Karunanidhi: Scratches On My Mind Firm Five Years In Chennai

Karunanidhi: Scratches On My Mind Firm Five Years In Chennai

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Muthuvel Karunanidhi’s passing away has brought back disparate images of my five unlikely years in Chennai as regional editor of the Indian Express. I use the term “Unlikely”, because someone born in Mustafabad, raised in the Urdu ambience of Lucknow would generally be expected to expire from culture shock in the four storeyed office in which every forehead was decorated with vertical, horizontal even circular designs. It was a riot of vermillion, ashen and turmeric. The sight stoked my curiosity but it did not repel me.

Karunanidhi, an atheist like his gurus, E.K. Ramaswamy Periyar and C.A. Annadorai, had an amusing take on “namams”. So long as Brahmins were busy with the shape of Namams on the forehead of the temple elephants, the Dravida movement had nothing to worry about. In his gruff, theatrical voice what he had drawn my attention to was a 200 year old litigation on what should be the shape of the namam on the forehead of the elephant at Kanchipuram (Devarajaswamy) temple. One set of Ayyangars (Vaisnavites) called Vadagalai insisted on the U design. But the Thengalai sect would invite the elephant to walk over them unless it was a Y. If the lower court permitted one design, the opposite side would throw a ginger fit. The case zig zagged from one court to the next, but it was not resolved. Eventually the matter went to the Privy Council.

If both the sides were defying court orders, why were they or their office bearers not sent to jail? As De Gaulle told the cabinet considering sedition charges against Jean Paul Sartre for supporting freedom fighters in Algeria – “No” boomed De Gaulle, “you don’t send Voltaire to jail.”

Likewise, all the judges including the ones on the Madras High Court bench hearing the case in 1976, refrained from punishing religious ardour. How can anyone complain against the UP police for showering rose petals on the rioting kawarias. “Aastha” is “aastha” after all.

For Karunanidhi all of this would be amusing. The things he felt strongly about he proceeded to take up as themes around which he wove his transformational politics. The way Karnanidhi burst upon the political scene in 1953 required political imagination. He pulled together several ideas that were dear to him and which moved the people to their core. The slogans were: my land is sacred to me and no one will appropriate it; my language will not be supplanted by another; capitalists from the north should be resisted if they come with hegemonic intent.

Karnanidhi put his finger on the pulse. When industrialist Ramakrishna Dalmia set up his cement factory, he sought to change the name of the town ito Dalmianagar. Students led by Karunanidhi came out in large numbers. The town reverted to its original name. Kallakudi. Brian Friel wrote Translations, a powerful play on a similar situation in Ireland in the 19^th century.

This agitation set the scene for the much bigger agitation in 1965 against the imposition of Hindi. Two year later, the DMK came to power and soon abolished the three language formula – Tamil and English would suffice.

It was only proper that he should have found a resting place beside his mentor “Anna”.

Relations between Karunanidhi and M.G. Ramachandran were strained since “Anna’s” death in 1969. Karunanidhi’s much greater organizational control was being undermined by MGR’s cinematic glamour.

I never got to know either well: my inability with Tamil stood in the way. But with journalists MGR was both inaccessible and vindictive, if crossed. Meeting him, however, was both, a gastronomical treat and psychedelic show. The interior of his residence was a series of criss crossing, cavernous passages until you came to what in racing terms is called the “straight”, a 30 feet dimly lit narrow hall, at the end of which, like a deity, sat MGR, with his trademark cap and dark glasses. He gestured that I sit on the sofa beside him. Suddenly a trolley materialized which heralded the beginning of elaborate hospitality, an endless procession of delicacies which served a twin purpose: they titillated the palate and discouraged conversation.

For me, raised on different aesthetics, MGR remained an enigma. And yet, by every yardstick, he had shot into the charismatic stratosphere by projecting an inexplicable persona. Jayalalitha performed the impossible: she amplified charisma which had already reached the nethar regions.

We have seen the mess the AIADMK, the two charismatic leaders mindlessly left behind. DMK, however, has always more real in its politics. Not only was Karunanidhi more intellectually agile, he had his feet firmly on the ground. The cadres are in place. The next line of leadership, (Stalin for instance) have been in the drill for quite some time. But the transition may be problematic.

The MGR-Jayalalitha charisma had obscured the Dravida movement’s earlier anti Hindi, anti north, anti Brahmin edge. In the absence of Karunanidhi’s hardnosed pragmatism, the second line of leadership may fall back on more radical regionalism indeed, parochialism, to score points over each other.

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Anti Semitism Rises When Populism Lurches To The Right

Anti Semitism Rises When Populism Lurches To The Right

                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

 

Call it coincidence or mysterious design, there are moments in world affairs when disparate societies have the same experience.

I had barely registered that the sword of Damocles hung on the heads of over four million people, mostly Muslims, in Assam by a very Orwellian sounding National Register of Citizens, when a friend from New York drew my attention to similar happenings in Israel.

In Assam, the terrified Muslims have apparently failed to provide documentary proof of citizenship. The BJP governments at the centre and the state have been at pains to reassure Muslims staring at the abyss that they will have a chance to appeal what is for the time being only a provisional finding of the NRC. In any case whatever is happening is at the Supreme Court’s prodding.

Meanwhile, far removed from Assam, on July 19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s kindred spirit, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed a boulder into the pond: he called it “a pivotal moment in the history of Zionism and the Jewish state.” The Knesset (Parliament) had passed a law which says: “The right of national self determination is unique to the Jewish people.” Israel’s non Jewish population have been left out. Assam’s Muslims, you are not alone.

I wish someone in the opposition galaxy would lambast the NRC half as effectively as Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO did the Israeli “perfidy”. The Jewish Nation State law, she said, is “apartheid, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and sectarianism at the expense of the Palestinian people”.

The way Donald Trump is distributing largesse to both, Netanyahu and Modi (shifting the embassy to Jerusalem and promising NATO status to India) he qualifies as their “big daddy” for more reasons than one. He set very high standards on how to treat the “others” when they try to violate national borders. He separated children from their parents. Children were sent to foster homes and parents to jail.

Netanyahu’s dilemma is as old as Israel: is it a democracy or a Jewish state? The new law would tend to tilt the balance one way. Of all the American Presidents, Jimmy Carter was the only one to place his finger on the pulse: “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”.

In the past, New Delhi always had two distinct approaches to Israel. There was a tweed-wearing, liberal, socialist disdain for Zionism opposed to a much more powerful “Hindu” empathy for the Jewish state which, like India, was surrounded by hostile Muslim neighbours.

Trump, the great guru of anti foreigner xenophobia virtually tousled Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte’s hair, like a school master showering affection on a promising pupil. At a White House Joint Press Conference, Trump, said: “I like your policies against illegal and legal immigrants.”

Matteo Salvini, of the xenophobic League Party, a self confessed admirer of Mussolini, Deputy Prime Minister but in effect the driving force behind the coalition in Rome, must be swooning in ecstasy. He must feel reassured that he has kindred spirits in very high places.

His ties to Le Pen once raised the hackles of Jewish leaders like Riccardo Pacifici for anti Semitic potential of the two. After all, Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen was a holocaust denier. Salvini clarifies that he hates Muslims, not Jews. That is salutary.

I doubt if friends in Israel would be overtly impressed by a Mussolini admirer denying his anti Semitic instincts. Indeed, there is growing anxiety that wherever across the globe the raging anti establishment wave has taken a turn to the far right, anti Semitism has followed.

The People’s Party in Austria, a very fascist outfit, under 31 year old chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has, as expected, revealed itself as virulently anti Semitic. There are moves afoot to have Jews buying kosher meat to be placed on a separate registry. The most shrill voice supporting the move had been of Gottfried Waldhausl, former animal welfare minister. “Soon you will ask us to wear the Star of David on our chests” said a spokesman for the Jews.

In Austria has surfaced the perfect example of enemies joining hands in the face of common danger: Jewish and Muslim organization have made common cause because “halal” meat too has come under fire.

Spokesman of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office, has denounced attacks on “halal” meat for Muslims. “These are attacks on Jewish and Muslim ways of life.”

Global media, like the ostrich, has buried its head in the sand in the hope that a gust of anti Semitism will pass even from a country like Poland where Auschwitz was supposed to be a constant reminder – “never again”. But what is happening is quite the contrary and scary. A law has been passed prohibiting Jews from reclaiming properties they lost during the holocaust.

Trump has rushed in with an act called “Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today”. In brief it is called the Just Act. It requires the State Department to monitor the activities of a dozen or so countries where anti Semitism stands in the way of Jewish access to property lost during World War II. US President as a realtor is a brand new concept.

The potential of explosive nationalism (say, in Poland) being stoked by this kind of foreign intervention has apparently been lost on the authors. The image of Trump as a backyard bully will only grow as will anti Semitism.

There is a profound lesson for a society like Israel in all of this. There is a potential for fascism, anti Semitism, when anti status quo movements take a sharp right turn. No such fear lurks when the Podemos rises in Spain, Syriza in Greece or when a 28 year old Leftist bartender in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beats a 10 term Democratic Law maker, or when Lopez Obrador knocks the stuffing out of the Right in Mexico. There are examples galore. Neither Jews nor Gentiles are invoked when movements talk of distributive justice and inequality.

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Afghanistan, Not India, Will Be Imran Khan’s Priority Until 2019

Afghanistan, Not India, Will Be Imran Khan’s Priority Until 2019

                                                                                            Saeed Naqvi

Even before elections in Pakistan had taken place the media which articulates the western establishment point of view, like the Economist, had already declared it a “flawed election”; it even screamed “foul play” which the “khaki umpire” (for which read the Army) had rigged.

If you will stand for a mixed metaphor, the “khaki umpire” is, these days, playing the monkey between two cats – the US and China. With Donald Trump and his Deep State apparently engaged in a savage fight to the finish, the balance of advantage must be seen to be with China. But Chinese themselves are keeping their fingers on the China-Pak economic corridor. Imran Khan has expressed reservations on transparency issues. On the other hand, there have been reports that thousands of Pakistan students, who in the past would have been westward bound, have entered Chinese schools of learning. Who knows, this may be the thin end of the wedge.

If the Chinese can decolonize the Pakistani mind to this extent, it must be time for the West to take note. But a sketch that sections of the Army and Imran Khan might be innately anti west can be overdrawn. Yes, Pakistan has choices other than the US which includes Russia, but this does not mean the army will bite the hand that has fed it since its inception.

These are complex times and a durable phenomena like the “West” manifests itself in many forms. After all retired Pakistan armymen, like retirees elsewhere, do keep a steady gaze on post retirement sinecures. A huge opportunity beckons Pakistan retired army officers in Saudi Arabia with its insatiable appetite for a war without end against the Arab world’s poorest country – Yemen.

The new Prime Minister will be pragmatic. He will not seek to impose a moral code on his armed forces. But he will draw some very firm red lines and these red lines will stretch from Pakhtunkhwa right through Afghanistan, the arena of his political baptism and purgatory. That is where he cannot be seen to be striking deals. His political turf will turn to ash if he does.

He should not be seen in the traditional Pathan-Punjabi balance. The brunt of the blowback from the Afghan war was borne by the Pathan region, true, but it was a national catastrophe. Let me explain. Washington twisted Pervez Musharraf’s arm to turn upon those Mujahideen in Afghanistan whom Riyadh, Washington and Islamabad had reared to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The blowback from the Afghan war singed Pakistan. The Lal Masjid fiasco in Islamabad aggravated an uncontrollable situation. The reverberations from that blowback have not ended yet. Remember, the public outcry was against Musharraf fighting “America’s war” against terrorism. It became all the more shrill when the two brothers controlling Lal Masjid, Ghazi Rashid and Maulana Aziz, led the chorus.

Let me fast forward to the latest American debacle in Syria and its possible impact on the Af-Pak region. Ever since the Russians landed in Syria to fight terrorism, the US, Israel, Saudi bluff has been called. They armed and financed Jabhat al Nusra, Al Qaeda and worse but their town criers amplified these rogue elements as the Free Syrian Army. When almost all the mercenary Islamists had been caught with their trousers down, the existential question arose: what to do with trained terrorists?

When animal lovers in Britain forced an end to the traditional foxhunt, the impulse reached India’s southern hill station of Ootacamund also. The same question arose: what to do with hundreds of pedigree hounds? Good sense dawned and the canines were kept in a deluxe kennel, then distributed among dog lovers. But what do the trainers do with terrorists, trained and tested in action, who have not only tasted blood but have begun to love it? Trained terrorists can only have one use: as assets against any Muslim society the “trainer” wishes to destabilize – Afghanistan, Xinxiang, the Caucasus and so on.

I can quote atleast two recent US Presidents to prove my point. In an interview to Thomas Friedman in August 2014, President Barack Obama made a startling admission. Asked why he had not ordered air attacks against the Islamic State, when it first reared its head, Obama said: “that would have taken the pressure off Nouri al Maliki”, Iraq’s stubbornly anti American, Shia Prime Minister. In other words, the IS advance from Mosul to Baghdad was facilitated to oust Nouri al Maliki, an outcome the US was excitedly waiting for. Maliki had to be punished for the affront of not signing the “Status of Forces agreement” with the US. Eventually Maliki was shown the door.

After having been briefed by the Intelligence Agencies, candidate Donald Trump told Jake Tapper of the CNN: “Where do you think have billions of dollars worth of arms – and cash – gone in the course of our involvement in Syria? To the extremists, ofcourse, I believe so.” He has not budged from this position.

What should worry Imran Khan is the next stage: the transfer of trained terrorists from Syria to Northern Afghanistan. Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei told a Friday congregation in Tehran on January 30. “The US transfer of IS terrorists to Afghanistan is aimed at creating a justification for its (US’s) continued presence in the region.” More recently, Russia’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Morgulov Igor Vladimirovich told a high powered assembly at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi: “IS fighters were being flown to northern Afghanistan”. The Afghan air space is under the control of the US and the government in Kabul. “so who is responsible?” Vladimirovich asked.

Islamabad, Beijing, Moscow are all persuaded that Taleban will have to be part of the solution in Afghanistan. Americans have been marking time with the good Taleban, bad Taleban mantra because they clearly do not have a policy.

The moment is laden with irony for President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul. The emergence of a Pathan in Islamabad should have provided him with comfort. Instead he is having kittens: the Pathan on the other side has an agenda which is totally at cross purposes with Ghani’s. Imran’s agenda would boost his popularity in the country where Ghani, alas, has none. The moral is simple: no sidekick to a foreign power has ever been respected at home.

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“Muslim” Meal On Air India To Protect Hindus From “Halal”

“Muslim” Meal On Air India To Protect Hindus From “Halal”

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

On an Air India flight from London the hostess walked down the aisle taking orders for dinner. She leaned over and asked almost conspiratorially.

“May I serve you your Muslim meal now?”

“Muslim meal?” I asked with a start, casting a glance at my equally puzzled wife.

The hostess was embarrassed. A new detail had been added to her hospitality protocol and she was not accustomed to it.

The damage, it turned out, had been done in my office. Responding to a column on dietary preferences, the person responsible for air reservation had hunted high and low for a simple non-vegetarian meal. No such meal was listed. Then he spotted “Muslim meal”. The explanatory paragraph clarified that “all non vegetarian meals are suitable for Muslims and are prepared in accordance with halal method.”

The journalist in me took over.

“Fair enough, you have identified us as Muslim, but surely there are others on the flight who are non vegetarians but not Muslim?”

Ofcourse, there are non vegetarians on Air India but they would not accept the odium of Muslim ancestry simply to indulge their dietary preference. They want to eat meat but as thoroughbred Hindus.

Two consequences follow. Obstacles in the way of non vegetarianism depresses the demand for non vegetarian food. By the same token Hindu passengers feel they are being short changed. This was reverse discrimination. They see themselves being pushed to the lower end of the culinary caste system. The demand for non-veg, therefore, gains in decibel levels: we want non veg, that’s for sure, but one which is neither “Muslim” nor “halal”.

A three way dietary division evolves: (1) Hindus not fussy about labels: “Muslim” or “halal” accept whatever is available. (2) Those for whom realization has been abrupt that what they have been eating for generations was “Muslim” – halal. Ignorance is bliss but not now that enlightenment has come riding on an Air India menu. (3) Simple vegetarians whose tribe, by the way, is growing by leaps and bounds in India as elsewhere face no problem whatsoever.

For the authors of the “Muslim meal” idea the first category is the most disruptive because it has skewed the process of data collection on how potentially vegetarian or otherwise, India is. This is the key research required for advancing the aspect of Hindutva concerned with promoting non Muslim dietary practices. If this category can stand its ground despite the disincentive of being called Muslims and halal eaters, this non veg constituency might just stabilize, even grow. God forbid, it may come in the way of full spectrum Hindutva, vegetarianism et al.

The second category is demanding a non vegetarian meal which is unsullied by Muslim-halal connotations. This is a new demand. This clientele does not quite know what it wants; it knows what it does not want in the non-veg arena. It has clearly asked the catering department of Air India a question which is not easy to answer: what non veg fare can you serve which is not Muslim-halal?”

Here the discussion acquires exactly the potential for which it was initiated – to polarize and, as a trial run, divide the aircraft cabin between vegetarians and non vegetarians who, the perpetrators hope, would not like to be grouped as halal-eating Muslims. The cabin is, in this instance, a microcosm of the meat-mukt India of Hindutva’s dreams.

A quick answer to halal is jhatka, the method of severing the animal’s head with one stroke, favoured by Sikhs. The jhatka-halal debate is custom made for an Arnab Goswami show. Have a devout Sikh, a muscular Mullah and a Bajrang Bali Bhakt, peer out of three windows. Extract all the gory details on jhatka and halal from the spokesmen of two distinct schools of slaughter. A possible walkout by the abstemious Bajrangi may well spur Hindu consolidation on an unprecedented scale.

On a more practical note, the “shosha” (mischief) started by AI can be put to some constructive use. A new approach to cuisine may involve drastic change: a non veg cuisine developed over centuries as a near art form may have to be jettisoned from official banquets and national carriers. The problem will, ofcourse, arise when lynch mobs on the lookout for a cause, enter restaurants advertising non veg fare. Individual non vegetarians may also incur the wrath of the lynch mobs. In fact a malicious rumour has been floated that the monkeys that have been let loose on Delhi’s citizenry are an animal loving Minister’s project directed against non-veg addicts. The monkeys, says the rumour, are being trained on the Ridge to block entry of meat into non veg kitchens. The producer of super hit Bajrangi Bhaijan, has threatened to go on hunger strike if the avatars of Bajrang Bali are involved in operations which have anything, negative or positive, to do with meat

The hypocrisy around the cuisine at official banquets at Hyderabad House or even the Rashtrapti Bhawan until the other day, has always bordered on the pathetic. There was an insistence on tasteless fare called Mughlai food at a time when streets named after the dynasty were under assault. The banquets begin with a bogus “toast” of some flat cola. This then is a good time to take a hard look at the rampaging Vegan movement globally. Climate change, animal care, fear of artificially inflated livestock for the table is turning the world to organic, vegetarian food. Jeremy Corbyn, who may well be Britain’s Prime Minister one day, is a vegetarian.

The core idea of the Nouvelle cuisine Air India should be searching for (and not just creating communal trouble) was available in the “prasada” or “offering” cooked each day in gigantic vessels at the Dargah in Ajmer. The daily fare followed one golden principle: it should be acceptable to widest possible range of pilgrims. The “prasada” was free even of onion, garlic, mushrooms, potatoes or any vegetable which grows underground. This principle is followed in all major Hindu and Sikh places of worship. Somewhere here is the answer to Air India’s quest. To monitor strict vegetarianism in flight, a free ticket may be considered for a representative of the lynch mob on every Air India flight.

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