and was replaced by a BJP footnote called Arvind Trivedi whose idea of permissive sex on film never went beyond fleeting kisses.)
Anand realized that in several parts of the country, some producers shoot two versions of a film, one with openly sexual scenes and another that is more regular and acceptable to the censor board. Commonly in small cinemas in satellite towns across the country, theatre owners interpolate 'sexually explicit' scenes into films certified for public viewing, he told me. He even had figures with him of police raids on internet cafes allowing customers to log on to adult web sites. He wanted this sex-with-lights-off attitudes to end by not making sex a moral issue.
Is the subject of sex, then, about permissiveness or liberalism? One thing is sure: it certainly is not about calling all Mallus sex-starved.

India a dream still, at 60

I was watching a white man's ode to India -- Slumdog Millionaire -- on, where else (?), channel 135 of Sky in the UK. And then I came across your piece. A brown man's ode to the original Slumdog.
Nehru was the Danny Boyle of his day. He discovered India, but ruled an imaginary India. He preferred the HIndu civil code instead of the uniform civil code; failed to uinderstand the need for a population policy; did not realise that a mixed-economy model also needed socio-economic infrastructure and building educational facilities in the rural areas; he was in a hurry to create states on a linguistic basis, not realising the impact of imposing Hindi as the official language everywhere; he was over-dependent on the public sector which encouraged bureaucratisation, institutionalised corruption and turned trade unionism into rowdyism.
Ambedkar, the gentleman you write about in the piece, said: “If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.”
Sixty years later, it seems an ideal Indian society is tne one only imagined. Like Nehru's India or Boyle's Dharavi. Because the real India is cruel.
Around 350 million – as much India’s wealthy middle class, are illiterate. A similar number of people are below the poverty line. Half of them lack access to drinking water. Half the country’s billion-odd population lacks basic sanitation facilities. Half of India’s children cannot get basic nutrition. Nearly three-fourths of rural India cannot access timely medical facilities and effective medication. ... See More
The girl child continues to be a stigma. Caste inequalities hamper economic and social progress. Linguistic and regional divides boo the concept of India’s inherent strength; it’s so-called nity in diversity. Save the top institutions, education standards are falling as it stands reduced to a mere profit-making venture. Corruption stands tall as ever, as the high priest of development; religious extremism, the high priestess of culture.
Politics in India is all about unbridled freedom for pelf and power to dissent and destroy. The ends justify the means for politicians or police, thieves or armed revolutionaries. Diversity in India can now be explained as people straight-jacketed in vote banks of caste, community, religion, language or region. Indians are bereft of national idols or ideals.
Of course, India rises as one voice when Sachin Tendulkar falls to a wrong decision or Amitabh Bachchan is admitted to a hospital or an Indian student is man-handled in Australia. India also rises as one voice when a Kargil happens or a Mumbai explodes in terror. That's what our news channels show and that's what we, who have no time to see the real India save a couple of minutes to dish out an article on it, prefer to watch.
Indians do believe in a vague sense of oneness. They are as yet unclear what this oneness is, but for them the truth lies somewhere between Tendulkar’s bat and Siachen’s last military outpost, between novel scammer Harshad Mehta and nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, between Do Bigha Zameen and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, between Tata’s |Jaguar and A. R. Rehman’s Jai Ho.
What awakens us Indians to reality is what comes off as reality in celluloid.