Will Lockdown Wipe Out Lifestyles Built Over 30 years?

Will Lockdown Wipe Out Lifestyles Built Over 30 years?

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

 

The ancient Indian protocol for social distancing is embedded in the lines my yoga guru, from the famous ashram in Monghyr, Bihar, taught me:

“Chaar miley, chausath khiley,

Miley bees ek saath.

Harjan se harijan miley,

Bihsain bahattar hazar”

(When two plus two i.e. four eyes meet each other; 32 plus 32, 64 teeth smile together’

10 fingers of both palms, greet 10 of the other, a total of 20.

Then a person, blessed by the Lord, is in union with another without physical contact.

This results in 36,000 vital points in one human body and 36,000 in the other, sending ripples of joy through 72,000 points in the two beings.)

The current etiquette of social distancing possibly has precedent in past practice. Arrival of outsiders may well have wrenched us away. With Freudian prescience, Akbar Allahabadi put his finger on the nub of the matter:

“Tifl mein bu aaye kya ma baap ke atwar ki,

Doodh to dibbe ka hai taaleem hai Sarkar ki.”

(How should an infant inherit characteristics of his/her parents on a diet of powdered milk and government education?)

The lockdown outlawed any toing and froing, conditions which Ghalib had described with great simplicity about Delhi during 1857:

“Koi vaan se na aa sake yaan tak,

Aadmi vaan na ja sake yaan ka”

(No one from there can come here;

Likewise, no one from here can go there)

This limitation on visiting each other soon began to reveal our instinctive comfort level with social separation. We were quite comfortable within the Lakshman rekhas we sketched around ourselves. More revealing were telephone conversations with neighbours, and members of the Residents Welfare Association. What they expressed was indifference to the migrants who had walked away from the suddenly imposed penury, joblessness, no roof over their heads in the torrid heat – and now it seems, the approaching winter. Were these millions condemned by their “karma”, to be judged for suitable slots only in the next life?

When I visited South Africa to cover Mandela’s release what struck me was not the exclusive white enclaves. I had expected them. After all that is what Apartheid was all about. What astonished me was Lenasia, the Indian colony outside Johannesburg. Sprawling mansions with two swimming pools was the lot of many Indians. Unlike the joyous “Black” South Africa, much the overwhelming majority, Lenasia was uneasy at the end of White rule. It was possible to meet Manek Patel in his bungalow who thought “apartheid helped keep bloodline pure”.

Hierarchies and class are inescapable. A revolutionary like Ho Chi Minh did live in a modest, two room, oak cottage but it had the nicest view of the lake. The rare visa which enabled me to cover the 1979 China-Vietnam war was arranged by a member of the Bao Dai family, an old Vietnamese aristocracy.

The Indian hierarchy, based on caste, is unique. Unlike racism, it is not based on prejudice: it is simply a time honoured practice which draws red lines, not to be crossed, between occupation based caste groups arranged in a vertical hierarchy. Egalitarianism disrupts these red lines. The unease with the Constitution is deep seated for this reason with the present regime which harks back to a pre Islamic “golden past”.

As we enter the seventh month of the lockdown, it may be worthwhile taking stock. My wife and I (and a live-in help) have been moderately cautious: we have entertained, keeping social distancing and never having more than four guests. Likewise, we have visited friends for meals, and taken the masks off, once seated.

My daily three kilometer walk in the park adjacent to our apartment (I take off the mask; it suffocates me) has been sacrosanct as has been my yoga. The clan in hundreds spread across north India, has so far reported no expiry. But there have been three positive cases in Lucknow including an 85 year old with co morbidities. They recovered within three days and three children in the same apartment remained untouched by the virus.

The bleakness that I see ahead cannot be extrapolated from our experience in the health arena. It is the economic sphere, joblessness, abysmal drop in resources, redesigned kitchen budgets, even within cousins where darkness is catching up.

A visit to South Delhi’s Select City Mall was scary. Hanuman Chalisa was being chanted in the biggest food mart to invoke the monkey God. The lobby of the five star hotel was as eerie as the empty road in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, where a biplane swoops down on a terrified Cary Grant. A five star restaurant without a customer abutting a bar, stocked to the ceiling, but without a soul. Trust Ghalib to invade my mind:

“Bharē hain jis qadar jaam o subu, maikhana khali hai.”

(Goblets and cups are full to the brim, but the tavern is totally empty)

How long will Indian capitalism survive such tightly sealed goblets? Corona, I suspect, will wipe out lifestyles boosted by 30 years of reform. The new middle class will revert to their first car, the Maruti and mother’s vegetarian recipes.

This middle class may adjust without too much fuss to the pre reform austerities, a mood that will dovetail nicely in the march towards Hindu Rashtra. A fly in the ointment may well be mass anger. After all, those who walked, their ranks swelled by the jobless and the hungry, will ask questions. Will bread trump faith? To forestall any trouble on that count, the regime has already unfurled a range of draconian measures to put away anyone with a talent to mobilize public anger. As a backup there is also the scary virus as a deterrent against public anger bursting onto the streets. This scarecrow can be made scarier. But that might accelerate velocity of the economy’s nosedive. Which economy? What better way to stop the leak than to sink the ship? Salvation shimmers over the sands as silhouettes of the Hindu Rashtra appear.

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Antecedents Of Anti Muslim Bias In Media Including Sudarshan TV

Antecedents Of Anti Muslim Bias In Media Including Sudarshan TV

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

There have been many but let me cite just two reactions from the family to Justices D.Y. Chandrachud, Indu Malhotra and K.M. Joseph’s utterances restraining Sudarshan TV from telecasting its “UPSC Jihad” show. A relative mailed a couplet comprehensive in its simplicity:

“Door insaan ke sar se yeh musibat kar do

Aag dozakh ki bujha do, use jannat kar do”

(Remove this menace hovering over our heads,

Douse the leaping flames of hell; make it a paradise)

“Leaping flames of hell”: that is how a majority of Indian TV shows register with petrified Muslims. TV news is daily mortification; lynchings happen outdoors. The Supreme Court’s quest for “some mechanism” for self regulation of the media brings her hope. “Cricket will be played within a well measured boundary?” Not too much to expect.

The other reaction, from a younger relative is more cynical: if the Supreme Court had sharp instincts, it would have taken suo moto note of the outrage, before Sudarshan TV was able to telecast even one episode.

Incipient communalism was part of the Republic from the very beginning. Contentious issues on that score, however, did not come up when the electronic media consisted only of Doordarshan. DD, launched in the mid-70s, faced roadblocks too – as in the screening of Tamas, based on a novel by Bhishm Sahni, directed by Govind Nihalani. Centered on Partition, the director pulls no punches on exposing communalism on all sides. Since Hindu communalism had never been placed under the scanner with such candour in independent India, there was a furore. Screening was stopped. Only when Justices Bakhtawar Lentin and Sujata Manohar of Bombay High Court cleared the serial was it screened.

The Sudarshan TV’s “UPSC Jihad” is in the words of Justice Chandrachud, a “rabid” vilification of Muslims. The channel felt encouraged to cross the red line because this particular line is considered Kosher in the current political atmosphere by mainstream channels as well as fly-by-night media operators.

An anti Muslim edge is a perceived requirement of Modi’s march towards Hindu Rashtra. But an anti Muslim edge in the media has antecedents which predate Modi. Four apparently disparate events stirred the cauldron of communalism. In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed. The disappearance of a column in the international system on which India had depended, plus an unprecedented economic crisis, caused Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to lurch towards Washington and swiftly embark on liberal economic policies.

With the new market economy came consumerism and the need for multiple TV channels to accommodate the burgeoning advertising. Remember, when the Babari Masjid fell in December 1992, there was only Doordarshan to televise the news. About this time Mandal versus Kamandal, caste versus communalism spiraled out of the control. It is pointless speculating whether a mushroom growth of channels went some distance in amplifying the new, energetic, communal politics. Market and identity politics is a separate study. Internal politics, however communal, would have been amenable to management. The real problem arose when globalization, spurred on by unbridled capitalism caused even Barack Obama to ask in retrospect: “Did we mishandle globalization?” I have often wondered if Ghalib’s imagery is applicable:

“Rau mein hai rakhsh e umr kahaan dekhiye thamey,

Nay haath bag par hain, na pa hai rakab mein.”

(The steed is in full flight; I know not where it will halt;

I have lost control of the reins and, feet are not in the stirrups.) That was globalization.

All Prime Ministers of India from 1947 to the mid-90s depended on traditional forms of mass mobilization, prior to the TV era. A more media savvy prime minister than Narendra Modi there has not been. He played all the strings to arrange for himself a saturation coverage of the 2014 and 2019 elections with expert ease. Crony capitalism was essential and it was easily managed.

Having brought down the Soviet Union, the US put its imprimatur on a Unipolar World Order by embarking on operation Desert Storm in February 1992. In some ways, Desert Storm bared the plans the US had for the future. The most important of these, pertinent to our narrative, was the inauguration of the Global Electronic Media which the Pentagon planned with such stealth that even arch ally like UK found itself flat footed. BBC’s senior correspondent, John Simpson walked around Baghdad with a lowly satellite telephone while Peter Arnett of the CNN launched the New World Information order from the terrace of Baghdad’s Al Rasheed hotel. For the first time in history, a war was brought live into our drawing rooms.

The unprecedented fire power which I saw from the 14^th floor of Al Mansour hotel, remained a nightmare for months. This frightful exhibition, let it always be remembered, divided the world in perpetuity into two hostile sets of audience – the triumphant West and the defeated Muslim world, humiliated yet again. Had multiple channels been operational in India (they were not in 1991-92), would they have been cheering western victory or Muslim defeat? It would have been bad form to pose this query then? Please note how times have changed and why the Supreme Court’s intervention is timely.

The Post 9/11 war on terror transformed itself into a crusade against Islam. Journalistic restraint became a casualty. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News flourished a revolver in front of a TV camera in October 2001 in Afghanistan. “Should I see Osama bin Laden anywhere, I shall finish him off with this”, said he, his finger on the trigger.

The copycat Indian media, now in a phase of rapid expansion, picked up every inflection. When Narendra Modi arrived in Gujarat in October 2001 for his baptism as Chief Minister, the fireworks over Afghanistan, demonization of Osama bin Laden was dominating the airwaves. Global Islamophobia dovetailed nicely into Indian communalism. The February 2002 Gujarat pogrom produced some excellent TV journalism but the confluence of Islamophobia and hard saffron muffled the murderous events for an attentive global audience.

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Politics By Blackmail: Eulalie Syndrome In Indian Public Life

Politics By Blackmail: Eulalie Syndrome In Indian Public Life

                                                                                 Saeed Naqvi

If the Gandhi trio stirred themselves into action as a serious opposition, is there a possibility that they would end up in jail? If they were spared despite this affront, it would imply that the Modi outfit has come to the conclusion that the Gandhis are now totally harmless.

Requirements of the media in this regard are helpful to the Narendra Modi establishment in a peculiar way. It keeps the Gandhis in frequent focus with the express purpose of sustaining the delusion that they are still the rallying point for a national opposition. This salience given to the Gandhis keeps them in the public eye and thereby a massive roadblock in the way of any opposition unity, particularly since the Gandhis and their limping cohorts constantly “emote” an urge to “revive”. They know that such a revival is impossible but the belief serves a purpose indicated above: it obstructs opposition unity. The media is content with the simplicity of the tweedledum versus tweedledee narrative. After all, coalitions and regional diversities are complexities impossible to contain in soundbytes.

In recent times, a story that has wafted out of the Gandhi enclosure is one of differences between them. Sonia Gandhi, with reliable retainers like Ahmad Patel is averse to rocking any boat. Status quo, uncomfortable though it be, is about the best she sees for the brood in the given circumstances. Her listless politics is also a function of her indifferent health.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s status quoism derives from her personal anxieties, family problems and an inability to cope with responsibilities. Ask Kishori Lal Sharma, appointed years ago to nurse the “family burroughs” of Rae Bareli and Amethi and he will guardedly spill the beans. The poor fellow’s Stan Hardy (as in Laurel and Hardy) moustache greyed waiting for Priyanka to address the “Congress volunteers”. But Priyanka, like Godot, never showed up.

Rahul Gandhi, meanwhile, is being more assertive about beliefs he has long held and which approximate to the line Rajiv Gandhi enunciated at the 1985 Congress Centenary in Mumbai chastising the “power brokers”. Is Rahul Gandhi looking for that kind of a platform?

In 1969, when his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, split the Congress away from the “power brokers”, the regional satraps, the capitalists, eventually joined up with the Socialists and the RSS in the Bihar movement of 1974 under the leadership of arch Gandhian, Jayaprakash Narayan.

The 1969 split had a Left-Right dimension to it because it was in the context of the Cold War. In the post Cold War world “Inequality” has emerged as the principal affliction of democracies where people’s demands are dismissed as “populism”. Crony capitalism thrives but no political party is allowed to find its feet if it intends to harness the discontent of the people who have borne the brunt of, say, the extended lockdown in India. There is a huge Left-of-Centre space for the opposition to occupy. It does not have to be terribly ideological. All it has to do is to make available to the people social benefits such as health, education, housing etcetera. Surely Rahul is aware of this opening, even though Sonia Gandhi is averse to any politics that would incur the wrath of the state.

Politics these days is at a standstill because of the lockdown, ofcourse, but also because of what I call the “Eulalie” syndrome. This light hearted diversion comes from Wodehouse. The resourceful Jeeves has come to the assistance of his master, Bertie Wooster, at a particularly challenging moment. Spode, the Earl of Sidwik, has become a permanent social menace in a country house which is Bertie’s favourite haunt. How to cut down Spode’s bombast? That is Bertie’s challenge. Jeeves provides the panacea. Bertie’s has to sneak upto Spode and whisper, “I know all about Eulalie.” Bertie follows Jeeves’ advice. The result is electric. Spode becomes white as a sheet and collapses in the chair like a deflated balloon. It turns out that before Spode began to float in London’s high society, he owned a store called Eulalie which sold lingerie known for its bras with bold designs. Eulalie, then is harmless blackmail. But the blackmail which has become the staple in contemporary politics is brutal.

A whisper on the National Herald case or Robert Vadra’s land deals and Sonia Gandhi will begin to resemble Spode after the latter heard the threat made to him, “I know all about Eulalie.”

After the BJP’s stunning victory in UP in 2017, the opposition, armed with data on electoral fraud, sought Sonia Gandhi’s permission to hold a press conference. She refused to get involved in “controversies”. Likewise, she backed away from “snoopgate” which had both Modi and Amit Shah in difficulties.

Take a look at Lucknow. Jockeying has begun for the 10 Rajya Sabha seats from UP. Conventional wisdom concedes eight to the BJP and one to the SP. One would have expected the opposition to jointly keep the BJP out on the solitary remaining seat. But individual party leaders are in an almighty state of funk just in case the Enforcement Directorate comes knocking at their door.

Even though the opposition has a comfortable majority in the Upper House, the BJP rammed through nearly a hundred bills without any vote. A petrified Akhilesh Yadav is hiding behind columns to avoid political leaders who are pressing him to approach the Supreme Court. What if Yogi Adityanath sets the dogs on him?

In uniformed cities like New Delhi these examples of the ruling party’s impunity, away from the media’s critical glare, enhance an impression of the BJP’s invincibility. Forgotten are dismal economic figures and the simple catalogue that the party is not in power in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Odisha, West Bengal, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Delhi. Just as your eye settles on these facts, India Today thrusts before you its poll results: Modi’s approval ratings are 78 percent. Like the Priest in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, you walk away nodding your head, “What is the truth?”

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Is Modi’s Invincibility A Cow Belt Paranoia? Nation Breathes Easier

 Is Modi’s Invincibility A Cow Belt Paranoia? Nation Breathes Easier

                                                                                  Saeed Naqvi

 

A priceless gift from a friend in Kerala, a Namboodri to boot, is a film to augment my collection which has sustained my personal film festival to beat the unintelligible lockdown.

The film, Agraharathil Kazhutai, or Donkey in a Brahmin Village, was a pleasant shock not because of the title, but its authorship. The film is listed as one of the masterly satires by the late John Abraham. A baby donkey, whose mother has been beaten to death for reasons unknown, strays onto the doorstep of a tall, lanky Professor of Philosophy in a local college. The donkey in the bachelor professor’s house leads to amusement, gossip, graffiti until the principal, a stern looking Pastor, informs the Professor that his hospitality towards the donkey was affecting the college’s reputation.

The Professor carts the donkey by bus and bullock cart to the Agraharam or the Brahmin village where his parents live. A deaf and mute maidservant looks after the donkey.

The maid has an affair with the village washerman, delivers a still-born male child which is left outside the temple. The Chief Priest declares it the most dreadful omen, unanimously attributed by the elders to the donkey’s presence in the village. The animal is beaten to death, followed by a series of unfortunate events which the Agraharam, on second thoughts, blame on the fact that the donkey was killed in haste. A monument to the beast is planned. A wild fire dance burns much of the village leaving the Professor and the maid contemplating the scene for its deeper significance.

The reason for my focus on the film is not “cinema”, but the fact that someone with a name like John Abraham could satirize the Agraharam with such outrageous audacity. In my limited experience – a day’s visit – the Agraharam was quite stately in its austerity. I saw no car on the street nor, in the middle of the day, was there any movement outside, dogs, cats, cattle, nothing. There is a lovely view of river Kalpathy below, like the Agraharam’s private pond for a holy dip.

Away from the road, on the stone seat were occasional bare bodied men, sporting the fattest janyeugs I have seen. The visitor’s room has a mural size painting of Palghat Mani Iyer, the great mridangam player and a local icon. The centre of the main hall is dominated by a swing; every square inch of the wall space is covered with Gods and Goddesses. At the end of the passage is a “tulsi” plant in a decorated pot on a pedestal. The master of the house, a man of wit and music, had worn a shirt to appear hospitable. With amusement in his eyes, he showed us where he slept: on a narrow bed in the passage. And his wife? “On the floor right below me.” He puts his head back and guffaws. But it is not quite so unequal. “She qualifies for the bed when she is unwell.”

I found it quaint, as an uncritical bird of passage would. But the Agraharam, like Peyton Place, would expose its darker side to a son of the soil, a few mohallas removed, like Abraham.

It is all so refreshing this informality across faiths, this ability to tolerate irreverence without ill will. The most popular political prisoner in Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s The Wall is Basheer, pining for Narayani on the other side of the wall and whom he has not seen. Adoor is quite unselfconscious about the fact that the protagonists belong to different faiths. My romance with “God’s own country” goes back to the 70s when I was editor of The Indian Express in the south. But a change has come upon me: earlier I admired Kerala, indeed much of the South; now I have begun to envy it.

India was always ones country, but the basic affiliation was with Awadh of which Lucknow was the markaz or centre. Mir Taqi Mir talked of Delhi’s destruction:

“Dill jo ek shaher tha alam mein intekhab

rehte thay muntakhib hi jahan rozgar ke

Usko falak ne loot ke barbaad kar diya

Hum rehne waley haen usi ujre dayar ke.”

(Delhi which was once the world’s pride, where only those with good manners lived,

Fortune turned upon the city, destroyed and looted it.

In that desolate city did I once live)

Replace Delhi with Awadh/Lucknow and you are somewhere near the root of those ogres in the mind.

Lucknow, indeed Awadh, was generosity personified. Ram Advani from Sindh was embraced as Lucknow’s very own. His bookshop was an incomparable cultural landmark. Among the Lucknavi’s several quaint beliefs: to be a lawyer or a doctor, you had to be a Bengali first. For obvious reasons, western enlightenment had come to Bengal first. Riding this belief, Bengali lawyers and doctors had easy passage in Lucknow. The intellectual life of Lucknow University was dominated for long stretches by Radha Kumud and Radha Kamal Mukherjee. Little wonder, when Satyajit Ray, soaked in Bengaliness, ventured out of Bengal, it was towards Lucknow he deviated with his superb Shatranj ke Khiladi.

The ogres of the mind have been gestating for atleast 30 years when the BJP and the Congress began to compete for the Hindu vote. Congress chose to play both sides of the street. Once, V.P. Singh tossed the Mandal Commission into the simmering cauldron, the Hindutva brigade ran away with the platform of brazen anti Muslim Hindu consolidation, leaving the Congress sleeping by the lamp post with its soft saffron.

There is a certain demoralization in the anti Hindutva ranks at the presumed invincibility of Narendra Modi, despite the country crashing on every count. This may well be a function of shrewd tactics: keep the media focus away from regions where the country still breathes easy. It may not be such a good thing, though, for national cohesion if different parts of the country do not fit into the same frame.

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