West Exerting For Documents Critical of Russia At G20, BRICS, SCO

West Exerting For Documents Critical of Russia At G20, BRICS, SCO

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

Even though the purpose for which the Ukraine war was provoked has boomeranged on the West, the capacity of the US to needle Russia and not let it rest in peace remains undiminished.

Western guerrilla actions are feared in each one of the international conferences lined up around the theme of Ukraine. Some of these conferences may not be focused on Ukraine but Ukraine will dominate proceedings.

Step by step it is building upto a crescendo, the G20 summit in September in New Delhi. Positions taken by all G20 countries are known and yet, the secure lines between Moscow and the Chanceries are working overtime lest an inflection is introduced in the communique by some official who will lift the comma from one place to another and will, by subtle implication, transform a benign statement to a condemnation of Russia.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization meet on July 4 – Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan are all under US pressure to introduce a full stop where a comma suffices.

A peculiar catch attends the BRICS summit scheduled in South Africa in August. Senator Lindsay Graham had at the very outset of the Ukraine war made a simple suggestion – assassinate Putin. All the troubles will be over. The US has not been emptied of gents teeming with such ideas.

Short of assassinating Putin is another idea: lock him up in jail, rigorous imprisonment.

An idea germinating in fertile minds is to make use of the International Criminal Court. There is no guarantee that the Chief Justice will be persuaded by the US to chase Putin with manacles and deliver him to a high security prison. For this scenario to be played out, a territory has to be located where the ICC’s writ runs.

Say, some place like South Africa. South Africa is a signatory to the Rome statute, which obliges the country to deliver the “culprit” to the ICC, should that body issue warrants to the effect.

Why is South Africa of any relevance in this context? Folks in Washington are smacking their lips because in August the BRICS summiteer will be meeting in that nation. The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former communist and trade union leader, is not one who would leap to arrest Putin.

Nor was there a judge at the ICC who would demonstrate enthusiasm to arrest The Russian President. But since June 2021, ICC is led by a British judge who is deceptively of Pakistani origin. Justice Karim Ahmad Khan is British but his father was born in the North West Frontier province.

Two suggestions are being talked about. Either Putin be represented by someone like Dmitry Medvedev or some other method be devised since Putin’s personal presence is being seen as important at the crucial summit. It is possible that the venue for the summit will be shifted to Beijing. This would suitably pique the West and protect Putin. The tussle has already begun behind the scenes.

The craft and cunning of diplomacy are accelerated when wars begin to taper. Is the Ukraine war tapering? The big signal for the war’s conclusion will be when Western help in weapons and cash shows signs of drying up.

When wealth being transferred comes down from billions to millions, as happened last week, it should be clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky that the end is nigh. Ofcourse the West is not going to expose itself to the odium of defeat.

What is this war about at this stage? Neither side can afford to lose in the battlefield. The stakes for Russia are higher. Their nationhood is at stake, with NATO glaring at them from the border. To prevent such an outcome, Russia will go to any length. A country which can afford to lose 26 million people to defeat the Nazis, will stop at nothing to save Russia.

In the face of so much Western propaganda, one sometimes hesitates to spell out even an obvious truth visible to the naked eye.

Who began this war and why? The unending Western propaganda suggests Putin embarked on this war, quite unprovoked, as a precursor to the reestablishment of the Soviet or Czarist Empire. Distinguished western academics are convinced that the West provoked the conflict.

Neither NATO-US military help to Zelensky nor “sanctions from hell” have brought Putin down to his knees. Europe, on the other hand, is in desperate straits economically, politically, socially. Should Trump come on top in the US, we are in for a very unpredictable world, its multipolarity now firmly established.

Remember how Liz Truss, the British Prime Minister for a week, rushed around the world rallying nations for “Democracy” as opposed to “Autocracy” which is what Putin is supposed to represent. So, in Truss’s perception an epic battle between “Democracy” and “Autocracy” was on. Let us count the trophies the West has picked up for itself from this conflict.

Far from the democracies Liz Truss was to be the harbinger of, we now have an accumulation of Far-Right, Nazi forces surging to the fore in Poland, Netherland, Austria, Spain, Hungary, France, Germany, Sweden – nations which on current showing make Russia and China look like promising places. What sayest thou, Ms. Truss?

Let the truth be told. This war was never about Ukraine. It was about the new world order. The West was keen to retain its dominance. The global south led by China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, India, members of BRICS had sighted a multipolar world order ever since the delusion of the Sole Superpower moment began to dissolve with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, leading to corporate collapse on an endemic basis. When China yoked Riyadh and Tehran into a deal, the West wrung its hands in anguish. The consequences of the war were clear as daylight. The main issue of the world order having been settled, the pugilists are now tiring each other out in the battlefield.

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Far Right Gallops Away Riding Manufactured Consent

Far Right Gallops Away Riding Manufactured Consent

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

The alarming surge of the far-right in Germany, according to the latest opinion polls, should not surprise the political class who have with diligent deliberation conjured up Hitler’s spirit.

Remember how the German ruling class, as the engine of EU, laid-low the Left-Wing Syriza which brought a 43 year old Alexis Tsipras to power as Prime Minister of Greece. The Greeks had tossed up a Socialist experiment. No, said Germany and the EU. This experiment shall not be allowed to prosper. Revert to austerity or we shall not pick up your debt. The pity is Tsipras turned out to be too weak-kneed. He buckled, demoralizing the left across the board.

In Spain, where Franco hovers over public life like Banquo’s ghost, people, accustomed to being obedient, suddenly showed spunk. Prime Minister of the right wing Peoples Party, Mariano Rajoy broke all records of corruption in the construction sector. This kind of corruption had become the fashion in this phase of accelerated globalization but Rajoy went a few yards past the post. People, groaning under a tainted democracy worked hard to remove the pollution in the next elections. Under the leadership of a 39 year old Pablo Iglesias, a Spanish variant of the communists burst upon the scene. This was Podemos or We Can, extracted from Barack Obama’s slogan which worked in the 2008 elections in the US.

In the 2015 elections the right wing Peoples Party and the Socialists lost relatively but emerged first and second. The party which created an earthquake by cornering 5 million votes and 69 seats was Podemos. Spain rubbed its eyes in disbelief. How could Europe’s fourth largest economy be “allowed” to be managed by a coalition of which Communists were a part? Franco would turn in his grave.

The very idea had to be killed. The Peoples Party and the Socialists conspired. By refusing a coalition slot to Podemos, they forced another election. The turmoil in Spain which had been originally brought about by Rajoy’s unspeakable corruption was overlooked. Rajoy was reinstalled. Anything but the Leftist ogre.

Not only was Podemos successfully thwarted but rivals like Ciudadanos under a young leader like Albert Rivera were promoted. They had deceptively similar aesthetics as Podemos but in a capitalist mould – “Podemos of the right.”

Accelerated globalization after the Soviet collapse was a shot in the arm for capitalism. This, in turn generated arbitrary inequalities which Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st century explains in clinical detail. These inequalities resulted in such movements as “Occupy Wall Street”. The Republican Tea Party was a response.

People adapt to change but Establishments are obstinately resistant. Additionally they have the power to shape events by their control of the media, refashion public opinion. In fact the popular will is anathema to entrenched Establishments. The consent has to be fashioned. People make economic demands, jobs, wages, price control, social welfare. These have the potential of making drastic reductions in corporate income. I know all this is elementary. Why then are such elementary truths edited out?

For corporates, it makes enormous sense to employ every possible trick, the media above all, to divert people’s attention from economic issues to issues of identity, minorities, migrants, race or caste and communalism in India. This continuous tussle between Establishments and the people leads to one result: muscular establishments emerge on top. The popular will is the missing ingredient in what are advertised as democracies. Given this perspective, the Liz Truss type democracy versus autocracy formulation to define international relations rings false and hollow. We are living in hollowed out democracies, but for how long? Well the latest German poll points to a model, in the short term at least.

And it is not something happening in distant Europe only. After defeat of the BJP in Karnataka there is some life in the opposition unity schemes and yet the discourse on Narendra Modi’s invincibility does not go away. It will not go away because the controls of the “Modi, Modi, Modi” echo chamber are with Modi. Did you watch the masterly choreography of the inauguration of the new Parliament building? It made you “gasp and close your eyes”. Yes, Modi will look invincible so long as the media keeps him in that focus. And the media is in the hands of big business who are in the hands of Modi and the other way around.

The global media and the one which is in the Prime Minister’s thrall are cousins born from the same seed and at the same time. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about the Sole Superpower moment which required a global media. This was inaugurated by Peter Arnett from the terrace of Baghdad’s Al Rasheed hotel during Operation Desert Storm of 1992.

The global media did not reach India until a few years later. The fall of the Babari Masjid on December 6, 1992 was only covered by Newstrack a weekly video magazine launched by the India Today group. The mushroom growth of independent channels is a phenomena of the mid 90s, when the neo liberal economic policies of P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh boosted businesses which demanded channels to accommodate the advertising which the new economy was attracting.

The burgeoning TV scene enlarged the consumer society which is what the new economy was galloping towards – a tinsel middle class, creating a huge imbalance between Lakshmi and Saraswati. It was all custom made for the corporates, multiplying billionaires – far away from the roti, kapda, makan, education, health care which are basic for a developing country where an overwhelming majority are poor.

The politician, corporates and the channels are together in diverting the poor away from their condition towards the glorious inheritance they been wilfully denied by “The Other”, the migrant from another race, another country.

New strategic choices imposed by the unending Ukraine war has introduce further fertility for the far right to prosper everywhere – Germany, Vox in Spain next month. And who can ignore Trump of the Howdy Modi chant in Houston.

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Hard For Someone From Lucknow to Accept That South Is Gentler

Hard For Someone From Lucknow to Accept That South Is Gentler

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

“People are gentler, and drawing rooms are refreshingly free of tense conversations on communalism.” My wife was summing up her impressions as we caught the flight to Delhi after an extended stay in Ooty and Bengaluru during the recent State elections.

I consider myself privileged to have been installed as the regional editor of the Indian Express from 1979 to 84, headquartered in Chennai. I supervised editions in Bengaluru, Vijayawada, Hyderabad and Kochi and all the districts in between. In Kerala, the principal News Bureau was situated within a stone throw from E.M.S. Namboodripad’s house which provided me with easy access to one of the finest political minds I met in fifty years of journalism. The great foreign correspondent, James Cameron’s advice began to make so much sense after every conversation with E.M.S. “Whenever I travel to a country to cover a major event, I first visit the local communist party office where the background to the story has been analyzed ahead of other parties. All I need to do is to sift out the ideology and I have the outlines of a first rate situation report in my notebook.”

At the bureau in Thiruvananthapuram or the main publishing centre in Kochi, the editorial staff worked with extraordinary diligence on days when a renowned Kathakali artist, like Kalamandalam Hyderali, was performing. Extra work was put in earlier is the day so that the scribes could be free for the show.

My colleagues knew the Katha (story), nritya (dance) and Natya (drama) like the back of their hands. The culture sustained by Urdu as the central column of what came to be known as our “Ganga-Jamuni” tehzeeb, was disrupted by Partition and a scramble for western education as the guarantor for bread on our tables. The South was spared these travails.

Partition or the primacy of English for jobs created no turbulence in Kerala. Muslims came to Kerala not as rulers from Central Asia but as traders from Arabia. There was no urge to impose a culture, as in the north, but to adapt to local cultures as a means for expanding trade. It was because of this enthusiastic acceptance of Malayalam that resulted in Muslims excelling in poetry, literature and all the performing arts including cinema in which Prem Nazir entered the Guinness book for having acted in a record 750 films.

Considering that M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) in Tamil Nadu and N.T. Rama Rao (NTR) in Andhra Pradesh built lasting political careers based on cinematic charisma, why did Prem Nazir not end up dominating Kerala politics? Little reflection provided the answer: the Kerala voter has been too politicized by an expansive and deep communist movement and too educated mostly because of the influence of the Church.

It is not commonly known that the first mosque in Kerala was built in 629 AD, three years before Prophet Mohammad’s death, making it among the earliest mosques anywhere. It was built by a Hindu nobleman, Cheraman Perumal. He was simply filling a need: increasing number of Arab traders needed a place of worship.

Not only is there no evidence of Urdu being promoted except in areas under the Nizam of Hyderabad’s vast reach, there are numerous incidents of prodigious works in Malayalam or Tamil by Muslim scholars like Justice Ismail in Chennai who was regarded the sole authority on Kamba Ramayanam. He was the single source for scholarship on the subject.

Likewise, to C.N. Maulana of Kerala goes the credit for having broken a taboo imposed by the clergy: God’s language is Arabic and the Quran can therefore not be translated. It was this kind of rigidity that Urdu poet Yaas Yagana Changezi had debunked:

“Samajh mein kuchch naheen ata

Parhe jaane se kya hasil

Namazon mein hain kuchch

Maani to pardesi zubaan kyon ho?”

(If there is to be meaning to your prayers, why should prayers be in a foreign language?)

In my appreciation of the South, my friend, the remarkable cartoonist Abu Abraham, played no mean role across the many conversations we had. His angry outburst on one occasion surprised me because a joke I had told him “smacked of uneducated, North Indian prejudice.”

I had just returned from JNU’s first convocation addressed by Balraj Sahni, film actor and a leading member of the Progressive Movement. The speed with which All India Radio was incorporating “difficult” Hindi in its news bulletins had elicited a quip from Sahni’s Bollywood friend, the comedian Johnny Walker.

“Ab yeh naheen kehna chahiye ki aap Hindi mein samachar suniye” Sahni quoted Johnny Walker, “balki yeh kehna chahiye ki ab samachar mein Hindi suniye.”

(Newsreaders should now say ‘listen to Hindi in the news instead of news in Hindi.)

Abu was livid. “You, North Indians must know that a more sanskritized Hindi is that much more intelligible to us.”

That all Indian languages, with the solitary exception of Tamil, have some proportion of Sanskrit, helped me understand cultural variations in India that much more. I cannot claim to have understood anything of the great Trinity of Carnatic music, Thyagaraja, Syama Sastri and Muthuswami Dikshitar but I became sufficiently acquainted with the form of their verse. I even visited the great Veena player S. Balachander for advice on elementary Carnatic sangeet.

One day the door of my third floor office on Mount Road opened and in walked Balachander in a high state of agitation. Renowned vocalist Semmangudi, he alleged, had the patronage of the Travancore Palace. So what? I asked. He is lobbying in Madras to elevate the musician prince Swathi Thirunal to the level of the great Trinity. He wants Thirunal’s photograph alongside the great Trinity in the Music Academy, virtually the headquarters of all the performing arts in South India. Beads of perspiration covered his forehead. “This will happen over my dead body” he said. He lifted both his hands and brought them down on my table with such force that the glass top splintered.

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IPL Games, Cheer Girls Et All, Will Kill Cricket’s Character

IPL Games, Cheer Girls Et All, Will Kill Cricket’s Character

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Call me a dinosaur if you like but as an amateur cricket lover I have been firmly averse to Indian Premier League despite peer pressure of friends, family which includes my granddaughter.

That is why it was like another fall of man when I found myself sitting up in bed because an extraordinary happening on TV kept me riveted. It was compelling beyond belief.

Shubhman Gill was stroking, not hitting, pace and spin off his toes, driving between fielders with geometrical precision, cutting, pulling, hooking on his feet like a ballet dancer. Except for the clothes he wore, there was nothing he did which was outside the classical mould.

The first problem with IPL is the sartorial garishness. White flannels against the green grass as the perfect colour scheme has been smudged by a carnival of colours.

The cricket which burns in my memory goes back to my school days. As soon as the visiting team, say, the West Indies, was announced, out came my scrap book the size of a broadsheet. The first warm up match was in Pune, mostly against the Cricket Board President’s eleven. Then followed a full fledged five test series. Why have we lost these? All the venues were capital cities except for Kanpur.

Why had my hometown, Lucknow, the capital of UP been overlooked? Lucknow not having a test venue, was part of punishment meted out by the British for the city’s dogged resistance during 1857 war of Independence. Denial of a major sports venue was only a part of other major denials, like the High Court and premier university to Allahabad; industry to Kanpur – hence the Green Park venue.

The India-West Indies match was the beginning my romance with test cricket, white against green, Wesley Hall’s menacing run upto the wicket and Subhash Gupte’s leg breaks, sometimes turning at right angles were delightful experiences. Gupte took nine wickets in that match. The Hunte, Holt, Kanhai, Sobers, Butcher line up found him unplayable but only in the first innings as you will see. It would be interesting to know how Sobers compares Gupte with Shane Warne. He saw both and I believe there is something to compare in the huge turn they extracted.

What has remained a lasting memory is a nugget of a knock by Rohan Kanhai, one of the three most pleasing knocks in all my life. None of them were centuries.

Gupte as I mentioned earlier had wrapped up the West Indies for 222. One of cricket’s coincidences, India too was all out for exactly the same score – 222.

When Hunte and Holt walked out for the Windies second inning, the game had acquired the looks of a one innings test match. Then, in a flash, Holt was gone for a duck. Hunte returned to the pavilion, also for a duck. Both the wickets were taken by the stand-in unlikely opening bowler – Polly Umrigar. The situation was dire and Kanhai, who had come at the fall of Holt’s wicket had not even taken his stance. At the fall of Hunte, Garfield Sobers had come in at the other end. A hush fell over the ground as all of us sat on wooden planks, biting our nails.

Umrigar, who will never again bask in glory as an opening bowler, turned around from his mark to finish the over. Kanhai stroked a cover drive, bisecting fielders like there was a compass attached to his bat. An on drive, a square cut, pull, leg glance, all evaded the fielders with nonchalant ease. And every shot went to the boundary caressing the grass.

With Sobers watching at the other end, Kanhai’s miniature knock of 40 plus had made the bowling look so easy that Sobers went onto 190 plus, boosting the team’s total well past 400 and went onto win the match. Sober’s near double century was a treat, ofcourse, but it was Kanhai’s cameo that instilled confidence in the Windies dressing room. In some ways Kanhai’s miniature has remained more precious to me than Sober’s imposing mural.

The other two cameo knocks of my life were played by Pakistan’s Maqsood Ahmad (Maxi, as he was called) and Neil Harvey in the venues of my boyhood, Lucknow and Kanpur. Yes, a temporary stadium on wooden planks was somehow conceded to the great sports administrator, Habul Mukherjee. I became the recipient of Habul Dada’s largesse – a pass for the player’s pavilion, a reward for having, done an awkward chore. I arranged a plaque for the ground with “Ladies Urinal” emblazoned on it.

Maqsood’s innings played the classical role which number 4 batsmen play after a few quick wickets have fallen. With aristocratic disdain he bisected the field all around. In the evening, students of Islamia College called him names, to his face, not because he thrashed Indian bowling but because he was drinking beer in the open bar of the Royal hotel where the team stayed. A Pakistani drinking was anathema to the Indian Muslim, trying to find his feet.

Harvey’s was a masterly knock of sheer magic against Jasu Patel’s off breaks had Richie Benaud’s Australians hopping like rabbits on an admittedly under prepared pitch. But Harvey, who was the youngest batting addition to Bradman’s famed eleven, simply stepped out, met Patel on the half valley and, magically found the gaps like he had a photograph of the Oval in his head.

The lyric of all the innings I treasure consisted of silken ground strokes. My ground stroke bias was enthusiastically endorsed in Port of Spain by as thorough a connoisseur as Gerry Gomez who came to India in 1948-49. He was involved in the run out when Weekes was on 90. Had he completed his hundred, it would have been an all-time record – 6 centuries in 5 tests.

“He had something of the great Don in him.” Gomez continued “since Bradman there has not been another like him.”

Let me, then, drive home my point. In 48 test matches Sir Everton Weekes hit only two sixes.

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