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

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

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheen o Arab hamara

Hindostaan hamara

Rehne ko ghar naheen hai

Saara Jahaan hamara.

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

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

The whole world is ours)

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

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

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

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

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

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Emergency And The Nation’s Current Travails: Comparing The Circumstances

Emergency And The Nation’s Current Travails: Comparing The Circumstances

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

“Globalization” may not have been part of the discourse 45 years ago when Indira Gandhi shelved Civil Liberties after declaring the Emergency but it is not possible to sketch that bleak episode on a wide enough canvas without touching such disparate points on the world atlas as Latin America and India’s cow belt. There was, after all, an external and an internal context to the Emergency as, indeed, there is to the erosion of civil liberties in India today.

The coup in 1973 which ousted and killed Salvador Allende, the world’s first communist leader to come to power through the ballot box, had a ripple effect on the communist movements in Europe. The counterpunch from the Right caused Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the powerful Italian Communist party to nimbly distance himself from the Soviet Union, invent Eurocommunism and seek a “Historic compromise” with the Christian Democrats. This was roughly the trajectory of all European Communist parties. True, Communists had come to power in Angola in 1975, but White South Africa was full square behind Jonas Swimbi’s relentless guerilla war against the Angolan regime.

This was the state of play between the power blocks, when Indira Gandhi, weakened by defeat in eight states in 1967, sought to consolidate her power by splitting the Congress party in 1969 and seeking support of the Left, specially the Communist of India (CPI) which attached itself to Congress (I) – (I) stood for Indira – as a sort of ideological motor. “Unite and Struggle” was how Sripat Dange, party chairman, described the arrangement – unite with the Congress but “struggle” against its “anti people” policies.

India’s Principal party, the Congress, in such apparent dalliance with the Left, against the backdrop of the global Left-Right contest touched upon earlier, had to invite a counter punch. A group to administer such a counterpunch was readily at hand: the “syndicate”, the Congress regional power brokers, placed by the split on the Right of the political spectrum – C.B, Gupta, Atulya Ghosh, S. Nijalingappa, Morarji Desai, etcetera. The RSS, Socialists and sundry, anti communist forces began to hold a meeting here, a seminar there and plan.

At this stage, Jayaprakash Narayan had more or less given up his socialist party work. He had become a heavy duty Gandhian attaching himself to Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhudaan, or land gift movement. Then a series of Youth movements began to look for a leader and typical of the Indian mind, a father figure to revere, which is not the same thing as “respect”. It would be flawed to find links with Kent State campus in the US, barricades in Paris, and Grosvenor Square pickets in London, but it is uncanny that Navnirman Samiti in Ahmadabad which was triggered by an agitation against increased hostel fees erupted at the same time. JP, as he was affectionately called, was now in the drill to lead the much more powerful Bihar movement from the cozy comfort of his house in Patna’s Kadamkuan where he accommodated me in a room on the ground floor. This gave me a ringside seat to cover the story for The Statesman along with my partner in sin, the wonderful photographer, Raghu Rai. Remember, there were no multiple channels then and Raghu’s photographs amplified the movement sky high. The movement was primarily carried on the shoulders of the RSS cadres, under Nanaji Deshmukh’s firm leadership. Paradoxically, it also spawned caste leaders like Karpoori Thakur, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.

1969, the year of so much political upheaval, also happened to be Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, Frontier Gandhi, Abdul Gaffar Khan was invited for a tour of India. Indira Gandhi and JP (with RSS, Socialists, Gandhians in tow) began to vie for favourable utterances from the Frontier Gandhi. He collected shawls at every function, diligently counted them at night and at every meeting next day, proceeded to chastise both the political formations for having “betrayed Gandhi”.

All concerned were in deep soup when the Frontier Gandhi arrived in Ahmadabad in September, a few days short of the Gandhi centenary on October 2. He decided to put down anchor in “Gandhi’s and Sardar Patel’s city”. This to witness firsthand the fiercest Hindu-Muslim riots in which the hand of the Gujarat Congress was discernable. The Khan docketed all these details which became inputs for the hundreds of public speeches he delivered across the country during that tour.

According to the Jaganmohan Reddy Committee the death toll was 660 of which 430 were Muslims. Unofficial figures exceed thousands. That the great singer Rasoolan Bai’s house was burnt is a detail etched on my memory. These were the first riots where I heard the terrible slogan for the first time: “Musalmaan ke do sthan; Pakistan ya Qabrustan”, (There are two destinations for Muslims; Pakistan or the graveyard).

This was the beginning of the series of riots climaxing with the macabre pictures that Gujarat yielded in February 2002. There is a major difference: an element of retaliatory violence on the part of Muslims was on show in 1969; 2002 was a pogrom, a trend inaugurated with the anti Sikh monstrosity of 1984.

In a nutshell, the Emergency of 1975 was in an East-West, Left-Right context and it lasted 18 months. The East-West context disappeared in 1990, exactly when Manmohan Singh embarked on economic policies which worldwide were creating inequalities. Lest economic distress strengthen demands for social security nets, establishments channelized popular discontent into identity politics which, in the Indian context, translates into rank communalism. The global war on terror and subsequent Islamophobia provided just the tailwind the Hindutva project required. Now come the headwinds – a shattered economy, dismally mismanaged pandemic, China hovering like Banquo’s ghost, unknown fate of the millions who walked in distress, and, FIRs upon FIRs as a preemptive strategy to cope with the gathering storm on the horizon. Will the storm materialize given such a stale, limp Opposition at the Centre? The Jury is still out.

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During Standoff In Ladakh, Remembering Another China, India, Vietnam Story

During Standoff In Ladakh, Remembering Another China, India, Vietnam Story

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

A strategy to undermine China beyond recovery has been spelt out by closet Sinologist in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, Ramdas Athawale, MP from Maharashtra and Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment. He exhorted the nation on the most popular current affairs show, Prime Time with Ravish Kumar, on Wednesday that restaurants must stop serving Chinese food.

The Minister’s edict is at the moment redundant because, in deference to Coronavirus, all restaurants are in any case shut, including the one’s notorious for Chinese cuisine. This begs the question: is the mushroom growth of Momo stalls to be checked too? Or, will a culinary inquiry have to determine whether Momos are Chinese, Tibetan or Ladakhi?

Levity apart, the standoff in Ladakh takes the mind back to External Affairs Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s 1979 visit to Beijing. That visit was conceived in a context. Until 1971, the Cold War at full throttle, a tiresome parity existed between India and Pakistan. When Indira Gandhi intervened to help create Bangladesh, the geography on the sub-continent changed: India became a large country surrounded by a necklace of small countries.

To balance power, regional countries in concert began to flourish a China card – classical balance of power politics. This was one dimension of SAARC’s genesis. The other depended on what India made of the altered situation. It was both, a challenge and an opportunity. What if Vajpayee moved towards some sort of an entente with Beijing?

Meanwhile, Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing had broken the bipolarity in the global power balance. Henry Kissinger had sketched a triangular balance of power – Washington, Moscow and Beijing. Nixon fell, in disgrace. Subsequently, the terms of Morarji Desai and Jimmy Carter coincided – a twice born Prime Minister and a born again President. Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, began to alter Kissinger’s design:  he talked of regional influentials. Morarji’s India and Shah’s Iran had barely been fitted into this frame when the Shah fell. Ayatollah Khomeini was sliding into the frame when Vajpayee was embarked on a brightly concaved but poorly prepared visit to Beijing. The timing was bad.

Deng Xiaoping must have been a bit distracted when Vajpayee arrived. The Supreme leader, who had just launched the four modernizations to strengthen Agriculture, Industry, Defence, Science and Technology, had simultaneously taken upon himself the task of “teaching Vietnam a lesson”.

Vajpayee was, according to his own lights, on an epoch making visit. But for Deng, the Vietnamese situation was high priority. India’s Ambassador to Beijing Ram Sathe had a sense of what was to come. He had alerted New Delhi: the timing of the visit was, well, “chancy”.

After a fruitful day at Hangzhou, one of China’s cultural centres, we had retired to our hotel rooms, when Subhash Chakravarti of The Times of India, called his editor, Girilal Jain in Mumbai. Jain said the stories were making fine play on the front pages of all the newspapers. Before ending the conversation, Jain mentioned something almost as an afterthought. “Subhash, you may like to check up with the officials in your delegation; there seems to have been some kind of an invasion.”

“What?” Chakravarti muffled his scream. He walked straight to Foreign Secretary Jagat Mehta’s room, in his pajamas. The Foreign Secretary, also in his pajamas, called Vajpayee.

Without as much as taking the visiting External Affairs Minister into confidence, the Chinese had invaded Vietnam. Sino-Soviet differences, particularly after the end of Vietnam’s war with the US in 1975, had extended to their respective affiliates, in this case Moscow’s friend Vietnam.

A disgusted Vajpayee cancelled the last leg of the visit and returned to New Delhi. N. Ram of the Hindu and I stayed on, having placed our request with the Chinese: we would like to visit the Sino-Vietnam front. Initially, the Chinese were enthusiastic. But after making us wait for two days, they came back with an official response: the visit to the front was not possible. This was something of a giveaway. Were the Chinese making heavy weather of the conflict? Instead of teaching Vietnam a lesson had they been taught one?

I found my way to Bangkok where Abid Hussain who later became Ambassador to Washington, was on a spell with a UN agency. Always helpful, Abid Hussain introduced me to his colleague, a member of the Bao Dai family, one of Vietnam’s aristocracies which were not in bad odour with the revolutionary government.

Lo and behold I found myself in Hanoi, much to the astonishment of our ambassador, Sivaramakrishnan. Abid Bhai’s “Bao Dai” friend in Bangkok must have been a man of considerable reach. The day after my arrival, I was granted an interview by the Secretary General of Vietnam’s Communist Party, Xuan Thuy. He opened the ultimate door for me. I became the only journalist to be driven to Lang Son where the decisive battle ended, in Vietnam’s favour. I was witness to much celebration and vast quantities of equipment being moved triumphantly away from the battlefield.

Two brief points before I exceed my wordage. It reflected on the civil relations between the Press and South Block those days that Defence Secretary Sushital Banerjee requested me to be de briefed at Army headquarters about the rare ringside seat I had had on a crucial battle which possibly changed global power equations.

The reception at the Indian Express was well short of what I had expected – a tepid sort of “good coverage” stuff. Ultimately, Ramnath Goenka, the feisty publisher of the newspaper, put his finger on the heart of the matter. “American newspapers have said nothing; Americans have said nothing.” This was revelation. The mist lifted.

“American journalists said nothing because they were not there.” In fact photographs of Hanoi I shot with my primitive camera were used by Time Magazine. Moreover, Americans would be loathe to play up the defeat of a friend they had just begun to cultivate and, that too at the hands of the old culprit, Vietnam.

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A Delusion That Our Lives Were Better During The Cold-War?

A Delusion That Our Lives Were Better During The Cold-War?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Pictures of unrelieved despair everywhere on TV and, that too, in the course of an extended house arrest (lockdown), does leave one, to use Faiz’s words, with “pain where the heart once was”. Heaven knows there were problems then too, but in these days of stress, I reflect on the period of the cold war with an almost irreparable sense of loss. The period spanned my childhood, between my village and Lucknow, school, college, employment at The Statesman, The Indian Express, with papers in London, Boston and Salem, Massachusetts. All of this experience was without religion ever being an obstacle in the three continents where I worked. During my spell at Salem, my wife and I lived in nearby Marblehead where we were much pampered members of the prestigious North Shore Jewish Community Centre, something unthinkable in the post 9/11 Islamophobia.

I find it difficult to believe at this distance in time, the warmth with which the gorgeous Bathsheba Hermon, donning a large straw hat, Public Relations officer for the Jerusalem municipality, received me at Ben Gurion airport. The year was 1969: an Australian lunatic had set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque. Israel in those days was a series of cooperatives called Kibbutz, collectively owned by the inhabitants, an almost dreamy kind of socialism. Total partiality to the Palestinian issue on my part did not obstruct a benign contemplation of the Kibbutz system. This response must be attributed to two factors – attractions of soft socialism and Bathsheba Hermon as the tour guide.

Hard to believe in the days of the Ayatullahs that one route from Ben Gurion to New Delhi was via Teheran. North Teheran those days was Paris to the power of infinity. The elite were totally unaware of the diligence of the clergy in the mosques and the Tudeh (Communists) who had latched assiduously onto the national mood after Socialist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq’s ouster by the Anglo-American combine in 1953.

Compared to Beirut, Teheran was, well, tinsel. European cosmopolitanism with an Arab soul best defined Beirut. Casino du Liban and the Crazy Horse Casino (which came from Paris for seasonal spells) and pubs, restaurants, café sparkled with conversations. I was a junior journalist, insistent on ambitious itineraries, my ears always cocked for scraps of conversation to be picked up, say, where Edward Said, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Eqbal Ahmad were in attendance. Beirut was the world’s most charming city, the only one where sport enthusiasts could, within the space of two hours, ski and swim in sea.

The metropolis never could rediscover its élan after Israeli Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon’s brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Cairo’s early Arab socialism had its attractions but intellectual life centered largely around Nasser’s moves, revealed in Hassanein Heikal’s columns in the Al Ahram which were debated and scrutinized for the entire week. Whatever the limitations of the system, editorials did matter because they were the bridge between public opinion and the state. They provided insights into what policy makers were thinking. Post-Cold War Murdochization of the media afflicted all continents; it proceeded hand in hand with globalization whose central grid was to be in Washington. The collapse of that project and global Establishments obstinately stonewalling any change in direction is at the heart of our current misery.

Even though Australian multicultural experience could never measure upto Canada’s, the period between the cold war and its end, was exactly when Australia was at its most relaxed, particularly after Prime Minister Malcolm Frazer (1975-83) buried for good Australia’s “White only” policy. Slowly multiculturalism picked up, the odd Pauline Hanson, Australia’s Marine Le Pen, notwithstanding. I interviewed a Chinese Mayor of Sydney in the late 80s, early 90s.

The project was hit for a six when Prime Minister, John Howard, Britain’s Tony Blair hitched their wagons to President George W Bush’s Islamophobia – all post cold-war, remember. For peace on earth, it was a terrible trio.

Indian multiculturalism was weak in its foundation from the very beginning in 1947. How could there not have been incipient communalism when a Muslim state is created next door but the larger part which falls to the Hindu’s lot, must, per force, be called a secular state. Initially communalism’s was the “Hindu rate of growth”, an expression made famous by economist K.N. Raj for describing the crawl of the Indian economy. Even so it did impact lives. In the golden period I have described at the outset the prejudice I faced was in finding a house until Kuldip Nayar and Bikram Singh, intervened. That intervention is totally missing today.

Congress-BJP competition for the Hindu vote, Prime Minister V.P. Singh stirring the caste cauldron accelerated communalism beyond the “Hindu rate of growth”, but the neo-liberal economic policies added fuel to the fire by creating unspeakably wide inequalities worldwide. Popular discontent was crying for policies that would redistribute wealth, strengthen the welfare net, provide universal health care, education, Universal basic income. It suited establishments to duck economic demands. Instead, popular discontent was channelized into the gutters of identity politics. In India, identity politics translates quite simply into communalism which already had lethal inputs from “1,200 years of foreign subjugation” (Modi’s phrase) and caste. And yet we have the same, tired list of economists paraded on our TV screens, sunk in the deepest layers of thought, proposing ways to “place the economy on track” the unmistakable assumption being that the “tracks” have been laid to perfection.

With coronavirus on a gallop, the economy in free fall, I wonder if millions who have walked will be satisfied with dollops of identity politics alone. Some bread may be required.

Meanwhile, all the cheerful places mentioned in the snippets from my diary from 60s to the 90s have today been transformed into desolations by the authors of the post Cold-War world. And, for want of space, I have not even mentioned the wilful destruction of Tripoli, Damascus and Baghdad.

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Race Riots In US And Walk Of The Dispossessed In India

Race Riots In US And Walk Of The Dispossessed In India

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

A passionate appraisal of the widespread anger at George Floyd’s murder by a white policeman that newspaper columns are full off, inspires no lasting change in race relations. Establishments have entrenched themselves too securely. In India the jury is out: will the establishment be able to contain street level eruption of discontent. It has never been tested on a scale it will surely be once the lockdown has been lifted.

In the US, Gen. James Mattis, respected soldier and former Defence Secretary, is enjoying what Andy Warhol called his five minutes of fame. He chastised a President whom everybody chastises except Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Never in his life had Mattis known a President so dedicated to dividing Americans. He was particularly severe on Trump’s call to “dominate” the rioters by taking recourse to troops, in violation of the military’s rules of engagement. His successor, Defence Secretary, Mark Esper, also did himself proud by going against Trump’s pronounced inclination to bring in troops.

I wonder if it shames us that there is neither a Mattis nor an Esper to provide relief in our arid wasteland, bereft of dissenters. Journalist Aakar Patel has an FIR staring at him for having asked the dispossessed in his homeland to express sympathy for African Americans. Rex Tillerson, as serving Secretary of State described Trump as a “moron”. The Texas police chief, Art Acevedo, was comparatively mild: he asked the President to keep his “mouth shut” if he has no constructive ideas to offer.

The vigour and success of a free society covered up an undercurrent of flaws like racism from the very beginning. Extraordinary success in many fields was able to induce a national amnesia about some harsh realities: the nation was founded on genocide and slavery. Unreliable records of Christopher Columbus combined with modern anthropology point to anywhere between 2.5 million and eight million natives killed by disease or other means of extermination. This was a matter of envy for Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. He lamented the fact that the Brazilian cavalry had not been as effective as its US counterpart in exterminating natives.

I have not seen anything as disturbing as the brutality of pre abolition slave lives portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A gruesome image, fairly commonplace in the film, shows a petrified slave, tied to a tree. A pack of hungry dogs, the size of full grown wolves, is let loose upon him, by way of canine supper. Do not dismiss it as cinematic exaggeration. I have just been forwarded a clip from current disturbances – a police dog set upon a black woman, screaming for dear life, even as three white policemen watch with scant interest, a sort of mechanical operation.

To flavour the past, let us rewind at fast speed. In 1919, a black teenager, swimming in Lake Michigan, drifts involuntarily towards a beach for Whites-only. He is stoned until he drowns. Record riots follow in Chicago. This, when President Roosevelt, his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, is busy persuading senators to ratify the Versailles Treaty. What flourished simultaneously were called “lynch laws”. Bodies of “niggers” hanging from tall, shady trees were occasions for family outings, yielding photographs for albums preserved for posterity. Such memorabilia was the stuff of American pride.

Everyone talks reverentially about Martin Luther King having brought to fruition the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. But this reporter saw “busing” an issue in Boston even in the mid-70s. Was an attitude ingrained over centuries going to be disbanded by pieces of legislation? Communalism in India has recent, deliberate beginnings, but caste beats western racism by millennia. Is its erasure possible by legislative means? And the recent walk of the impoverished, was laden with images of caste-class overlap.

There have been a surfeit of newspaper writing on the US riots. But a friend has placed in my hand an editorial from New Democracy, which touches the nub of the matter. The piece contrasts Martin Luther King’s failed quest for salvation within the American Dream with Malcolm X’s search for revolutionary change.

Look farther afield, and even Nelson Mandela’s adjustment with white South Africa’s last Prime Minister, F.W. De Klerk begins to look like a bargain struck in a hurry. I was in South Africa weeks before Mandela walked free. That he was free of rancour or bitterness against whites, despite having been in their jails for 27 years, did further elevate his charisma. De Klerk on the other hand came out smelling or roses for having righteously renounced power. In truth, what decided their fate was the global situation. At the end of the cold war, a nasty, nuclear armed white outpost in the face of rising black anger had become unnecessary. The odium of apartheid could now be shed.

In the high voltage emotionalism of Mandela’s release, reporters did not seek out what Mandela’s colleagues like Joe Slovo, the white Jewish firebrand communists were thinking. How could they have been happy when Mandela’s first Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel had to be cleared by Gavin Riley, chairman of South Africa’s largest Corporation? No two situations are absolutely similar, but memory ferrets out an interesting detail from independent India’s first cabinet. When V. Shankar, ICS, was first inducted into Sardar Patel’s secretariat, he had to go through a ritual interview with veteran industrialist, Ghanshyam Das Birla.

Capitalism, in other words, kept a wary eye on all transitions away from its stranglehold. Then capitalism overreached itself by mismanaging the post-Soviet globalization. The 2008 financial crisis, and a record economic slump after the Covid 19 mayhem, have induced some rethink. Comprehensive health care for all, Universal Basic Income, an appraisal of the Scandinavian model, are all part of a vigorous discourse in the West. There is, on the other hand, a deafening silence on these issues in India where the millions of the hungry and the destitute sent on a trek may well return to plague us.

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