The Sunak Factor Showcases Britain At Its Best Or Decline?

The Sunak Factor Showcases Britain At Its Best Or Decline?

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

Can Rishi Sunak be placed with Macaulay’s children? Thomas Babington Macaulay described these as “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion in morals and intellect.” Traces of Rishi, there?

Had Macaulay manifested himself by some miracle in the Calcutta of the 50s and 60s, he would have patted himself on the back. All English companies were in the safe hands of brown-Englishmen – boxwallahs they were called. But Macaulay would have gulped at the sight of his cultural progeny of colour elevated to the job his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli once occupied – that of Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Macaulay’s Minute for Education policy was circulated in 1835. As if on cue, Doon School, modeled on Eton, opened its dormitories for the first batch in 1935. This facilitated princes, civil servants, army top brass and sundry elites to recycle their progeny through Doon School, St. Stephen’s College (or its equivalents), and Cambridge or Oxford.

This recycling lasted barely two generation because a large part of this elite ran out of cash. It found it difficult to afford the Rs.10,000 required to put their wards through a Tripos at Cambridge. By the mid 70s, it was the turn of the scholarship elites from the Ivy League to take over top jobs in the economics sector. Rishi Sunak does not trace his ancestry to this earlier elite. His is more the aspirational tribe which did not have an elite base in India. This lot turned up not to recycle itself through famous universities. It did one better. It settled in places like South Hall, Birmingham, Leicester Rochdale, Leeds. The last named triggers a story I cannot resist telling. The story was told to me by Denis Healy, the best Prime Minister Britain never had. During an election in the 20s, the short list of three Labour candidates for Leeds South contained one M.A. Jinnah.

Healy peers at me from under the bushiest of eyebrows: “supposing Jinnah had been nominated and won, would the history of the subcontinent been different?”

Had Sunak’s ancestors, who left Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, come directly to Britain where would they have settled? It is difficult to map them because they left for Kenya before India was Partitioned. In a sense, Sunak is Idi Amin’s gift to Britain. Had the Ugandan dictator not set into motion a chain of migration from East Africa by first expelling them from his country in the 70s, Indians may still be in East Africa.

The planning by the Sunak family into the making of Rishi is exemplary. But let me first tell you a brief story of a planned life, destination clearly in view.

A young man of modest means sought accommodation near a Golf Course so that his daughter could join the nearby school. He and his daughter would then join the Golf Club, at whatever cost, beg, borrow or steal. By the time she is past her higher-secondary, ready for college, she will be an expert, if not a champion, golfer. This is high premium qualification for admission in the fanciest US colleges on his diligently drawn up list. The whole trajectory worked out.

In Sunak’s case the career was conceived and mapped with the best possible education as a stepping stone to networks, wealth and power. Stroud preparatory school, Southampton, Winchester College where he was head boy; Oxford, Stanford and the campus secret societies en route double distilling the elite network.

It is, ofcourse, misleading to place a person who became Prime Minister in double quick time in the same frame as those who achieved less. With a first from Oxford, when he entered Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar, he met Akshata Murthy, heiress to the multibillion dollar Infosys empire.

An unbroken first class record through the best possible schools and universities wedded to the wealthiest family in Britain quite clearly helped break the colour barrier. But it must never be forgotten in India, Kenya, Gujranwala, wherever they celebrate Sunak, that a practicing Hindu is made Prime Minister in a country which has its own proud Church. Britain is an Anglican monarchy, a Christian country but which, quite admirably, is socially and politically so secular as to find Sunak doubly kosher.

The hoopla surrounding the swearing in obscured the cardinal fact that he was “crowned” by an uncrowned king. Thus far Charles is king only by succession. He is yet to be crowned king at a ceremony where the Archbishop of Canterbury will confer on him the aura of which the crown is but a symbol.

In this perspective is it not possible to conceive a Hindu state which treats all its citizens, of diverse denominations, as equal? If you are so averse to the word “secularism”, change the dictionary and assign to Hinduism that meaning –– secularism.

The large hearted accommodation in this instance by Britain must be glorified, ofcourse, but do keep room for a thought: how far will this accommodation go without straining the fabric? A Prime Minister, Mayor of London, Ministers in cabinet, always from the colonies. Also, I have watched four cricketers of subcontinental origin play for the English test team and so much more. Some of it betrays a decline in quality, attitudes which probably come from resting on ones oars, a sort of ennui after satiety, a blasé shrug of the shoulders.

When I first entered the Sunday Times, the Best and the Brightest on Fleet Street were uniform, without exception, in their marital circumstance. They were all waiting for their divorces to come through; they all had mistresses who were quite visibly advanced in the family way. The only half way stable marriage was Phillip Knightley’s that too, because he was married to a Mangalorian who are tenacious keepers of the institution of marriage. It was this institution which I saw fray in my very first outing to England. Is this a pertinent variable to be looking at to grasp a country’s generosity which may also carry seeds of its decay?

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Great Chance For Kharge To Redesign Congress Architecture

Great Chance For Kharge To Redesign Congress Architecture

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

In a sense the wheel has come full circle. On March 14, 1998, Sonia Gandhi was made Congress President by a virtual coup manufactured against Sitaram Kesri by party stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjee, Jitendra Prasada, Sharad Pawar and a host of others. Kesri was locked up until Sonia formally replaced him. It was a clumsy, insulting operation.

It is a relief therefore that, after several gyrations, the Congress Party held its first election for President in 20 years. The remarkable feature of Mallikarjun Kharge’s elevation is this: he is the first Dalit President of the Congress and he came through a free and fair election. Shashi Tharoor, three times MP from Thiruvananthapuram, contributed to the credibility of the outcome by putting up a real fight giving notice that he was the preferred candidate of 11 percent of the 9915 strong electoral roll. In defeat, Tharoor’s stature in party has grown.

Some blame must be placed at the door of the Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot for having devalued the stature of the Congress President by preferring not to be one. If there was an official Gandhi nominee for the job, it was Gehlot. But he found the Jaipur gaddi more alluring than Congress Presidentship. He chose to be a Chief Minister on a long leash rather than a Party President on a short one – so he imagines.

In a Congress dispensation, Party President is top job when the party is in the opposition. When in power, the President has often been the Prime Minister, a system discontinued after Sonia Gandhi, sensing her foreign origin might be raked up, shirked from Prime Ministership. Sushma Swaraj had given notice that she would have her hair shorn, should Sonia be seen anywhere near the Prime Ministerial chair.

Kharge will doubtless be watching the Pilgrim’s progress with as much interest as Meroli Shnigha the 10^th grade student from St. Joseph’s School Mulgumoodu, Tamil Nadu. Rahul had left Meroli wonderstruck by doing 10 pushups in seconds last year. The Tamil 10^th grader will watch with admiration Rahul’s physical fitness, endurance, stamina along the 3500 kms he proposes to traverse, preparatory to the 2024 general elections.

Kharge’s eye will be on the mass mobilization, upsurge, popularity and enrollments for the new party. The Gandhis with another serial loser, Sitaram Yechury as their Sancho Panza, were never able to resist the temptation of wanting to “revive” the Congress nationally and the CPM in Bengal.

The task at hand is to tone down your ego to a point where you become acceptable as coalition partners to leaders who are well entrenched in the regions. Coordinate with them for a role in the states; they coordinate with you for a role at the centre. This is the way a “salad bowl” coalition takes shape as opposed to a coalition patched up with chewing gum.

May I, Khargeji, do you a favour with utmost humility? I would like to loan you my pendrive loaded with the greatest political documentary I have seen in recent times. The Edge of Democracy focuses on an ideologically divided Brazil and how it is manipulated by the Corporates. Obama called Lula da Silva as the “most popular politician on earth.” Then what happened?

The documentary is timely because the final run-off on October 30 is between Lula and Bolsonaro who was Narendra Modi’s handpicked chief guest for the Republic Day three years ago. To this screening invite the Gandhis, your advisers, the Working Committee. The discussion after the screening will expose the Judases at your supper, the tweedledees who are in lock step with Corporate patrons of Tweedledum.

You are taking over the reins of one of the world’s oldest parties at a time when the Ukraine war has caused a complete reordering of the global distribution of power. A hegemony is yielding to a multipolar world, a situation to which Modi’s foreign office is adjusting nicely. But there is one proviso – the MEA’s heart is still with the US but its mind is with the ground realities.

Kharge’s cohorts will say: “but this is not what the media tells us.” Kharge is experienced enough to know that democracies worldwide have been subverted by big corporations who, one way or the other, control the media. These are the ventriloquists for whom the anchor is only a plausible town crier. Ofcourse there are notable exceptions like a handful of anchors in the NDTV.

This media gives you, the Congress, considerable attention because you have chosen to be tweedledee and are therefore no threat to the established order. Eversince Randeep Surjewala declared him a “janeudhari” Brahmin, Rahul has been visiting temples at the rate of knots, Priyanka too has been vigorously pasting her forehead with thick vermillion and dipping in holy waters with amphibian ease.

The siblings clearly hope that temple hopping will give them a slice of the Hindu vote which appears to be at the moment in the BJP’s thrall. The Aam Aadmi Party has done what the Koel does with her eggs. She lays them in the crow’s nest. AAP’s message to the Ram temple builder in Ayodhya is clever: you build the temple, we shall send our Hindu constituents on a pilgrimage gratis.

These are tricks. What Kharge must focus on is strategy. For a strategy to become kinetic you need a party and an election machine. By the time Rahul returns from his yatra all charged up, bristling with ideas Kharge must have a preliminary plan ready for party elections right down to the bloc level. This is after Rahul’s heart.

The coming elections are important, ofcourse, but will be a distraction if the optimism generated by Kharge’s election is not quickly harnessed to enervate a listless Congress by building it to its grassroots which will acquaint the Party President with bread and butter issues. Remember, a poor country must eventually settle on the left. In the course of redesigning a new architecture for the party, risks will have to be taken. Remember he who loses shall win.

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Stray Thoughts For Their Lordships As They Focus On Hijab

Stray Thoughts For Their Lordships As They Focus On Hijab

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

What does the controversy surrounding hijab have to do with the 1973 Yom Kippur war? Well, the quadrupling of oil prices by the Sheikhs of Araby caused an upheaval.

Hoardings in Arabic came up on Oxford Street. Rooms at Dorchester and Savoy were sold out to the Sheikhs who came to see the rain. The anti Christ had entered the citadel.

At the other end, petro dollars were attracting Indian labour, initially from Malabar in Kerala. These blue collar workers earned enough in a short time to be able to build in Kerala the garish “Dubai” houses which intruded on a traditionally simple skyline. Since the Kerala Muslims were among the first to turn up in quest of the GCC El Dorado, the resentment was tinged by inter religious jealousy.

Muslims being Muslim soon lost the edge which made them objects of ire. The more educated Hindus and Christians outshone them in white collar jobs.

That non Muslims registered greater success later did not erase the initial “Dubai house” resentment because the politician had by now incorporated it in his repertoire. This was a propitious time for a politician to prosper on religious antipathy. Gen. Zia ul Haq’s Nizam-e-Mustafa caused anxiety this side. The broad brush act of conversion in Meenakshipuram boosted divisions sky high.

At the other end in London, publishers were gauging the market for books of high salability. This is the time when exceptionally generous advances were made for books like Among The Believers, by V.S. Naipaul (1981) and Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988). Both expose Islam to satirical scrutiny.

Larger than life focus on Islam, assisted by the media and the book industry, gradually transformed it into Islamism. This very Islamism received a further boost with the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Since Ayatullah Khomeini projected himself as the leader of the Muslim world, there was deep consternation in Riyadh which considered itself the central pole of the Islamic world. It controlled Mecca and Medina, the two Holiest places. The “control” of the holy shrines had been opened up for questioning by a dramatic occupation of the Mecca mosques by a wing of Akhwan ul Muslimeen or the Muslim Brotherhood. This incident traumatized the Muslim world.

Occupation of the Mecca mosque and the Islamic revolution coincided. Both pronounced the institution of monarchy in Saudi Arabia as anti Islamic. With anxious alacrity the House of Saud declared themselves as “keepers of the holy shrines,” toning down the royalty.

Even so, a fierce competition ensued between Tehran and Riyadh on who was purveying true Islam. Since one of the items on the Ayatullahs agenda was to erase all traces of North Tehran fashion patronized by the Shah, the hijab acquired a very high priority. To this day all hotels in Tehran have a plaque at the entrance requesting women guests to “respect Iranian culture and wear a hijab in public places.”

The Arab Mullah was not going to allow the Ayatullahs to walk away with the trophy of Islamism and its manifestations like the hijab. It is difficult to explain to friends who have not travelled to Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus during the peaceful years of the Cold War that these cities once defined gracious living.

Why go that far back. I was seated with Ambassador Rajan Abhyankar, who knows Syria like the back of his hand, at a popular wayside schwarma joint in Damascus at the start of recent troubles when he suddenly spun around and pointed to three young women wearing white hijabs. “You see, this is the result of the Iranian revolution.”

Syria, after all, is the land of Comrade Michel Aflaq, founder of the Arab Ba’athism which took root in Syria and Iraq. In their aversion to Islamic ritual they were not very different from Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Pasha, a generation earlier. It turns out that the thoughts of Hasan al Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi, tilted towards Salafism, clearly had durability. After all Turkey’s first lady had to fight her way to wearing a hijab which the Kemalist culture resisted. Tayyip Erdogan is a Brother (Akhwan) in disguise.

The rapid expansion of the hijab is in direct proportion to televised Islamophobia which burst on the scene in 1991, the first post Soviet expedition called Operation Desert Storm. Peter Arnett of the CNN inaugurated from the terrace of Baghdad’s Al Rashied hotel a new era of global media. For the first time in history a war was brought live into our drawing rooms. One telecast divided the world into two antithetical sets of audiences – the victorious West and the Muslim world, humiliated and angry. This continued through the post 9/11 wars giving acceleration to be wearing of the hijab. The Indian media followed in their steps.

Missile strikes against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, launched on October 18, 2001 coincided with the arrival of Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad to take over as Chief Minister. The Ahmedabad pogrom of 2002 took place in the shadow of American fireworks. Hindu-Muslim ill will was apace with galloping Islamophobia globally.

The hijab in India is tangled in the threads mentioned above, but it is also an expression of choked anger against the perceived excesses of Hindutva against the world’s largest minority.

The minority factor aggravates the problem to an extent that their Lordships appear not to have noticed. The hijab protests in Iran are a self-confident assertion by women aware of their rich heritage. Girls of South Kannada and Udipi belong to a minority under unspeakable pressure.

There is no hijab problem in Pakistan or Bangladesh because the state neither opposes it nor has any urge to promote it.

Trust the late Khushwant Singh to have put his finger on the nub of the matter. The festive atmosphere of the India-Pakistan cricket match at Lahore in 2003 was enhanced by Pakistani women turning up in formidable fashion – dark glasses, tinted hair and blazing colours. The only lady in the VIP enclosure draped in the hijab happened to be Irfan Pathan’s mother.

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If US Has Its Way, Iran Protests Will Grow

If US Has Its Way, Iran Protests Will Grow

                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

The 22 year old Kurdish girl, Mehsa Amini’s death under suspicious circumstances at the hands of Iran’s “morality police” has raised a storm across the country beginning with her hometown in Kurdistan. What the police accused her of is somewhat unclear: she was wearing the hijab immodestly? Many Iranian women do. Was Amini unique because she was Kurdish, a region not in adoration of the regime in Tehran?

Iranian cinema, stifled because of the curbs, remains influential internally and abroad. This probably explains Oscar winning stars mobilized enough to chop off their hair in front of cameras with choreographic perfection. The infection reached the European Parliament in Strasbourg where lawmaker, Abiv al Sabanian pulled out a coiffeur’s pair of scissors and, before the Parliament in session, chopped off her hair as an act of protest. This is spreading in Iran mostly. The marvel is that the expansion of protest is despite internet restrictions imposed by the government to control the situation.

This serial chopping of hair does not necessarily diminish women’s hair style. In some ways it enhances it. Oscar winning stars and glamorous Parliamentarian would like to remain telegenic in the interest of their professions.

“Women have always taken more pains than men to adorn the outside of their head.” By contemporary yardsticks, sexism must have been rife in days when Joseph Addison wrote what we were taught as model essays. The great essayist would have asked, why are they making their hair shorter?

Shortening of hair would have invited a severe reprimand from Sharad Yadav: “par kati” (clipped wings) he would have snarled. Did Yadav’s opposition to “bobbed hair” for women correspond to the Ayatollah’s aesthetics? I fear there is a huge misunderstanding involved here.

Short hair may also be in fashion but Indian and Persian folklore and literature is replete with celebration of “hair upto the waist and lower down.”

“Jamuna mein kal nahakar usne jo baal baandhe,

Humne bhi apne jee mein kya kya khayal baandhe”

                                                                                  Mushafee

(After bathing in the Jamuna, she tied her hair in a bun

My heart also tied itself in thoughts I dare not utter)

A “par kati” cannot inspire that couplet nor the following lyrical composition in raga Behag:

“Lutt uljhi, suljhae ja balam;

Mehendi lagi hai.”

(Come, my love, untangle my hair;

My hands are wet with hena)

No room for short hair here.

Oddly, what is happening in Iran, is not a story of coiffeur and hair styling: it is about the hijab which, in Iran means a modest headcover. The Iranian hijab is much simpler – a dupatta or a scarf which makes for a perfect frame for faces leaping straight out of Persian poetry.

For an Indian journalist, the paradox is engaging: Muslim girls in South Kannada and Udipi districts of Karnataka were some months ago being told to discard the hijab while attending classes. The girls did not compromise. They were fighting for Azadi, their right to wear the hijab. Feminine modesty was not the issue. The question of identity was. A dress code was being imposed on a minority community under pressure. It dug its heels in giving no space to majoritarianism.

Look at the irony. Sauce for the goose in this case is not sauce for the gander. Iranian women are fighting for Azadi from the hijab. Before the revolution in 1979, North Tehran dictated fashions which even metropolitan Paris followed. For this lot – rest of the country in pockets too – the austerities imposed by the revolution altered life styles totally.

Many interests in and outside Iran are crouching in the slips for just such an opportunity. From the very outset, the regime has had to brush under the carpet a risky theological debate. In Islam, particularly among Shias, there is room for a second coming by the twelfth Imam to sort out the world’s chaos. An Islamic state cannot, therefore come into being before the arrival of the twelfth Imam. To cope with this situation, the institution of “Vali faqih” or intermediate Imam was created. Vali Faqih, in this concept is temporarily incharge, pending the arrival of the Imam. To be a transient entity at inception must carry its own insecurities.

Spiritual leaders like Saiyyid Ali Sistani in Najaf, believes the role of the clergy is to guide, not to govern. Between these positions there is sufficient space for splinter groups and external mischief makers.

Against this background, consider the United States which has been hostile to the regime eversince the Shah, their man in the Persian Gulf, was dethroned by the Mullahs. The US, uncomfortable with the unfavourable stalemate in Ukraine, nervous about European resolve in the war, (Italy is already receiving Russian gas) unsure of the compressional election in November, will certainly try to help the opposition in Iran. Indeed, it is doing so already along with Israel, which knows how to cover its tracks.

When the Economist speculates that the protests may well be the precursor to a regime change because of the “exhilarating bravery” of the women, Tehran better take note. If men join, “the removal of the vile system may no longer be inconceivable.”

Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, was quite explicit that the US would transfer to the protesters, advanced variants of the information technology that was responsible for so much internal and regional mobilization in Syria.

James Glanz and John Markoff of the New York Times had reported well before the US involvement in Syria. “The Obama administration is leading global effort to deploy “shadow” internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down communications networks.”

The NYT reporters described “one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth floor shop in L street, Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs, looking like a garage band, are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype ‘internet in a suitcase’.” It was all in preparation of an elaborate “Liberation Technology Movement”.

 

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