Congress Letter Writers: Who’s For Business Houses, Who’s For Himself?

Congress Letter Writers: Who’s For Business Houses, Who’s For Himself?

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

The late R.K. Mishra, editor of Patriot, founder of Observer Research Foundation, used to tell a delicious story about Indira Gandhi whom he knew well. Once Dev Kant Barua, Congress President during the Emergency, furtively handed Mishra a crumpled piece of paper with names of three Congress leaders scribbled on it. Barua led him onto the lawn for secrecy. Indira Gandhi suspected the three of being American moles. She was keen that, after scouring the grapevine, Mishra share his appraisal with her. Just when Mishra was about to visit Barua, his mouth full of news, the morning newspapers gave him a shock. On page 1 were photographs of the three named in that crumpled paper. They had been inducted into the Union Cabinet. Why had he been sent on a wild goose chase? The mist lifted after a call from Barua.

What had happened was this. A parallel investigation, though inconclusive, had caused Indira Gandhi sufficient anxieties to take quick action. She slotted the three in her cabinet. Moral of the story: the best way to keep powerful political colleagues under surveillance is to bring them into the cabinet “system”.

During the Cold War, the East-West affiliations of Congressmen made a material difference. In the post Cold War messy capitalism, an eye has to be kept on the party smart-alecs and their links with Corporate Houses. Prior to this phase Left-Right, East-West – were the salient terms of affiliation. Peter Hazlehurst, The Times, London, correspondent, described Indira Gandhi herself as “slightly left of self-interest”. In his time, Nehru had been “sanctioned” a free hand in the Foreign office, but even here the “jute press”, were tardy in their endorsement of friendship with Moscow.

Werner Adam, who retired as Foreign Editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine, after excellent stints in various western capitals, New Delhi and Moscow, was aghast at the absence of the Indian press in Moscow. Some of Adam’s many friends from his innings in New Delhi came in handy during his Moscow posting. Once he found himself interviewing the Indian Ambassador who, in the middle of the interview, received a call from Anatoly Dobrynin, former Soviet Ambassador in Washington during the Cuban missile crisis and possibly the most powerful official in the Soviet Foreign office. The brief exchange with Dobrynin, though guarded, was “chummy”. Adams’ point was that an Indian press contingent with its easy access would be the most well informed in the Soviet capital. The world media parked in Moscow would be eating out of Indian hands. But the “jute press” had their abiding preferences: they posted correspondents to London and Washington.

Days when Prime Ministers needed trusted friends to keep a steady gaze on east-west affiliations of colleagues are over. The PMO itself has become the lynchpin in a brand new system of crony capitalism. In such circumstances what kind of information does, the “interim” Congress President, Sonia Gandhi need from her confidant about, say, the 23 “rebellious” letter writers?

She may, for instance, like to refresh her memory with brief thumbnail sketches of the 23 (twenty three) so called rebels who shook the teacup? Her informants do not have to go far back into history – just October 2011 when the Nira Radia tapes erupted. A simple read of the tapes transcript will be revealing. Which “rebel” is looking for life after the Rajya Sabha?

Recently I read a piece by Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg which Sonia Gandhi would do well to glance through. The headline itself is arresting: “Adani Joins Ambani in Attempting Full-On Dominance.” The story reads:

“Multiple media reports now say that Ahmedabad, Gujarat based billionaire Gautam Adani, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, might (also) succeed in taking control of the already-privatized Mumbai airport, as well as a new one coming up on the financial center’s outskirts.” Earlier, Adani had won contracts for six of the smaller airports. “A fresh batch of six will go under the hammer.”

Who among the rebellious letter writers are known contacts of Ambani? Who is salivating on Gautam Adani? Shashi Tharoor wants the contract for Thiruvananthapuram airport to go to the industrialist who is one of the patron saints of the Modi establishment. Where does the Congress President stand on all this?

A brief flashback: When Indira Gandhi split the Congress in 1969, the Cold War mentioned at the outset, was entering its fiercest phase. Détente was giving negative returns. Détente, according to Washington standup comedians, was like going to a wife swapping party and returning alone. The presence of ex-communists like Mohan Kumaramangalam in the government, the Communist party’s external support to the Congress, was galling for the West as well as its supporters within. Further, the Soviet Union loomed larger than life during the 1971 Bangladesh operations. This warranted the appearance of the US 7^th fleet in the Bay of Bengal. There was corresponding interplay within. Powerful Congress party bosses discarded by Indira Gandhi in 1969, linked up with Socialists, viscerally anti Communist, and the RSS – this was the amalgamation which became the Bihar or JP movement of 1974. It eventually led to the Emergency and the first non-Congress government in 1977.

The 70s and 80s were a period of intense East-West grappling. In India, it turns out the Communists remained relevant well beyond that time frame. It is unfashionable to say so, but 2004 to 2009 was the finest Sonia-Manmohan Singh spell in office. This is when they had the support of 61 Communist MPs who were instrumental in pushing through MGNREGA, Forest Rights Act, National Food Security Act, Right to Information Act. Somewhere here is salvation for the troubled Congress. The sole super power moment is over and Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders teams are together hammering out a document for social justice. Instead of bursting its guts to “revive”, the Congress must be prepared even to lose on a platform of equality and justice, keeping faith in the Biblical dictum that he who loses shall win.

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Links Between Beirut Blasts, UAE-Israel, Oil And Gas In East Mediterranean?

 Links Between Beirut Blasts, UAE-Israel, Oil And Gas In East Mediterranean?

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

The mother of all blasts at the Beirut port on August 4, would have qualified as the West Asian 9/11 but the objective circumstances are totally different. But 9/11, the great tragedy though it was, happened just when a muscular United States, victorious in the Cold War, was spurred on by the neo-cons towards a goal of comprehensive global dominance. Osama bin Laden became the rabbit in that greyhound race. The hounds are still parked in their Afghan kennel.

 

The Beirut blast happened when the US is a shadow of what it was two decades ago, President Trump is shuffling his feet in the ring but has no punch, Israel’s Netanyahu is dancing around a minefield of corruption charges. Emmanuel Macron, facing massive popular protests looked pathetic turning up in Beirut barely two days after the event, walking around the port area with the authority of old Masters.

 

The French are prone to wear their colonialism on their sleeve. In 1992-94 when Left Liberals in Paris were writhing in pain at Europe’s indifference towards the Bosnian carnage, a brief exchange with a senior French official has remained with me:

“The balance of power shifted against the Christians in Lebanon; it is shifting against the Muslims in Bosnia.” The restoration of that balance may have crossed Macron’s mind, after surveying the scene. Macron was forthright: “What is now needed is political change; the explosion should be the start of a new era.”

 

The most respected of journalists in Beirut, Robert Fisk has, after talking to many witnesses, distributed damages in appropriate proportion. The sea took 70% of the blast. That’s a revealing figure. In other words only 30% of the blast killed 300 people, 6000 injured, and 3,00,000 homeless in a population of a million.

 

According to the distinguished Palestinian columnist, once a regular on BBC discussions, Abdel Bari Atwan, “the angry demonstrations and protests in Beirut and the hanging of an effigy of the Hezbullah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, are telling: it is Nasrallah’s head they want.”

 

How does an opponent like Israel go for Nasrallah’s jugular, protected as he is by a cavernous security system? Well, in sheer desperation, the war cry could well be: to block that leak let’s sink the ship. This is not the yearning of deranged enemies: this is the headline of an article made available by Carnegie, Middle East Centre – the headline itself is the story: Destroying Lebanon to Save It.

 

It remains a whodunit. Whichever direction the needle of suspicion goes, yields a conspiracy theory. The blast would provoke Hezbullah-Iran into action which would help Trump’s dwindling fortunes. The absurdity of this thesis is exposed by UAE Mohammad bin Zayed turning up in Washington to embrace Netanyahu. If there were to be a “retaliation” to the port blasts, his magnificent towers would be the first in line of fire. So, no one is likely to rush into battle until all of Trump’s beneficiaries are cent per cent sure that he is losing.

 

What is all this adding up to? So far all the major post 9/11 US military engagements in West Asia have been in theatres endowed with hydrocarbons or gas pipelines. It is generally forgotten that US involvement even in Afghanistan, after Soviet departure, was to push for TAPI, Turkmenistan-Afghan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. The Taleban would control Afghanistan; Americans would control the Taleban. This reporter was witness to the collapse of that scheme – on which more later. Osama bin Laden provided the US with a reason for entering Afghanistan. But Iraq, Syria, Libya, even Sudan (remember how George W Bush pronounced Janjaweed in Darfur with expert ease) attracted Americans for their oil, gas and pipelines.

 

How does Beirut fit into this framework? That Nasrallah’s mesmeric hold on the region’s non GCC Muslims, his unquantifiable arsenal of missiles, his reliable support structure in Iran gives Israel nightmares, is the narrative being sold. But there has to be something more compelling in the mix. Global energy giants are focused on the world’s biggest reserves of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. Names like Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, Rothschild and all others in this club leap out of the documents. The gas bonanza is in the territorial water of Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus. Note therefore the energy in Tayyip Erdogan’s swagger, his eye keenly settled on northern Cyprus, under Turkey’s occupation and stretching the gas fields to Adana.

 

Meanwhile the London based World Energy Council has for quite some time been researching the 250 billion barrels of oil from the Shfela basin south of Jerusalem and extending into the sea. The Wall Street Journal has quoted Howard Jonas, CEO of US based IDT corporation, which owns Shfela basin that “There is much more oil under Israel than under Saudi Arabia.”

 

While British Petroleum is busy in Egypt, the French giant, Total is in Beirut. Little wonder Macron was navigated expertly across the port area devastated by the blast. In addition to the Hydrocarbons, there is now the possibility of redesigning the entire Beirut port, not just for trade and transport but for gas explorations on the horizon.

 

Russia, Iran, Qatar, in that order have the world’s largest reserves of gas. This formidable line up now has in its opposition a team with rich prospects in oil and gas. This latter group is what the UAE’s Zayed has joined. It will please Trump before the election. Former Saudi Ambassador, Bandar bin Sultan was so identified with Bush as to acquire a nickname, Bandar Bush. The UAE’s powerful ambassador Yousef al Otaiba in Washington since 2008, is by comparison more nimble. Should Joe Biden win, Otaiba will be well plugged in there too.

 

Who knows an oil and gas rich Israel may in the future be nice to a people it has been particularly nasty with: the Palestinians. The credit for affecting a change of heart will go to a GCC country which will, to that extent, have helped weaken the Iran-Nasrallah ticket in the region.

 

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For Late M.F. Hussain, Rahat Indori Was “Just The Greatest”

For Late M.F. Hussain, Rahat Indori Was “Just The Greatest”

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

 

Rahat Indori was five years old when the much loved poet Majaz died of a stroke after he was found on the freezing terrace of a country liquor shop in Lucknow’s Qaisar Bagh. As someone born to a poor cloth mill labourer, Rahat’s nightmare of financial insecurity only increased watching the economically circumscribed lives of Urdu poets. Majaz was only one of them. Rahat worked hard educating himself right upto PhD on a subject which was to stand him in good stead in subsequent years – Urdu Mushaira. And what a performer he became in Mushairas charging upto Rs.10 lakhs for an appearance – quite unprecedented.

 

A brief digression might help explain the phenomenon of Rahat Indori, the Urdu poet who died in his hometown, at the age of 70 last week. Govind Ballabh Pant, UP’s first Chief Minister and Union Home Minister died on the same day as one of Urdu’s greatest ghazal writers of the 20th century, Jigar Moradabadi. But while Pant made banner headlines in newspapers, Jigar received a single column notice, buried in the inside page.

 

This is precisely the reason why Rahat’s dominance of the media space following his death is such a phenomenon. Andy Warhol’s observation is succinct: society has reached a point where everybody will have fifteen minutes of fame. But applying this quip to Rahat Indori would be an insult. Rahat had an extraordinary following for decades.

 

Rahat missed out on any personal experience of the greats like Faani Badayuni, Jigar Moradabadi and Yaas Yagana Changezi. He was too young. But Josh Malihabaid and Firaq Gorakhpuri were around till the late 80s, and a 30 year old budding poet of Indore must have overlapped in a Mushaira or two. Firaq, ofcourse, taught English literature in Allahabad University, but Josh mostly depended on feudal patronage after the abolition of zamindari in 1952. Some experiences for a man of his ego were humiliating. For instance when Josh was introduced to the Patiala Durbar, the state’s Prime Minister Sardar K.M. Panikkar, ill equipped to place any value on an Urdu poet, decided on a stipend of Rs.75 per month. The Maharaja, an admirer of Josh, was embarrassed: he increased the amount to Rs.300, a princely sum those days.

 

The fastidious would not rank Rahat among the finest poets, but the poets who would qualify for their esteem would never have audiences of thousands in their thrall, Mushaira after Mushaira, across India, indeed, worldwide.

 

What will be Rahat’s place in literature? There is a singular lack of endorsement of a large swathe of contemporary Urdu poetry by critics, scholars, connoisseurs and those who have grown in an informed Urdu milieu. Ironically, this turns out to be in inverse proportion to the unprecedented popularity of poets like Rahat. How does one explain this equation? It is almost axiomatic that with rising egalitarianism a taste for classics will decline. This truism was advanced for classical music too. It was a touching dependence on feudal patronage, as Jawed Naqvi recently reminded us, that caused the great Sarod maestro, Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan (Amjad Ali Khan’s father) to refuse any recording of his performances: “I don’t want my music to be played in city squares and paan shops.”

 

The danger of feudal patronage drying up was real but mostly in North India. The South remains much the more civilized thanks to such institutionalized treats in dance and music annually as “The Season” in Chennai. In the Hindi belt, just as the feudal patronage tapered off, enlightened business houses like the Bharatrams, Charatrams and the Sarabhais stepped in massively. They have now been superseded by the unbelievable explosion of music on the social media. Everything, from the earliest recordings in 1900, is available with the flip of a switch.

 

Compared to music, the graph of Urdu poetry is more complex. After Partition it was assumed that interest in Urdu would decline. Josh Malihabadi’s dictum that “a language which does not give you bread will die” did operate to the extent that the number of scholars, critics, indeed even university faculties dwindled. A more formal and educated appreciation of poetry was a distinct casualty.  Highbrow literature did begin to make way for more popular genres. But Urdu was able to frequently shock those who had written its obituary. Never was this shock more telling than during the unprecedented success of Jashn e Rekhta, a celebration of Urdu in all its forms, an annual carnival which fills up half a dozen venues at New Delhi’s National Stadium day and night for three days. This brainchild of a remarkable cultural entrepreneur Sanjiv Saraf is an unparalleled contribution towards uplifting the drooping morale of Urduwallas. Urdu’s demise, in any case, was prematurely predicted after the resilience it had demonstrated in Bollywood in the field of lyrics, diction, dialogues both, their content and delivery. Little wonder, Rahat became a sought after lyricist with music directors like Anu Malik and A.R. Rehman.

 

Artist M.F. Hussain became one of Rahat’s obsessive admirers after watching him keep a packed hall spellbound during a poetic symposium in Qatar. They became close friends. In fact the cover of one of Rahat’s collections, has been designed by Hussain.

 

There is stunning irony about his death. Rahat wrote:

“Waba phaili hui hai har taraf

Abhi mahaul mar jaane ka naheen”

(A pandemic is spreading everywhere

This is not the proper season to die.)

 

The poet who wrote these lines is declared Corona positive on the night of August 10 and is dead by August 11. Is there a galloping strain of Corona?

 

Remember how Habib Jalib’s “Main naheen manta” became an iconic song during the anti-citizenship stir? Equally evocative and direct was Rahat’s couplet:

“Sabhi ka khoon hai shamil yahan ki mitti mein;

Kisi ke baap ka Hindostan thodi hai”

(The blood of all of us has mingled in this soil;

Hindostan is not the property of anybody’s father)

 

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Two Brick Laying Ceremonies For Ram: Which One Was Kosher?

Two Brick Laying Ceremonies For Ram: Which One Was Kosher?

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

It reflects on the civilizational power of Lord Rama in this ancient land that Independent India’s five Prime Ministers involved themselves in the affairs of his birth place at Ayodhya. Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Narendra Modi and, tangentially, V.P. Singh in between.

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, learnt his early lessons about the limits to his power when the Rama idols “mysteriously” appeared on the night of December 22, 1949 at the spot where the Lord was supposed to have been born and UP Chief Minister, Govind Ballabh Pant refused to have the idols removed despite Nehru’s insistence. Secularism was a fine concept but not at the cost of Hindu faith. In the different approaches to Ayodhya are embedded serious divergences within the Congress on the centrality of Hinduism in national life. Not only was Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, President of the Congress for a record four terms, but he was also a founder of the Hindu Mahasabha. One may quibble on proportions, but there is Hindu Mahasabha in the Congress DNA just as there is the RSS in the BJP.

Nehru was a proud “Pandit” but there was a clear mismatch between his elitist tolerance of Hinduism and the all-pervasive Hindu faith in the make-up of most of his colleagues. It turns out, in retrospect, that Nehru’s secularism was a huge gamble. It would be thrilling if the secular experiment succeeded to a point where my brother Shanney could revisit relatives in Karachi and regale friends in JNU with the observation which became a classic in the 70s: “Nice place”, he said returning from Pakistan, “but too full of Muslims.” Today, this gregarious raconteur finds himself fixed in the pitying gaze of relatives from across the border. I called him in Lucknow on August 5, the day of the Shilanyas. He didn’t say much. It is instructive that the top-down secularism of Nehru and Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk faced eclipse within weeks of each other.

In his very first speech in Parliament in May 2014, Prime Minister Modi had lamented 1,200 years of foreign subjugation. But after the Shilanyas at Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, he was specific about the time-line of the Ayodhya struggle, that it had taken 500 years since Babar’s arrival, to liberate the hallowed birth place. There will ofcourse be arguments galore: has the choreography at Modi’s Shilanyas brought down the curtain on the old consensus on the Idea of India? Is that what an emotionally pent up nation’s cathartic “victory over Babar” entails? Was it that, a victory?

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra must be commended for having endorsed the beginning of a Ram temple, but in doing so she may have slighted her father’s memory. Rajiv Gandhi may not have been present at Ram’s birthplace for the first bricklaying ceremony on November 9, 1989, but a foundation stone was laid, at the behest of Rajiv Gandhi’s government under official supervision of the District Magistrate of Faizabad, Ram Sharan Srivastava, a more harassed officer I shall never see. Since I was seated next to him, I could virtually peep into the pit where the brick was to be laid, under instructions from Rajiv Gandhi, his cousin Arun Nehru and UP Chief Minister Narayan Dutt Tewari. It was an underhand, duplicitous operation, totally violative of the Allahabad High Court order which prohibited any construction on “disputed” land. In a show of force, Ashok Singhal of the VHP, the Hindu body leading the agitation for a temple, threatened “rivers of blood”: he would lay the foundation stone on exactly the spot which the temple plan dictated, namely the “disputed” land. Clandestinely, the VHP was allowed to have its say. But Srivastava was to put out a press note that the brick was laid a 100 feet away from the disputed site.

Rajiv was fighting for his life against his once favoured Finance Minister, V.P. Singh’s rebellion, in the 1989 General Elections. He struck a desperate deal with the VHP. The VHP was to press the BJP to pull back its horses in a seat at Faizabad and three in Kerala. The VHP will claim that it had done the Shilanyas where it wanted, in the first place. This double cross too was part of the secret deal. With all these machinations, Rajiv lost the General Elections.

Pranab Mukherjee in his memoirs, The Turbulent Years, has confirmed a gem of a story. A week before the Shilanyas, Rajiv escorted by Home Minister Buta Singh, visited Godman Devrahwa Baba who had a delightful way of blessing his devotees. He dangled his legs from a thatched roof and thumped on the head those he chose to bless, in this case the renaissance Prime Minister of India, eager to know if he should allow the Shilanyas. The Baba, networked in the interstellar spaces, transmitted his message: “Bachcha, ho jane do” (child, let it happen).

The soft saffron that Rajiv adopted by way of electoral tactics came to him from two sources: Indira Gandhi donned this shade during the 1982 Jammu election, this being her gut response to the Khalistan movement. Two years later, the unprecedented majority with which Rajiv Gandhi came to power after Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 was not attributed to a sympathy wave but a massive Hindu consolidation against “minority” communalism.

This conventional wisdom among Congress senior leaders caused him to open the temple locks in May 1986. Since then the Congress is wasting away, wearing soft saffron, selling its family heirlooms, even as the BJP acquires a shade of saffron as hard as was on show at the Shilanyas in Ayodhya.

Since it is accepted by everybody except perhaps Randeep Surjewala that the Congress is now beyond redemption, the best the Gandhi siblings can do is to recover as a priceless memento that brick which was laid in their father’s name in Ayodhya to start a temple for Lord Rama.

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