West Asia Building Upto A Turkey-Egypt Catastrophe In Libya

West Asia Building Upto A Turkey-Egypt Catastrophe In Libya

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

As I settled down to write on Libya, the news ticker opened up the whole West Asian vista.

IAF pilots flying the first batch of Rafales from the Dassault Aviation Facility in France had barely settled down to relax at the UAE’s Al Dhafra air base, where they were breaking journey, when they found themselves exposed to what they feared might be fatal danger. They scrambled for cover because an Iranian missile landed nearby. They must have heaved a sigh of relief when it was established, without the shadow of a doubt, that neither they nor the UAE, were in the Iranian firing line. Iranians, inventive as the achaemenids have always been, were shooting missiles at a prototype of a US aircraft carrier Nimitz they had floated in the Strait of Hormuz.

The choreography of the exercises clearly caused alarm in UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain where US 5^th Fleet is docked. Spokeswoman for the US 5^th fleet, Commander Rebecca Rebarich was furious: “The US Navy conducts defensive exercises with our partners promoting maritime security in support of freedom of navigation.” She said. “Whereas Iran conducts offensive exercises attempting to intimidate and coerce.” From the Iranian side, Commander of the National Guards, Maj. General Hossein Salami was brazen: “What was shown today in these exercises, at the level of aerospace and Naval Forces, was all offensive.”

This exchange is representative of the mood in the entire region. There has not been a day free of tension in the region for decades but for this narrative let us consider 20 July as the cut off when Israeli aircraft fatally targeted a Hezbullah Commander, Ali Kamel Mohsen. Promptly came the Hezbullah response: Zionists should be ready for a suitable retaliation.

Just as the cauldron was simmering, came the startling disclosure by Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyah. He told, Qatari newspaper Al Lusail that major powers had offered $15 billion in aid for Gaza “provided Hamas gave up armed struggle and laid down arms”. The offer was rejected.

Facing convulsions within Israel and a possible change of heart on the issue in Washington, the project of inundating the West Bank with settlements, the “settlement project” has gone into a limbo. Occasionally Benjamin Netanyahu shows his oats in neighbouring Syria because of Israeli paranoia about the Iraqi-Syrian road having been opened. This gives Tehran a direct land route to Lebanon via Iraq and Syria, creating deep anxieties in Israel about sophisticated Iranian weapons being ferried to Syria and arch-enemy, Hezbullah. Every now and again Israel panics into aerial bombardment of some such transaction.

Not only is the Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon road link a menace, the Hezbullah, Hashd al Shaabi in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, the pro Iranian arc, are persistently menacing the Saudis and Israel.

In these choppy waters, Jordanian Prime Minister, Omar Razzaz tosses a boulder: he made the startling suggestion that a single Israeli-Palestinian state would be acceptable to Jordan provided “equal rights were given to both people.” This was novel beyond recognition in an area where a two-state solution has been the mantra for three decades. Not only is the thought absurd in itself, it blissfully overlooks the “Jewish nation state law” passed by the Knesset. The law states that all occupied Palestinian territories belong exclusively to the Jewish people. It is politically impolite to say so in Amman, but the only Palestinian state which the Right wing Israelis will ever concede happens to be Jordan.

Against this varied and disturbed mosaic, the impending Egypt-Turkey confrontation in Libya portends a regional catastrophe. Before I share this catastrophe with you let me seek your indulgence just for one paragraph to share my bewilderment, naively maybe, on an issue I acquainted myself with during my first visit to Libya in 1986 when President Reagan ordered the bombing of Benghazi and Tripoli in which Qaddafi’s baby daughter was killed. In my conversation with him in those tense conditions, he never forgot to mention his pet project – Great Man-Made River, the world’s largest network of pipes, covering a distance of 2,820 kilometers, pumping water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System. Qaddafi called it the Eighth wonder of the world. During recent operations, NATO bombed a key segment of the pipelines. It is universally accepted that this miraculous source of pure, underground water, its cost barely 10 percent of desalination projects, which will last anywhere between a 1,000 to 100 years, in a region where water security is projected to be a serious problem in the future – why is there no mention of this project in a nation being looted by major powers? Is it happening so stealthily?

Now to the Turkish-Egyptian confrontation building up in Libya: it will be like the clashing of the Cymbals, the crescendo in a Wagner symphony. When Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, was toppled by US-Israeli machinations in 2013 and the then Saudi Crown Prince turned up in Cairo with an offer of $eight billion to help Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi ascend the Egyptian throne, what was the Saudi motivation? Remember Juhayman al Otaybi and his 400-500 supporters had occupied the Mecca mosque in 1979, virtually the same month as when the Ayatullahs ousted the Shah of Iran. This internal rebellion by an extreme variety of the Brothers is what Saudis fear more than Iranian Shiaism. Sisi is Hosni Mubarak II reincarnated to keep the Brothers under his heel. To Israel’s chagrin, the Brothers are a powerful influence on Hamas, whose links with Qatar are secure. Qatar meanwhile relies on the Turkish army. Notice the linkages?

Tayyip Erdogan who restarted “Namaz” at Hagia Sophia, has come out, all guns blazing as an unabashed Brother. His clash with Sisi, the oppressor or Brothers in Egypt, will cut the ground from under Sisi’s feet. That clash has to be avoided by forces which, alas, are these days preoccupied with issues of their own survival.

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A Faltering Erdogan Falls Back On Islamism For Brownie Points

A Faltering Erdogan Falls Back On Islamism For Brownie Points

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Saint Sophia museum in Istanbul being reverted into a mosque has brought back, like a powerful refrain, that couplet of Mir Taqi Mir which has been an emotional crutch for me on such occasions. For instance, when I visited the great Cordoba mosque built in Southern Spain, in 786 AD and which was converted in 1236 into a live Church.

Mir said:

“Mut ranja kar kisi ko, ke apne to aeteqaad,

Jee dhaaye ke jo kaaba banaya to kya kiya?”

(Never hurt a human being. It is not worth building even the House of God or Kaaba, if the project breaks human hearts.)

Mir’s contemporary, Mirza Rafi Sauda, inverts Mir’s image:

“Kaaba agar che dhaya to kya jaae ghum hai Sheikh;

Yeh qasr e dil naheen ke banaya na jaa e ga.”

(Destruction of Kaaba is not as catastrophic as the breaking of the heart, which is irreparable)

From the Bosporus, the Istanbul skyline is exactly like its picture postcards, a skilful contrast of domes and minarets, slim as thermometers. The brooding Ayasofya Museum stands apart. The greatest Byzantine Cathedral, built at the edge of Europe in 537 was designed to dominate the panorama of the Marmara Sea and the Asian mainland beyond.

The first Arab probe of Sindh by Mohammad bin Qasim was in 711Ad, exactly the date when Tariq Ibne Ziad crossed over from Morocco to set up station at what he called Jabal al Tariq or the Rock of Tariq which the British renamed Gibraltar in 1704 after the famous Spanish-British naval engagements including the “Spanish Armada”.

Before the Iberian Peninsula turned into a cauldron of intra-European conflict, an 800 years of Muslim rule was somewhat unevenly spread across Spain. To flavour this phase of history, one has to read Maria Rosa Menocal’s masterly, Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. The title itself tells the story. It is astonishing that in the past three decades of gruelling Islamophobia, not one of our liberals had the width of vision to recall phases in history when robust multiculturalism thrived under Muslim rule. After Reconquista in 1492 by the Christians, the Inquisition was much harsher on the Jews who found refuge in Morocco and later in the Ottoman Empire.

The glory of the greatest Eastern Orthodox Cathedral came under partial eclipse when the Roman Catholic Church occupied it for six decades. But it was Sultan Mehmet’s establishment of the Ottoman Empire in 1453 which caused the Cathedral to face a predictable total eclipse. It was transformed into a mosque.

From the debris of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Pasha “Ataturk” resurrected what is modern Turkey. He was determined to take his country from “backwardness” into “modernism”. In other words he turned his back on “Muslim traditionalism” and dreamt of a secular Turkey, custom made for Europe. He replaced the Arabian alphabet with Roman script for the Turkish language. He banned the Fez cap, brought the practice of Islam under a department of Religious affairs attached to the Prime Minister, and so on. Little wonder the texture of life in Istanbul and Ankara was more European than Islamic, rather like North Tehran under the Shah of Iran. But what was the ingredient that made Turkey’s secularism comparatively more durable? It was the Turkish army which became the guarantor of the Republic’s secularism. Ataturk divined, and quite rightly too, that Sophia mosque would be an eyesore for Europe, in perpetuity. With one executive order in 1934, it was reinvented as a museum of Byzantine history.

It was western callousness which, in the ultimate analyses, made Turkey’s secular edifice vulnerable. Western, mostly American, Israeli hostility to Arab Socialism (Egypt), Ba’athism (Iraq, Syria), Libya’s cradle-to-grave welfare system (details for the Afghan tumult are only slightly different) which promoted Islamic extremism on an unspeakable scale.

Details for Turkey’s upheaval need to be explained. With the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian nationalisms turned upon Bosnian Muslims with vicious brutality. Srebrenica is only one chapter in that bleak and shoddy history. Briefings by the UN military commander, Gen. Sir Michael Rose, were laden with more gruesome detail by the day particularly the four year long siege of Sarajevo. Balkans, the turf for continuous conflict throughout history between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, became a wide open killing field when Belgrade could not hold Yugoslavia together. The helplessness of the Bosnian Muslims was unbelievable. Europe’s reason for not intervening rang hollow. Its intervention, it was argued, would cause individual European countries to take sides in a conflict in which World War II adversaries, Serbia and Croatia were fighting each other over the spoils of Bosnia.

Europe being sucked into the Bosnian war carried the risk of under mining the very purpose for which EU was being forged – to avoid conflict between member states. This was sophistry, said Salman Rushdie. Reverse the religious affiliations of the combatants, and European troops would be in Bosnia within a day.

Mornings evenings and afternoons, the Turks watched the brutalization of Bosnia and Sarajevo, both an evocative part of Turkish historical memory. A powerful anti-West, Islamist party, Refah or Welfare took shape and spread like prairie fire. Necmettin Erbakan, founder of Refah, became Prime Minister. Citing the secular Constitution, the Army summarily dethroned the “Islamist” Prime Minister.

Erbakan’s protégés, Abdullah Gul and Tayyip Erdogan, dismantled “Refah” and reappeared in a secular garb as leaders of AK or Justice and Development Party. As evidence of their secular credentials, they kept alive their application for membership of the EU, European callousness notwithstanding. In fact, French President Giscard d’Estaing virtually slapped Turkey across its face. “European civilization is Christian civilization.” 

After his mishandling of Syria, misreading of Europe, the US and Russia, his popularity in serious question, Erdogan has fallen back on the oldest trick in the politician’s book – religious extremism. “Look”, he will address Islamists, “like Mehmet, the conqueror, I have restored for your supplications a great mosque.”

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By Not Moving Out Of The Way, Gandhis Perpetuate Modi Rule

By Not Moving Out Of The Way, Gandhis Perpetuate Modi Rule

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

The utter irrelevance of the Sachin Pilot-Ashok Gehlot spat is matched only by the saturation coverage accorded to the mishap by the media – atleast a large section of it.

Of Rajasthan’s storm in a teacup the amplification is more disturbing than the storm itself. It reinforces the perception which is most helpful to Narendra Modi: “Look, that is the disheveled lot being positioned to replace me.”  Modi’s own men will not be able to devise a script more favourable to him, and it is so simple: just keep the Gandhi family in focus as the only alternative.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, neo liberal strategist, Francis Fukuyama predicted the End of History. The neo liberal Utopia had arrived. He was wrong, indeed he was shamed. Observers of the Indian scene are liable to be proven equally wrong if they predict that the Congress party is about to go over the cliff. As in the mobike ad, the party may just splutter over the chasm. Much more helpful will be the analyst who can peer into his binocular and report, like Sanjay of Mahabharata, the departure of the Gandhi family.

This would be a welcome outcome not because some Lutyens’ bungalows in their occupation will become available for other politicians. Quibbling over security for Priyanka is partly misplaced. Sonia Gandhi was paranoid about the family’s security (quite understandably) when a reluctant Rajiv ascended the gaddi soon after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Once he had worn the crown, the security of the two Gandhi siblings was such a matter of concern that “uncle” T.N. Kaul, ambassador to the Soviet Union had more or less arranged for Rahul, then 15 and Priyanka, 13, to be parked in Moscow, which seemed like a wonderful idea because Mikhail Gorbachev had so warmed up to the young Indian Prime Minister.

Had Rajiv lived through the 1991 elections, he would have sat in the opposition. His assassination in Thiruperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, half way through the campaign, changed Congress fortunes. It derailed the Gandhi family though.

Rajiv was losing seats in the North in the first phase of the 91 campaign. The sympathy factor after the death operated in the South to boost the Congress barely upto the pipping post. The South Heavy Parliamentary party became the anchor for the Party’s first Prime Minister from the South, P.V. Narasimha Rao. The wily Brahmin that P.V. was, his politics became clear from the very outset: no challenger would be allowed to prosper in the North particularly if he happened to be non-Brahmin, indeed a Thakur like Arjun Singh. It is interesting that the strongman of Madhya Pradesh, secular in the Nehruvian mould, whom Rajiv had once elevated as Executive Vice President of the party, was outside the pale for P.V. As late as June 4, 1992, two days before the Babari Masjid demolition, Singh was warning friends that the mosque could fall. After the fall, mass defection of the Muslim vote brought P.V.’s Congress to its lowest ever – 140 seats.

This was the state of play when Sonia concentrated on her children, family friends like Satish Sharma (they were Indian Airlines pilots) and sundry school friends. In 1997, Priyanka, 25, married an upwardly mobile Robert Vadra who had leap frogged from the family’s brass business in Moradabad to the British School in New Delhi. He was married into the premier family, alright, but his mobility upwards would be boosted if Sonia Gandhi emerged from her political retirement. Within months of the Priyanka-Vadra marriage, ambition stirred in Sonia’s breast too. P.V.’s dethronement in May 1996 after his dismal performance and a general restiveness in the Congress Working Committee, that a low level, “teli” (seller of oil in rural India), Sitaram Kesari, then President of Congress, was angling to become Prime Minister, provided a suitable occasion. What was speculation was dignified as fact by the senior most Congressman, former President Pranab Mukherjee in his book “The Coalition Years”.

Nothing became her less than the illegal manner of Kesari’s ouster. He was locked up in his Congress office; just in case he protested. Pranab Mukherjee, among others, supervised the wrenching out of the Kesari name plate: it was replaced by “Sonia Gandhi” Congress President, written in black ink as a temporary measure.

Quite unlike Kesari’s ouster, nothing ever became Sonia more than her refusal of the crown after the party’s shock victory in 2004. That the 2004 to 2009 term was the high point of Sonia-Manmohan Singh team is not celebrated with high decibel drum beating because a great deal of restraint and dignity was imparted to the power apparatus by the 61 Communist MPs who supported it from the outside. By setting up a National Advisory Council as a restraint on neo liberal excesses Sonia too asserted herself.

In the 2009 elections, the Congress’s 209 seats were a huge improvement on 140, 141, 143, 145 under P.V., Kesari and Sonia respectively. Before Rahul Gandhi could unfurl his wondrous talents, the party sank to 44 seats in 2014 and 52 in 2019.

There is a huge lie Indian ruling classes have told themselves: like our masters in London and Washington, we have become a two party system. A multi ethnic, multi religious, multi lingual country where currency notes indicate every denomination in seventeen languages, most with classical literatures pre dating Christ – will this immense diversity ever be contained within two parties?

By not moving out of the way, the Nehru-Gandhi family is holding up political movement, a churning, shuffling by which the regional parties will have a stake in an accommodative central unit which is not obsessed with the unrealistic desire to revive “on its own” just because the straight laced Randeep Surjewala announces, without an iota of embarrassment, that his leader, Rahul Gandhi, is a “janeudhari Brahmin”. By its mulish obstinacy, the Gandhi family is ensuring the perpetuation of one party rule on the other side.

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Vikas Dubey Saga: Reflecting On Lucknow’s Badmen In Nicer Times

Vikas Dubey Saga: Reflecting On Lucknow’s Badmen In Nicer Times

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

The manner of Vikas Dubey’s murder (encounter) would cause Joey the child in awe of Shane played by Alan Ladd to scream: “that’s not fair – I hate you.” A kneejerk response to the Dubey saga would lead nowhere without picking up the thread of a perennially unjust system of which the police are the chosen cat’s paw. It reflects on the rottenness of the system that the real puppeteers, who pull the strings, seek to heap the odium exclusively on the police.

Systemic injustice, the police and “badmen” figure in my experience in two clusters: the peaking of urban terror at the hands of Mumbai’s underworld after the frightening 1993 pogrom and, ofcourse, the badmen of Lucknow during my growing up years.

The badman of Lucknow was called Bakait or Badmaash which literally means someone who lives on “ill-gotten livelihood”. That would suggest that they were thieves which they were not. Honour was an article of faith. They were mohalla or neighbourhood toughs, with clearly demarcated areas of operation. These notional lines, like all frontiers, could be pushed depending on the Bakait’s personality and that of other’s holding contiguous terrains.

At a time when the feudal order was fading away nicely, noiselessly, selling their bungalows to builders and cramming themselves on a floor without fuss, the Bakait served a purpose. He became the unofficial middleman between the retiring gentry, for whom he had an old fashioned respect, and the lower judiciary, the Kutchery, constabulary, and the hangers on, lounging on cane furniture in the unkept lawns of the new political class.

My exposure to a Bakait was through our driver, Khan Saheb Nazir whose protective instincts for the family came into play when he received word that in the course of growing up, I had audaciously exceeded my brief. I was seen in Royal Café with the well groomed students of Isabella Thoburn College, a revolutionary violation of Lucknow’s gender segregation. This ignited jealousies, a class war – English medium versus Hindu/Urdu medium, not communal, mind you. This was a crucial divide which amplified itself into two class streams which, believe it or not, in some ways defined independent India. One stream swelled the ranks of “boxwalas”, Civil Service and other high end careers. The other lot, with an ever expanding base, turned to political activism with a vengeance, not as a cause but a profession.

The second cluster became the Bakait’s habitat. In retrospect, everything falls into place, but for a debutante saga-boy, what followed was intimidating. As I came out of Royal Café, I was encircled by a group led by a boy named Atiq who lunged at me even as the menacing figure of Buddhu Pahelwan, the Bakait from Nrahi near Hazratganj loomed in the background. Worse was in store but for the timely arrival of Khan Saheb, with Rasheed Ghosi (milkman) in tow. Rasheed knew “Buddhu” Pahelwan. The situation was thus defused. Other than supplying milk to our neighbourhood, Rasheed’s claim to fame was that he faced murder charges. He acquired status because of the protection he provided to the poker-den run by the Heartwell brothers in their mini mansion not far from Rasheed’s buffalo shed.

Khan Saheb had a word of praise for “Buddhu” Pahelwan’s valour – “no one can attack him from front” – but he romanticized “Nannhe” (Aslam Khan), a legend in Aminabad for his swift knife-movement, a slight, brooding man whose rendezvous was the hair cutting saloon opposite Royal Talkies, popular with Lucknow’s underclass because it screened two Nadia-John Cawas movies, back to back, for the price of one ticket. Like swordsmanship, expertise with Rampur knives was considered manly. Revolvers were effete even though Pyarey Jaani, in his trench coat, had considerable aura in Nakkhas and Chowk, his one hand always on the revolver in his pocket. There was no recorded case of the revolver ever having been used. It was deterrence, Lucknow style.

Deterrence had given way to open warfare when I turned up in Mumbai to gauge the aftermath of the March, 1993 bomb blasts. The driver of the yellow taxi from the Cricket Club of India, obviously from my home turf, Pratapgarh or Rae Bareli, was averse to giving me his name even though I spoke in his accents. Not a word by way of reaction to the blasts or the pogrom which preceded it. I put it down to my persistence, because quite abruptly he pulled up the taxi by the kerb and turned to me sharply. “Look we were butchered in the riots, but after the blasts, things have changed.”

“We are no longer ‘dabey huey’ or “cowering”. He continued, “enter any suburban train and say ‘Salam alae kum’ and people give you the way.”

The vengeance in his eyes was scary. “The state is too strong”, I said. But it is, I said almost to myself, equally true that a community driven to hopelessness would extract satisfaction from the actions of anybody who gave vent to the community’s choked anger.

In these circumstances, consider Vikas Dubey. In his list of alleged murders there were Brahmins too. But details recede when the larger than life figure of Vikas Dubey, a Brahmin, takes on the might of the state which is increasingly in non Brahmin hands – indeed in Thakur hands. You may not register these facts but ask the Brahmins of Kanpur and they will read out their plaint: Chief Ministers of UP, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh are all Thakurs.

A community which basked for generations in the patronage of Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, Kamalapati Tripathi, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Narain Dutt Tewari, must feel a little sidelined with the arrival of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Kalyan Singh and, now, Chief Minister Adityanath.

Bihar’s Director General of Police, Gupteshwar Pandey put his finger on something while criticizing on Primetime TV a tweet which had gone viral: “Dubey was tiger for Brahmins.” In doing so Pandey was giving even wider currency to a dangerous thought particularly in the context of UP today.

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Roots Of Sino-Indian Conflict: How They Emerged From Their Cocoons

Roots Of Sino-Indian Conflict: How They Emerged From Their Cocoons

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

A clue to the future of Sino-Indian relations lies in the different ways the two ancient civilizations came out of their respective cocoons into the modern world in 1947 and 1948.

Indifference to the debates in British Parliament preceding the Indian Independence Act in July 1947 may lead to faulty conclusions. Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s was an elaborate exposition, on why Independence was being bestowed on India. The plan of June 3 is, after all, known as the Mountbatten plan. At the request of Indian leaders, he stayed on as the first Governor of Independent India. It was all very chummy to the very end. The friendship with Mountbatten was so deep that the Nehrus, particularly, Vijaylaxmi Pandit, were regular visitors to Broadlands, his family Estate in Hampshire. India’s first Prime Minister, nursed the friendship with great care: he was even averse to observing the centenary of 1857 because “Dickie” was still alive.

Mao Zedong, meanwhile, was going through the rigours of the Long March across China recorded in Red Star over China by Edgar Snow in 1937. In 1942 when Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek (and Madame Chiang Kai Shek) visited India as the Supreme Commander of the Allies during World War II, Mao Zedong’s Communist army was laying plans to chase him out towards Taiwan. China had come through the purgatory of a revolution, heavy US support to the Generalissimo notwithstanding.

It followed that the two countries would embark on different development routes too. Friends have helped me refresh my mind on that dry theme by furnishing two classic, period movies on India’s first decade and Breaking with Old Ideas on China during Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

In the Chinese film, the regional committee of the party appoints one of its energetic non-academic cadres, with experience of land, as principal of an Agricultural College. The traditional teachers, most of them veterans of one of the many stretches of the Long March, resent the new principal’s mobilization of students and peasants to shift the Agricultural College from an urban to a rural location. The principal believes this would provide greater synergy between knowledge and its application in agriculture and animal husbandry. The new college is actually built by students and peasants.

There is a delicious exchange between the principal and faculty: should a chapter on Mongolian horses be replaced by a study of buffaloes who were falling ill in the area. Buffaloes win the day. We would be justified in screwing up our noses at frequent references to “Mao’s thoughts” if they had been in the way of a $10 trillion edifice which is what China eventually is today. I would invent Gods to bow before if our economy were even a fraction of that sum, with one proviso: can we honestly claim that we have shown fidelity to our constitution – Justice, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – with a sense of achievement.

Reverting to the movies: transition from Chetan Anand’s debut movie with haunting melodies by Ravi Shankar, Neecha Nagar (Shanty Town) in 1946 to Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (small land holding), 1953, only amplifies rural distress, aggravated by exploitation in the name of development. The ruling classes dispossess the peasants of their meagre holdings, with promises of an elusive housing project here and an industrial unit there, forcing rural folk (as in Do Bigha Zameen) to turn to cities to eke out an existence.

Not only is the dream of hope in Neecha Nagar, at the cusp of independence, shattered but it leads consistently to disappointments as post-independence decades pass. Raj Kapoor, ofcourse, deserves salutations: in Awara and Shree 420 he inaugurates a trend in popular cinema to look at “Inequality”, straight in the eye. In this he is 50 years ahead of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.

A popular song dwells on all the houses cornered by the rich while “we sleep on footpaths”. It is graphically summed up by Sahir Ludhianwi in “Phir Subah Hogi” (The Dawn will break).

Cheen o Arab hamara

Hindostaan hamara

Rehne ko ghar naheen hai

Saara Jahaan hamara.

(The Arab world, China are all ours; Hindustan belongs to us.

Never mind if we don’t have a roof over our heads,

The whole world is ours)

The song taunts Nehru’s “Hindi Chini” bhai bhai, non-alignment, Afro Asian solidarity as much as it does “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”.

Summon a procession of these images in the mind’s eye and note the stunning continuity in the march of the dispossessed millions beginning with the lockdown of March 24 upto, say, mid-May when a sort of fatigue set in – human kind cannot take too much tragedy.

The country has, in the meantime, accumulated 138 billionaires and millions upon millions below the poverty line – in the 73 years of independence. Confronting us is a neighbour, China, with a comparable population and depth of Civilization but which built itself into a great power status on “Atmnirbharta” or self-sufficiency, which Prime Minister Modi dreams for India. Give me an egalitarian system guaranteed by the Rule of Law, and my comparisons stand withdrawn.

The hawkishness which informs the current chorus, “India of 2021 is not the India of 1962”, ignores the accompanying truth: China of 2021 is not the China of 1962. It is challenging the United States. Author of the much discussed, “Destined for War”, Graham Allison, Professor of Government at Harvard, has used “Thucydides Trap” to describe the Sino-US jockeying. The truth to be distilled from the great Greek historian’s analysis and record of the 30 years’ war between Sparta and Athens (Peloponnesian wars) yields an abiding truth: when an established power is challenged by a rising power, conflict occurs.

Supposing the established power is preoccupied and is craftily inclined to downgrade the game and shift it notionally to another ballpark? It projects the Thucydides logic to operate on the two Asian giants. This would give the US an elevation, a notional perch above the Asian combatants. But it takes two to clap: where is the rising challenger?

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