From Modi, Reliance, Adani Presence at Motera to Possible SAARC Tournament.

 

From Modi,Reliance, Adani Presence at  Motera to Possible SAARC Tournament.

                                                                                                                             Saeed Naqvi

Mun tora haji begoyam

Tu mara haji begoh

The subtlety in the Persian couplet, which roughly means “ I scratch your back, you scratch mine”, would be misplaced if applied to the affairs surrounding the world’s biggest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad. What was once billed as the Sardar Patel Stadium has, in contemporary fashion, been renamed after Narendra Modi. Just as some deities are depicted with their Guardian Angels, the Modi stadium is flanked by Adani and Reliance enclosures.

The brazennes of the trio in one Motera package is more aptly expressed in the song:

            “Khullam Khulla pyar karenge hum dono.

            Is duniya se naheen darenge hum dono”.

(The politician and the industrialist will make Love openly. We do not give a damn to this peering, learing world).

Stand up comedian Kunal Kamra is even more irreverent “Why is Modi standing between me and Ambani / Adani”. Kamra sees the business duet as the principal drivers of crony capitalism.

The triumvirate has been in play since atleast 2014. It gathered momentum during the 2019 elections when Modi, draped in saffron, sank into the deepest layers of meditation at the Kedarnath cave. This spiritual exertion of the Supremo became 24 X 7 diet for the voters in the throes of an election. Saturation media coverage was per courtesy the duet which controls the electronic and print media. Now, ofcourse, the supremo has acquired the looks of a sage : silver locks and beard of pious length. Just imagine peacocks eating out of his hands. Unbelievable, the televised image of a peacock, the shyest of birds, unfurling its plumes in a divine mujra for Modi.

The triumvirate must have  beamed suitable vibrations on the pitch. The test match ended in two days and in India’s favour. For the local crowds, a hero was born, Axar Patel, who had a tally of two fifers. Heaven knows what else is in store for him in the next Test and fiveT20s on the same hallowed ground. 

With his 11 wicket haul in the match Axar Patel still remains way behind another Gujarati, Jasubhai Motibhai Patel. His 14 wicket haul, at Kanpur in the 1959-60 series against Ritchie Benand’s star studded Australian team is worth remembering. That the wicket would turn became clear in India’s first inning when Benand took four wickets with his leg spinners. But Patel was quite unplayable, virtually turning at right angles.

The most vivid memory is not of Patel’s haul. Patel took advantage of the devil in the wicket as did Joe Root at the Motera. What left an indelible mark on me was how a great batsman copes with impossible playing conditions. This was the cameo of a knock by Neil Harvey, the elegant, left handed batsman. The adjective “great” would in my reckoning apply to a player who was part of Bradman’s celebrated eleven. He used his feet, jumped out to smother the spin or drive on the half-volley in a brief but dazzling display of stroke making.

The description of the Kanpur pitch as a “mud Leap” by some Australian cricket writers was cause of deep consternation for Vizzy, the well known Commentator who was all lyrical about Patel. The lyric was frequently punctuated by a mocking chant of “Mud Leap Indeed”.

The relevance of the Harvey story in the context of the English team’s debacle at Motera is exactly what Sunil Gavaskar in his comments emphasized: in such conditions, “use your feet”.

My preference for the miniature in comparison to a mural probably reflects in my admiration for scintillating, purposive, brief knocks. During the 1958 West Indies tour, the high point of the Kanpur test was Gary Sobers 198, ending sadly in a run out. But Rohan Kanhal’s 41 remains memorable because it turned the tide with effortless stroke play, bisecting the field with compass-like precision.

West Indies were all out at 222. India scored just that –222. In the second innings India’s laughable opening attack of G.Ramchand and Polly Umrigar removed the celebrated opening pair of Hunte and Holt for a duck each. A hush fell on the ground. The short, slight frame of Kanhai walked to the pitch. First ball driven for a four between point and cover; second ball, another four, off his toes. Within two overs, Hunte and Holt had receded as memories. Only after the West Indies had been steadied did Sobers come out with his full majesty.

An equally pretty knock etched on my mind is Maqsood Ahmad’s breezy 41, clean shots leaving fielders flat footed, caressing the grass at Lucknow’s Gomti ground, all the way to the fence. At the other end was opener Nazar Mohammad carrying his bat with a dull, dour, possibly relevant hundred.

From the open consolidation of the Modi, Ambani, Adani triumvirate at Motera, I have deviated vastly into the caverns of my experiences with cricket. I am finding it difficult to resist the temptation to recall a defining moment in Indian cricket at Sabina Park, Jamaica during the Bishen Singh Bedi led tour in 1975 – 76. Bedi’s lament in the West Indies sums up the equation between the teams. “Their effort was to subdue us”.

The test was memorable for debutante Michael Holding’s Lethal bombardment of the Indian batsmen . They ducked, got badly hurt, or hung their bats out to save their skins – with the solitary exception of Sunil Gavaskar with his innate genius for facing pace attack. Bedi called the team off the field.

This was also one of Vivian Richards earlier tests. His innings of 61 revealed his singular talent – yards of time to design his strokes.

I was reading reports of the briefest test in history when my eyes fell on the Page 1 headline: Thaw In Deep India-Pak Chill. Like Walter Mitty, I sank into my reverie : SAARC Cricket tournament headquartered at Motera .

 

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Did External Influences Increase in Indian Politics After Congress Split, 1969

Did External Influences Increase in Indian Politics After Congress Split, 1969

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

I had no business to forget Badshah Khan’s 130^th birthday this February, having been his press secretary when he came on a year’s “healing mission” as guest of both the political camps led by Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan.

The international system is trying to compose itself today. It was dividing itself sharply during the Pashtun leader’s visit. Just as India became salient to regional play then, it will by force of circumstances, become part of the new regional pirouette.

The Indian Independence Act, 18 July 1947, was part of the world order being shaped as part of the Cold War which began in 1945.

Pakistan was incorporated into the Baghdad Pact, CENTO, and such like military alliance as bulwark against the Soviet Union. Also, Industrial production of oil had to be protected in the Persian Gulf. On India was conferred the elaborate task to secure a liberal democratic polity which would keep nefarious ideas like Communism and Marxism at bay. That was the responsibility given to India by the imperial order. And how dutifully New Delhi has fulfilled that role. Demonization of “Urban Naxals” is a crude variant on the theme pursued by the Congress party since its earliest days in power. Remember how Indira Gandhi as Congress President (Nehru was the Prime Minister) had President’s rule imposed to dismiss the world’s first communist government elected by the ballot box in Kerala. The E.M.S. Namboodripad government had been voted in 1957. Mrs. Gandhi sought US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s help to discredit this government by helping organize street protests. This would give the centre an excuse to dismiss the government and impose President’s rule. This operation was revealed by Bunker in a Podcast at Columbia University.

This brings me to Badshah Khan’s visit in 1969 when Indira Gandhi, as Prime Minister, played a hand ideologically quite the opposite of what she did in Kerala a decade earlier. She split the Congress Party, weaning away the party bosses close to capitalists and proceeded to nationalize banks. The correspondent of the Times London, Peter Hazelhurst, summed up Indira Gandhi succinctly: she is a little Left of self interest.

As a matter of fact she had at this stage moved more than a “little” to the Left. Not only did she have in her cabinet a once card carrying member of the Communist Party, Mohan Kumaramanglam educated at Eton and Cambridge where his education coincided more or less with Kim Philby’s innings at Cambridge but he became an influence on her.

He enunciated what came to be known as the Kumaramangalam thesis. President S.A. Dange of CPI joined hands with Indira to make up for the shortfall in numbers in the Lok Sabha. The CPI described it as a policy of “Unity and struggle”. In other words “we struggle” against Congress’s “anti peoples” policies and unite on its socialist programmes.

This leftward lurch reached a climax when Soviet advisers helped New Delhi’s 1971 Bangladesh operations. The high Soviet profile in these operations was the principal reason for Nixon-Kissinger to order the 6^th fleet in the Bay of Bengal, as a check.

The fierce East-West competition induced a parallel internal Right-Left competition. As her comfort level with the Left increased, the powerful Congress party satraps, expelled by Indira Gandhi clasped the hands of compulsive anti communists, anti Congress, Hindu nationalist, all on the capitalist page, under the leadership of arch Gandhian, Jayaprakash Narayan. It came to be known as the Bihar movement for “total revolution”. This movement itself had antecedents, both internal, like Gujarat’s Navnirman Samiti agitation and external, like the Grosvenor Square demonstration in London and the barricades in Paris which shook De Gaulle. In fact the cusp of 1968 and the 70 were momentous – Prague Spring, Tet offensive (Vietnam), Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy’s assassination. These traumatic events were chronologically proximate to the Congress split, Navnirman agitation (Gujarat) and, JP movement in Bihar, the state with a powerful communist party which, unlike elsewhere in India, had not split into CPI and CPM following the Sino-Soviet split of 1964.

Although the Bihar movement projected itself as anti corruption, it was primarily aimed at seeking regime change at the centre and the state to give advantage to anti Left forces in Bihar where the communists and a Left inclined Congress – I (I stood for Indira) had retained their power.

It was the thrust of JP movement combined with the Allahabad High Court judgement unseating Indira Gandhi – a double fisted punch which unnerved Indira Gandhi to the extreme. She imposed the Emergency in 1975.

Conspiracy theorists advanced a right wing plot. Indira Gandhi had walked straight into the post emergency elections which colleagues like P.N. Dhar advised her to undertake. These held in 1977 brought to power the Janata Party, consisting of every political formation under JP’s banner including the tallest leaders of what is today the BJP – Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. The Right had got the opening it was eyeing.

During her brief political wilderness, Indira Gandhi spoke at length of the “foreign hand” in Indian politics. This was in continuation of the “foreign hand” chant sustained by her hand picked Congress President, Shankar Dayal Sharma. Sharma’s “foreign hand” inspired Swatantra Party leader, Piloo Mody to come to the Lok Sabha wearing a placard – “I am a CIA agent.”

An Agatha Christie like twist to this tale was my conversation with Chester Bowles in the US. Afflicted by galloping Parkinson’s disease, Bowles used to whisper into a pipe which his secretary decoded. When he heard of allegations in the Lok Sabha about the CIA having placed a device on the Nanda Devi to spy on the Chinese, Bowles sat up from his reclining position. “But Indira had asked me to.”

Indian independence coincided with the Cold war. Continuous interplay between the external and internal was built into the script. And now that world order, unrecognizably smudged during the Trump years, is reshaping itself with Biden’s inauguration, what lies in store for Indian politics which was fractured in two during Badshah Khan’s 1969 visit?

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Communalism Eases Out Legendary Wasim Jaffer From Uttarakhand Cricket

Communalism Eases Out Legendary Wasim Jaffer From Uttarakhand Cricket

                                                                                       Saeed Naqvi

Culture of cricket on both sides of the border suggested itself at this stage as a theme because of the shocking developments in Uttarakhand Cricket. Coach Wasim Jaffer, a legendary batsman (no one in cricketing history has scored over 19,000 runs in first class cricket) resigned from his job, harried by allegations of “communal bias” in selection of the state’s team. Jaffer blames Mahim Verma, Secretary of State Cricket, for promoting undeserving favourites, a fact which led to a conflict between the two.

Another cricketer, Iqbal Abdullah, more interested in the hereafter than scoring runs on the pitch, sought permission to invite a Mullah to lead the Friday prayers. This was unacceptable to Secretary Verma as it would be to any sensible person. But Verma was supportive of “Ram bhakt Hanuman ki jai” as the team’s slogan. Jaffer’s suggestion that “Go Uttarakhand” would help weld the team better was ignored.

Distress at incidents of this nature causes me to reminisce about better days. My initiation into test cricket was through the agency of a medium size AGA radio which had to be tuned every minute to hear the commentary with any clarity.

Commentary by Vizzy or Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram was the soul of Indian cricket for us novices. One of Vizzy’s obsessions was to have test cricket shifted from Green Park Kanpur to Lucknow, the city of Nawabs, which vibed better with Vizzy’s feudal, aristocratic temperament.

Lucknow, because of its stout resistance during 1857 was punished by the British on every count. Thus the High Court was bestowed on Allahabad as was the country’s premiere university. Industry was parceled away to Kanpur (Cawnpore, during the Raj) which, per courtesy the Industrialists, began to host the Test match at Green Park.

Vizzy was determined to exert all his influence in cricketing circles to have the Test match venue shifted to the picturesque grounds located between the University and Gomti River. It was on these grounds that the 1952-53 Pakistan team clashed with India in the second test. Opener Nazar Mohammad hit a century. Fazal Mahmood with his leg cutters took 12 wickets. Indian was routed. Meanwhile Lucknow’s adorable vagabond, raconteur and wit, Safdar had found two Maulanas at the match sources of great amusement with their gentle biases.

Fazal Mahmood bowled a leg cutter which was snapped up by Imtiaz Ahmad behind the stumps but the umpire disallowed the appeal. The Maulana’s leapt to their feet in excitement. “Click to hua tha?” (There was a click) said the Maulana peering into the binoculars. Safdar could not contain himself. Pointing to the binocular he asked: “Ismein sunayi bhi deta hai, Maulana?” (You can also hear through this instrument?) I have told this amusing incident earlier too.

Safdar had failed in High School several times at Islamia College where he remained an institution for years after his unsuccessful bid at scholarship. Islamia College was on a narrow lane which opened onto one of Lucknow’s main roads curving from Hazratganj past the Legislative Assembly building, towards Charbagh railway station. At this intersection was Royal hotel where the Pakistan team were staying. As one entered the hotel the lounge bar immediately caught the eye. In the middle was a circular service area decorated with alcoholic beverages, mostly beer served to guests seated on high bar stools.

The lounge bar was a curiosity by itself for students of Islamia College drawn to the Royal hotel for a glimpse of Pakistani players particularly, “batting prodigy” Hanif Mohammad, only 17 years old and Fazal Mahmood the ace medium pacer with blue eyes. For Islamia College students the “maikhana” or the Tavern was the haunt of Urdu poets. They had not seen a bar in real life.

What astonished them more was Maqsood Ahmad, Pakistan’s stylish number 3 batsman, quite at home at the bar with a large tumbler frothing over with Golden Eagle lager. Musharraf, the tall swing bowler from Lucknow’s famous Morning Star club, leading a handful of Islamia College boys lurched aggressively towards Maqsood.

“Aapko sharm naheen aati; Mussalmaan hote hue bhi sharab peete hain? (Aren’t you ashamed drinking even though you are a Muslim) A shocked Maqsood, along with his team mates, receded, balancing his beer.

It was stunning irony. Here were students in a secular state, admittedly culturally conservative and of a somewhat mofussil background, faulting cricketers from the newly formed Islamic Republic on the question of alcohol.

The answer possibly lies in the different evolutions of Lucknow and Lahore, the primary catchment area for the Pakistan team. After the experience of 1857, Lucknow had begun to accentuate its Urdu culture and shed the Anglaise in its makeup. The core of old Lucknow rejoiced in its chant “gandi galiyaan; saaf zubaan”. (Dirty lanes but elegant speech).

Lahore retained its cosmopolitan vigour until the other day – Maqsood or Maxi as he was called, was a creature of this culture.

Directive Principle of the Indian Constitution sets prohibition as a sort of ideal. This is in deference to Gandhian abstemiousness. In 1977, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in a burst of populism to outflank Gen. Zia ul Haq’s excessive Islamism, banned the consumption of alcohol. Yes, the same Bhutto who had brought his own crate of Chivas Regal to the Simla Summit in 1972. An exchange in Simla between Bhutto and his Berkeley University friend, the late Swatantra party leader Piloo Mody is memorable.

“Zulfie, I can understand you bringing your own scotch to Simla, but surely you could have accepted Indian soda.”

For irony, Bhutto’s response is a classic, considering that he is the author of Pakistan’s much flouted dry law.

“Have you forgotten Piloo, Scotch tastes best with Schweppes soda!”

Incidents mentioned above touch on creeping religiosity but they can yet provide some amusement. That religiosity has now putrefied to a point that a gentleman cricketer like Jaffer becomes an object of hate for folks like Mahim Verma advancing personal interests on the back of rampant communalism.

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