For Wider Reach, More Hindustani Than Sanskritized Hindi, Prime Minister

For Wider Reach, More Hindustani Than Sanskritized Hindi, Prime Minister

                                                                                Saeed Naqvi

I did not understand a word of what our Prime Minister said at the United Nations General Assembly. Well, except for words like “taaqatwar”, “rozgar” and “zahir” all other words were beyond my comprehension. I had to fall back on translation.

What confounded me even more were the one liners on top of the TV screen.

“Modi’s befitting reply to Sharif.”

This was baffling. I may have lost Modi’s syntax but I did not hear him mention “Sharif” even once. But the anchors would not give up.

“The UNGA hall was empty when Sharif spoke; it was packed when Modi did”.

Another chipped in: “I think we should cut out this Indo-Pak hyphenation”.

The anchors were possessed by a seering desire to be nasty with Sharif, Pakistan, and anything associated with either. As an answer to their prayer, up popped the heads of two Ex Pakistani Generals from distant Karachi and Islamabad, grinning from ear to ear, in cheerful anticipation of being punched for the next hour. Why they show up, is a mystery.

Yes, to revert to that difficulty in accessing the Hindi used by Modi. Why did I find it so disconcerting?

It is immaterial what my belief is because in a world comfortable with denominational identity, it is tempting to place me in a coop with other Indian muslims. This would be a bad fit. Indeed it would be a cacophony. Muslims would speak Malayalam in Kerala, Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Bengali in Bengal and so on. Modi’s elevated Hindi would pose the same problems in the regions – for Hindus and Muslims alike. They have all learnt to understand Bollywood Hindustani. That should be the queue.

In Kerala, for instance, it was accepted in the 80s, that Mohammad Koya spoke the wittiest Malayalam in the State Assembly. As Chief Minister he once invited me to dinner which was something of a culture shock to both of us. He spoke little Hindi or English and I spoke no Malayalam. He left a strong Malayali imprimatur on the meal by having me sample five varieties of bananas by way of dessert.

Hindi cascades from its Sanskritic heights then picks up the flavours of Awadhi, Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri and lilts of a hundred, rural, pastoral dialects, across the Indo Gangetic plains.

Dilute the Sanskritic bit and add some Persian instead and you have the scale of Urdu. The language can be stately and inaccessible to the untrained. When writers elevate their diction, as Maulana Azad did, the verse quoted is generally in Persian. But the finest writers and poets have brought it down to the level of popular literature where it becomes Hindustani. It was the boast of Arzoo Lucknawi that in his collection of poetry, Surili Bansuri, Melodious Flute, there is not a single Persian or Arabic word.

In the vast stretch of the cow-belt, an area called Awadh, was where Hindus and Muslims together refined and enriched Urdu. The first great prose writer of Urdu was Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar. One of the great ghazal poets of the 20^th century was Raghupati Sahay Firaq Gorakhpuri. Urdu became the central column of what people in this region called India’s Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb or culture. (Tragic consequences of Partition on Urdu in Pakistan is another sad story.)

When the Congress party, without consulting the people, signed up for the Partition of India on June 3, 1947, this lot panicked. What would happen to their beloved Urdu. In divided India, Hindi would have to be the national language. What would happen to Urdu?

Saiyyid Mohammad Askari wrote:

“Hai dua yeh ki mukhalif jo

            Hain dharey mil jaaen;

Aaj phir Kausar o Ganga ke

            Kinarey mil jaaen.”

(Let u s pray that these opposing currents become a stream;

May the banks of Kausar, river of paradise, become one with the Ganga)

Josh Malihabadi wailed:

“Chalne lagi zabaan pe churi inteqaam ki,

Chhaanti gayeen lughat se jo lafzein theen kaam ki

Rahman hi baat chali phir na   Ram ki

Guddi se khich gayee jo zubaan thi awaam ki”

(The vengeful knife reached for our mother tongue

Choice words were wrenched from dictionaries

No heed paid to Ram or Allah,

Tongues pulled out from the throat, men became speechless.)

This was not hyperbole in 1950.

This love for Urdu cost the Muslims dear. While the enlightened Hindu took to Western education exactly as Macaulay had willed, Muslims saw the package of Westernization, language included, with disdain. Later they settled for Hindustani. But what would happen to the Urdu script? Trapped in such considerations, a whole community lost the race for modernity.

Atal Behari Vajpayee’s reversal to Hindi was moderate cultural assertion. There was lilt and melody in his makeup. Modi’s Hindi, learnt presumably as an RSS pracharak, is dry and, to a novice like me, forbidding. Not just me, there are Macaulay’s children and millions of votaries of the new consumerism – they will all be more comfortable with Hindustani.

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Saudi Nightmare: What If ISIS Plans For Eid In Mecca

Saudi Nightmare: What If ISIS Plans For Eid In Mecca

                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

In President Barack Obama’s initial list of the coalition against the Islamist State (ISIS) are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain and Jordan. Others are being cajoled, tempted, lured but are not quite there.

India too was sounded. Mercifully, the Prime Minister is embarked on a mission of economic diplomacy. He will tip toe out of this one.

The frenetic hurry with which air attacks were launched on IS positions in Iraq and Syria, would seem to suggest extraordinary anxiety.

To everyone’s surprise, Syria approved the strike. Clearly, a deal had been cut under the table. Would the Saudis have been privy to this understanding?

The danger in their hugely revised estimate is not coming from Iran. In fact Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal met Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on the margins of the UN General Assembly.

After the Zarif-Faisal meeting, President Hasan Rouhani congratulated King Abdullah in a message on the kingdom’s 84^th national day.

The speed with which the IS had taken Mosul and threatened Baghdad, alarmed the world. By contrast the Shia Houthi’s swift takeover of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen from Abd Mansur Hadi has evoked little response.

In a brilliant maneuver, they did not stage a coup but arrived at a power sharing arrangement with the regime. They now have the potential of becoming a Hezbullah-like force in Yemen.

Surprising that Riyadh has not pointed fingers at Iran. In the past, this has been the continuous refrain from Saudi Arabia: that Iran dabbles in Yemen. Not a word this time.

In 1980 when the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan set a hatchery for Jehadists in Afghanistan to help eject the Soviets from that country, the hard line interior minister of Saudi Arabia, the late Prince Nayef set up training camps for true-blue all Arab Mujahideen in Yemen also to fight Soviet influence in Aden. It is these who mutated into Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. These forces were in the care of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a half brother of the earlier dictator, Abdullah Saleh.

When the Houthis entered Sanaa without resistance, it was Ahmar, a one-time Saudi favourite, who fled and found refuge in Qatar.

In normal times, Saudis would have been at Iran’s throat. Instead they have been kissing Javad Zarif on both his cheeks at the UN.

Something strange is happening. Saudis are swallowing their pride, making up with enemies, towards what end? Are they preparing themselves for an existential battle against the ISIS?

Let me explain why this could be an existential battle. In November, 1979, Juhayman bin Uteybi, a retired corporal in the Saudi National Guard, was identified as the chief leader of the siege of Mecca which shook the foundations of the Saudi regime. Earlier that year the Ayatullahs had come to power in Teheran. The siege and its aftermath were brutally suppressed and attention instead was directed towards Shia mischief from Iran.

The Iranian revolution, removal of triple distilled Sunni Taleban from Afghanistan, rise of Shia power in Iraq after Saddam Hussain’s fall, Hezbullah victory in 2006, failure to have Bashar al Assad’s Alawi visage knocked down, Iran’s conversations with the West on the nuclear issue, and now Shia Houthis in the news, occupying Sanaa. Shia encirclement of Saudi Arabia is complete. This should be the existential crisis for Saudi Arabia. But Riyadh is drumming up its GCC cousins as a coalition of the willing against ISIS.

In 2010 Recep Tayyip Erdogan was chummy with Bashar al Assad. He sought accommodation with Assad for the Akhwan ul Muslimeen or Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian power structure. In other words, there were a sizable number of Brothers in Syria. In Turkey, ofcourse, Erdogan and all his cohorts were Brothers behind the screen of Ataturk’s secular constitution.

Qatar too, a patron of the Brothers, had its irons in the Syrian fire. The Amir leapfrogged into Gaza to promise them the moon. Again, the Brothers axis. All of this was most disconcerting for the Saudis.

In the standoff between President Mohamed Morsi, a Brother to boot, and Gen. Abdel Fattah el Sisi, the US initially hesitated. The Saudis turned up with $8 billion to keep Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood out of power.

The Saudi’s puritanical school of Wahabism belongs to the Hanbali school of Jurisprudence. So do the Brothers. The founder of Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, was the son of a Hanbali Imam.

In the crisscross of fundamentalist traffic in Syria injected from the outside, there is a strong contingent of Brothers, those whose ancestors laid siege to Mecca in 1979. Their mission was to keep the faith pure. Saudi rulers, in their perception, have since deviated from Wahabi piety. Other than the Muslim Brotherhood, there are kindred spirits from other Sunni schools under the ISIS umbrella. Frustrated Baathists are too in this grouping as Born-Again Sunnis.

Suddenly, the regime in Riyadh found itself under pressure to revert to its “pure” Wahabism. The Economist reports that many more beheadings have been done in recent weeks by way of capital punishment presumably to keep pace with ISIS’s televised beheading spree, a Christian group too came under the police gaze for simply practicing their faith. That ISIS in tolerance again.

Eid-ul Zuha is on October 6. Attribute it to their black humour, but Arab diplomats not in the Saudi camp, have been floating a story: Abu Bakr al Baghdadi may like to celebrate Eid in Mecca. I had written three weeks ago that a Caliphate cannot be a Caliphate without Mecca.

Ofcourse the US is powerful enough to prevent an outcome that will shake its two principal allies in the region – Saudi Arabia and Israel. But the People versus Potentates balance will have to reset.

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Why BJP Lost? No Anti Gandhi Anger to Harvest

Why BJP Lost? No Anti Gandhi Anger to Harvest

                                                              Saeed Naqvi

Recent by-election reverses for the BJP are early intimations of mortality for the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duet. As a senior BJP leader whispered: “They must come down to earth.” In other words, a degree of realism may now be introduced into the proceedings.

The May Parliamentary elections were peculiar in some ways. The outcome was expected and yet the scale of the BJP victory was something of a shock.

What magic potion was administered to all senior leaders of the BJP (except Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh) at the Goa conclave of the party in June 2013, remains a mystery to this day. They first threw a fit at Modi’s candidature but were soon miraculously tamed.

Began one of the world’s most comprehensive 24X7 media campaigns to market a Prime Minister. The campaign was sustained at a frenetic pitch for a full year. With his unbelievable reserves of energy, Modi kept pace.

Did this advertizing Blitz alone overwhelm the electorate? There were other reasons.

The campaign for Modi gathered force in geometrical progression because of the electorate’s profound disgust with the incumbent Congress, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and, above all, the Gandhi family.

Natwar Singh has in his memoirs corrected a story circulated by the coterie around Sonia Gandhi that she refused the Prime Ministership after the 2004 elections because of an “inner voice”. According to Natwar it was Rahul Gandhi who stopped his mother from accepting the job.

After the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, it was understandable that both, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi should stop their mother from taking any risks.

What was annoying, however, was the pretense the family maintained about Rahul Gandhi as the future Prime Minister. He was simply not interested.

If the Gandhi siblings were anxious not to expose their mother to any peril, would Sonia Gandhi allow her son to take such a risk? Neither Sonia Gandhi nor Rahul ever clarified that the Congress Vice President would ever be a Prime Ministerial candidate. And yet they would not encourage an alternative leadership to evolve. Exasperated Congressmen privately seethed with rage.

In 1985, a year after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the reformist leader of the Soviet Union. After Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Moscow and Gorbachev’s return visit to New Delhi, T.N. Kaul, Ambassador to Moscow, floated an idea that both Rahul and Priyanka, teenagers then, would be safer in Moscow while the Punjab insurgency lasted.

The point is that the entire Gandhi family had very understandable concerns about personal security after Indira Gandhi’s murder. This turned to paranoia after Rajiv’s murder in 1991.

 It would have made perfect sense for the family to concern themselves with Congress party affairs, and promote an alternative leadership for electoral politics.

Instead, the family pretended to be interested in the top job for Rahul without any inner conviction that Rahul was upto it both, for want of ability and, ofcourse, for personal security concerns.

This confusion at the top created by the Gandhi family combined with the governance deficit of the Manmohan Singh apparatus, to give Modi an unbridled electoral advantage.

Communal polarization as a vote generator was identified fairly early, particularly in UP. In fact, after the Faizabad riots over a year ago, Yogi Adityanath had given notice:

“UP ab Gujarat banega

            Faizabad shuruaat kare ga”

(UP will now be like Gujarat,

and Faizabad will the starting point)

Modi had thus far largely dwelt on a development theme but the mega riot in Muzaffarnagar provided the Hindutva foot soldiers with a communal torch to carry from constituency to constituency in UP and beyond.

These, then, were the ingredients which brought Modi to power – an unprecedented media campaign; universal disgust with the Gandhi family; promise of development on the Gujarat model; carefully choreographed communalism to polarize votes with Congress and Mulayam Singh cast as “Muslim appeasers”; a clever system of splitting Muslim votes.

Each one of these ingredients were missing in the recent by elections. For instance, there is no Muslim population to polarize against in, say, Uttarakhand. There was no corporate backed media blitz. The Congress, particularly the Gandhis, are now too diminished to work as a “hated” foil. People feel they have been short changed with promises of “achche din” which have receded. Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav combined in Bihar as did Mulayam Singh Yadav with Mayawati, the latter by not contesting. And “Love Jihad” simply did not look like a credible allegation against a battered and bruised community.

Above all, the voter recoiled on intemperate speech and rank bad manners on the part of Yogi Adityanath, Sakshi Maharaj and their cohorts.

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