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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US Rush To Afghan Peace, For Trump’s Reelection Or For Real?

US Rush To Afghan Peace, For Trump’s Reelection Or For Real?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

When the US signed the peace agreement with Afghan Taliban on February 29 in Doha, mutual recriminations were obviously brushed under the carpet but some of these must be remembered for historical record.

Taliban were defeated in December, 2001 by a coalition led by NATO and helped by Russia, Iran, India, the Northern Alliance of which the “Lion of Panjshir”, Ahmad Shah Masoud was the architect and leader while he lived.

Masoud carried his fierce opposition to Taliban and Al Qaeda to international forums. These included a fateful address to the European Parliament in Brussels in the spring of 2001. His forces, much the most effective in Afghanistan, had picked up chatter on a possible Osama bin Laden (Al Qaeda) – Taliban action on the US mainland. On September 9, two Arabs, with passports forged in Brussels, approached Masoud disguised as journalists in his hideout bordering Tajikistan and detonated their vests. That was the end of an Afghan hero who had begun to be compared with Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and others in that league. This was on September 9 as I have said earlier. On September 11, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. Did someone want Masoud out of the way because he knew too much?

So keen was Zalmay Khalilzad, US special envoy for the peace talks, to sign a document that on current showing he would have accommodated any formulations, even swear words, in the pre US election agreement. Read the text of the agreement and you will be amused. The heading to the document reads:

“Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America.”

If the US does not recognize the Emirate, the insertion of this self-definition of the Taliban could mean that the phraseology is not to be taken seriously or is valid only upto the US elections after which, well, who cares. Also, if suitable caveats were not there, the position of President Ashraf Ghani would look comical. As it is, he is looking in the region like the leader with the thickest skin. Having been tied at one ankle with rival Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani cannot even hobble without Abdullah’s concurrence or a US nod. To top it all, the Taliban are scaring him with nightmares of an Islamic Emirate in which even a self-imposed, posh exile (like Hamid Karzai) will become impossible.

All of this will tickle Robin Raphel to distraction. As under Secretary of State for South Asia, Raphel was among the authors of the original understanding with the Taliban in the mid-90s. The US, with Raphel in the lead, had spotted the Taliban as the most muscular force in Afghanistan. The game was simple. Taliban would control Afghanistan; the US would control Taliban. TAPI, the Turkmenistan, Afghan, Pakistan, India gas pipeline, because of which Afghanistan was stoked in the first place, would then become feasible. Everyone would toss up their hats and whistle. Then, as now, South Block was four square behind the US project. A slight problem then was that National Security Adviser, J.N. Dixit and his coterie had declared Raphel persona non grata because she had mentioned Kashmir as a “disputed territory” a statement attributed by South Block to her friendship with Benazir Bhutto.

As a journalist, lucky to be at the right place, I was witness to Raphel’s Afghanistan project coming to naught. Ambassador Frank Wisner had invited some of us to meet friends he was escorting to a holiday in Bhutan. Among his guests was Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the UN and a fixture in the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Just as the conversation picked up, Holbrooke received a call from Washington. He walked to the far end to take the call and returned waving his hands. “The Taliban project is over.” Apparently, Christiane Amanpour of the CNN had shaken up Washington with a series of prime time features on the excruciatingly harsh application of Shariah law on women.

Raphel lived to rue the telecast. “A strategic move had fallen victim to US gender politics”, she told this reporter. Well, she should now reach out and shake hands with Trump, Mike Pompeo, Khalilzad for the hospitality they are according to a project not dissimilar to the one she had launched in the 90s. The idea was to treat Taliban as the most powerful group in Afghanistan.

Will the Peace Agreement be followed up by a withdrawal of US troops? Between conception and execution a shadow does sometimes fall. After all, President Barack Obama had set his heart on withdrawing US troops by July, 2011. One would take the will for the deed in Afghanistan had Obama not jumped into the Syrian quagmire, the very next month, in August 2011. I was in Damascus when US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Stephen Ford, along with his French counterpart spoke to protesters in Hama, Homs, Darra, in small groups. Obama administration was providing communications facilities named “Liberation technology movement”. Bashar al Assad had to be replaced by someone more pliable.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan meanwhile remained a still born project. General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, cited the popularity of India’s socio-economic development work as an obstacle to peace, because it distracts Pakistan from its war-on terror focus. The US establishment in Afghanistan were unable to bank on Pakistan’s total co-operation for peace in the nation. Rawalpindi GHQ’s fears of what India might be upto was a constant distraction. Yes, Indian consulates in Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Kandahar were cited as “spy nests” from where India helped stoke rebellion in Baluchistan. Even McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus complained of India’s “cold start” doctrine. In other words, Pakistan’s centrality to Afghan peace was the anchor to US policy. Are there reasons to believe that strategic appraisal has changed in Washington with regard to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Something is not adding up.

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Journalists In War Zone Produced Daily From Basement For Years

Journalists In War Zone Produced Daily From Basement For Years

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

What does one make of it, this singular absence of even a column-inch worth of interest in this land of Vasudev Kutumbakam, when Nazism in its raw, naked form comes riding on the back of the Croatian Catholic Church to organize celebratory mass for Croatia’s Nazi collaborators during WW-II. This, when the world is celebrating the 78^th anniversary of Victory in Europe.

There has been worldwide condemnation officially and in the media, but our disinterest disturbs me for two reasons: tolerance for fascism anywhere will, over a period of time, spur cantering majoritarianism here into a gallop.

The second reason is that it brought back memories of the horror perpetrated by the Serbs and Croats on the Bosniacs. I saw it from all angles – Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar and Pristina, capital of Kosovo. I visited Belgrade later, after the 72 day NATO bombing of Serbia pulverized Slobodan Milosevic and created the independent state of Kosovo. It is an unusual country in several ways. It is the only Muslim country with an avenue named after a US President, Bill Clinton. It was during the Clinton period that the bombing of Serbia eased Milosevic’s stranglehold on Kosovo.

Before US intervention, Pristina was an apartheid city. A school has a wall separating the well-furnished Serbian section from the Kosovar-Albanian part, unbelievably run-down. The solitary telephone is in the Serbian principal’s office. The Albanian Vice-Principal has no telephone. The contrast is like travelling from Israel to Gaza.

Clinton bombed Serbia to stop Milosevic from ethnically cleansing the Muslim population from Kosovo. The irony is that Kosovo happens to be the center of Serbian religious and historical lore.

Little wonder the Serbs have held onto the 2,00,000 strong Serb enclave of Mitrovica, abutting Serbia. When the US was creating independent Kosovo, why did they leave Mitrovica in local Serb control even though the enclave is part of Kosovo?

Big powers, while helping carve out new enclaves, always leave behind some issues for future manoeuvre – Palestine, Ulster, Kashmir. Also, freeing Mitrovica of Serb control or joining it with Serbia would have invited a vicious Southern Slavs backlash with active support of the Orthodox Church, powerful in Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece etcetera.

And yet, there are so many monasteries and monuments holy to the Serbs that it is impossible for them to wrench themselves emotionally from Kosovo, a Muslim majority state which is historically their holy land. Note the confusion.

Serbs anchor their nationhood to the monument outside Pristina, which reminds them of the battle of Kosovo (1389) a battle they celebrate even though they lost it to the invading Turks. They see defeat as a moment of glorious martyrdom: by their fierce fighting they blocked Turkish advance towards Europe.

It is a Serbian belief that the best wine in the world is distilled by the monks of the great 14^th century, Serbo-Byzantine monastery in Decan, near Pristina. How precariously Orthodox-Turks are poised is symbolized by a regular ritual: at dusk every day, a young, muscular priest, circles the main Church vigorously rotating a giant wooden rattle called tallantone, a sort of warning for the inmates to remain alert against the Turks.

This being the state of play between the two faiths, does the international community envisage a permanent role for KFOR, the NATO led peacekeeping force in Kosovo?

So proud was Secretary of State Madeline Albright of the Clinton-Albright intervention in Kosovo, that she asked her Policy Planning Chief, Morton Halperine, to initiate “A history of Kosovo project.” Prof. Richard Ullman of Princeton University, former Editor of Foreign Policy, led a high powered team on the subject. I wonder what happened to the study?

Let me now revert to the Croat Church’s misdemeanor in Bosnia which was the starting point of the story. No sooner did I reach Zagreb than I found my way to the office of Cardinal Kucharij in the Cathedral which dominates the city square. I was met by Father Juraj Jezerinac who, after pouring out a shot of traditional cherry brandy, became the willing source for stories.

First he confirmed that Cardinal Kucharij, after a visit to the Vatican, had obtained the Pope’s “OK” to recognize Croatia as soon as Yugoslavia began to break up. The EU, which had come into being to keep the intra-European peace, was keen for coordinated action on Yugoslavia. But a secret “OK” from the Vatican was a signal German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, did not fail to pick up. German recognition of Croatia, ahead of other Europeans, set the cat among the pigeons. An imaginary Axis-Allies line began to surface. The brutalization of Bosnian Muslims did not ruffle London, Paris or New Delhi. No one in New Delhi even took note of the fact that General Satish Nambiar was abruptly replaced from the UN Force in Bosnia by European officers as soon as UK and France began to throw their lot behind the Serbs, WW-II allies. The observation by a senior Foreign Service officer in Paris will remain indelibly etched on my mind. “The balance of power shifted away from the Christians in Lebanon; it is shifting away from the Muslims in Bosnia.”

The four year siege of Sarajevo was of no interest to my friend in Paris. Equally, it disturbed nobody’s equanimity in South Block. Whatever the Serbs did in Kosovo or Bosnia was of no consequence. The logic advanced was that New Delhi’s relations with former Yugoslavia were in the context of the Non Aligned movement: New Delhi considered Serbia and Belgrade as inheritors of that legacy.

The editorial staff Oslobodenje demonstrated the kind of heroism probably impossible to come by in the annals of journalism. I had met the Editor, Kemal Kurspahic, at the last Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade attended by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. His office in Sarajevo was now in a nearly inaccessible basement enclosed on three sides by the rubble of bombed out structure. “How did you bring out the paper, every afternoon in a war zone?” He pointed upstairs. “God.” I asked: “who financed you?” He fixed me in a gaze. “George Soros.”

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Will Political Lockdown Continue To Control Anger Of Migrant Workers?

Will Political Lockdown Continue To Control Anger Of Migrant Workers?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Why did some of us expect anything else from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the Nation the other evening? Why did we imagine that this massive migration of dispossessed, wretched labourers, walking unspeakable distances with babies on their shoulders, an aging mother on the waist, indescribable pictures of hungry children, pregnant women, misery beyond imagination, would even be noticed by the country’s most awesome leader? Like King John signing the Magna Carta with his Barons, Modi mollified the disgruntled business caste by giving a huge chunk to the MSMEs.

His silence on the 16 Gonds who slept between rail tracks to be run over by a goods train was stunning. Labourers were simply longing for what the Bard called “sweet nature’s second course” – sleep. And they got a surfeit of it.

Unlike western philosophers, who dwelt on society, our Seers had the cosmos in their ken. In their elaborate framework, migrant labourers have all been given lottery tickets for upward mobility only in the next life.

The great sociologist M.N. Srinivas asked, “What is Hinduism without caste?” Modi knows the answer. Since he is engaged in an architecture of Himalayan proportions to take us back to our “golden Hindu past”, he has fallen back on divine sanction to neglect the underclass.

With lamentable naiveté some of us began to expect tectonic changes once the lockdown was lifted. The build-up to the Bastille, we forgot, is a long process. What did the millions who migrated from the post 9/11 wars in Syria, Libya, Sudan, North Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen achieve in Europe? Nothing immediately. Initially Europe hid behind barriers. It takes a while for people to begin to cause organic changes. Since the countries from which the migrants came were Muslim, even fading images of Osama bin Laden and Jihad facilitated a revival of Islamophobia. Identity politics began to rear its head everywhere. Even post war Germany’s most successful leader, Angela Merkel was unsettled. In Bharat this genre of politics leads to communalism with which we have lived since 1947 but which, in Modi’s hands, is the brick and mortar for a Hindu Rashtra.

During this period of change, George Soros and Steve Bannon were hopping across Europe and the Americas, pushing for their respective visions of capitalism. Soros is a neo liberal capitalist within a democratic framework; Bannon, a known supremacist, seeks to promote the market in an illiberal, xenophobic order. Which one does Modi approximate to?

Soros has launched $1 billion fund for campuses to fight authoritarianism and to promote liberal values and democracy among the youth. Will some of this charity trickle down to Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia and numerous campuses which are fighting excesses with their backs to the wall? Soros, a Hungarian Jew, is involved in a cat and mouse with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian dictator who stands for, what he calls, “illiberal” democracy. Will Modi stand with Soros or with Orban?

Orban is very much on Bannon’s anti-Semitic, crypto fascist network. Anti-Semitic? But Modi is a buddy of Benjamin Netanyahu, is he not? Unlike in socialism, such contradictions are inherent within differing shades of capitalism. Recently, Bannon was accorded legitimacy on the Indian channel which defers to Modi on most issues.

Some months ago Bannon told a crowd of far-right French politicians – Marine Le Pen, for instance – that they should wear labels of “racism” like a “badge of honour”. If they call us “xenophobes and nativists” let them “because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.” Modi, likewise, thumbs his nose at critics.

Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil, whom Modi handpicked to be the Chief Guest for the Republic Day parade is another one of Bannon’s favourites. Bannon bolstered his media management which enabled Bolsonaro to topple Lula da Silva whom President Barack Obama once described as the “most popular politician on earth”. This was at the G20 summit in 2009 in London. Modi would do himself a favour if he watches The Edge of Democracy, a great docudrama on Netflix, on the rise and fall of Lula.

Bolsonaro has been quite as forthright about Brazil’s indigenous people as Modi has been about the yoke of “1,200 years of ghulami”. One of his quotes is a classic: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry was not as efficient as the American (cavalry), which exterminated all the Indians.”

Bannon, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi and many “soul mates” waiting in the wings have got their fingers crossed. They are aching for a second term for Trump. But there is a huge fly in that ointment. The covid pandemic and the lockdown have so secularized the political game that serious policy makers are speaking a vocabulary which would make Senator Joseph McCarthy turn in his grave. Socialism is becoming a kosher concept in the post pandemic mayhem.

Little wonder, a brand new mantra of Universal Basic Income is acquiring wide acceptance. A productive work force, 40 million strong, is staying at home in Europe and receiving salary. Finland has done a path breaking study: 2000 Finns were paid UBI of 560 Euro’s per month for two years. They were able to improve their lives in every possible way. They were so productive that the Pope endorsed UBI in his Easter message.

Can Modi buck this trend? Ironically, Lenin provides him comfort. Human misery even on a gigantic scale does not by itself provide objective conditions for revolutionary change. Other factors are needed. A middle class willing to give the lead, for instance. Fortunately for Modi, this class is in his thrall. Even so, there is little doubt that an upheaval lurks on the horizon but what its contours will be is less than clear. Who knows, it may not be possible to lift the political lockdown quite yet. Which means no protest marches. Protesters, please return home, otherwise the nation runs the risk of expiry from coronavirus.

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