Pivot To Poland: Is That The Trajectory Of Ukraine War?

Pivot To Poland: Is That The Trajectory Of Ukraine War?

                                                                                      Saeed Naqvi

The Ukraine war has already yielded one of its most important outcomes even though the western media does not dwell on it with enthusiasm. It is now confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that US hegemony has been irreversibly replaced by a multi polar world. G7 are a grouping in decline; BRICS is the expanding reality.

In this altered order, nations are busy consolidating their slots. The Turkish President, Tayyip Erdogan took another turn in his pirouette: he lifted his objection on Sweden joining NATO and received Volodymyr Zelensky. He repatriated five commanders of the neo-Nazi Azov brigade in clear breach of his understanding with Russia, agreed to support Ukraine’s membership of NATO. His recent alliance with Russia has been more or less discarded.

He likes the multi polarity, but to play a regional role he would not like to be painted on the same page as, say, Iran. Russia is acceptable as a regional power but not as a victor over Ukraine. That would make the Black Sea its lake. Erdogan’s stakes in the Black Sea are considerable.

Turkey’s U-turn is not without reasons: economic crisis, spiraling inflation, unemployment, weakening currency and, above all, falling investments. Apparently his outreach to the Gulf States did not spur investments. Hence this westward lurch. There were speculations in Ankara that he would play the Swedish card if the issue of Turkey’s entry into Europe were reopened. This, if true, is a foolish dream. Former French President Giscard d’Estaing was blunt. “Western civilization is Christian; Turkey can have no place in it.”

Talking of Muslim states and their compatibility with Europe, consider this: when Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to the Balkans, settled the issue of Bosnia’s statehood he tied a part of it to a district of Serbia – a sort of three legged state, its Muslim identity totally in check.

An unadulterated Muslim Bosnia was not in order. Ironically, a Muslim Kosovo was carved out of Serbia. The Orthodox Church and the Slavic links with Russia create a special bond between Belgrade and Moscow. When Kosovo was being carved out of Serbia without as much as a Russian nod, Russian tanks gatecrashed the US supervised party and occupied Pristina airport.

Diverse policies in Kosovo and Bosnia were explained those days as part of bitter differences between Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Holbrooke.

So proud was Albright of her Kosovo initiative that she asked her Director for Policy Planning, Morton Halperin, to commission a special study of “The Kosovo initiative”. Richard Ullman, a distinguished professor of International Relations at Princeton and a former editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, was provided with space in the State Department to embark on this research. No one has ever heard what happened to the research launched with such fanfare.

There is reason for this extended focus on the Balkans: should the conflict be expanded as a regional destabilization project, the Serbia-Kosovo section lends itself to much mischief. It is a maze of criss crossing interests involving the US, EU, Russia and Turkey which, in its Ottoman Avatar, ruled over large parts of the region. Troops from different European countries guard distinct parts of Kosovo, including the most revered monastery of Dejan.

A daily ritual at Dejan is emblematic of the deep and abiding grudges in the region. Every evening a muscular young priest carrying a heavy rattle called the tallantone runs around the main church in the compound. The noise from the rattle is supposed to alert the inmates against the “Turk”, the eternal threat.

Recently, Zelensky, a Jew, ordered Orthodox priests to vacate Ukraine’s grand churches. The reason for this harsh order? The Orthodox Church has links with its counterpart in Moscow. This link can undermine Ukraine’s war effort, it is argued.

Even otherwise, there is enough conflictual material in the region. Just as Turkey unlocks the gate for Sweden to enter NATO, Sweden emerges in bold relief as the state authorizing Quran burning, enraging Muslims worldwide.

Hezbollah’s supreme leader Hassan Nasrallah has already called for Sweden’s ambassadors to be expelled from Muslim countries. Provide fuel to this and Islamophobia may well be on the way to being resurrected. Are there powerful interests working towards this end?

All of this may be bleak speculation, but the recent NATO summit in Vilnius rubbished any positive spin the western media may have placed on the West’s gains in the war. Public fireworks lent themselves to photographs which were not flattering to NATO at all.

One photograph shows NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg virtually pushing Zelensky off the stage. Apparently Zelensky, angry because Ukraine had been denied immediate membership of NATO, had clambered onto the stage like an irate heckler.

His protests caused British Defence Minister, Ben Wallace to virtually scold Zelensky. Wallace thought Ukraine should express more appreciation to its supporters.

The rejoinder from Zelensky was sharp. “He should write to me about how he wants to be thanked.” Wallace himself was none too happy because his candidature as the next Secretary General of NATO had been scuttled by the only authority more effective than Britain in the conclaves of NATO – the US.

A prominent Ukrainian activist, asked US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan a question, in these words, “how to explain to my son, who is sleeping in the corridor due to air raids, that Biden isn’t ready to accept Ukraine into NATO.” She added “Is he afraid of Russia – are there back channel negotiation with Russia and Ukraine’s NATO hopes are a bargaining chip?”

Such scandalous talk plus the Anglo-American differences on Wallace’s candidature as the next NATO Secretary General must have been honeyed music to Putin.

Meanwhile, Putin revealed that reliable intelligence gathered by the Kremlin confirm US plans to insert into western Ukraine a Polish expeditionary force “for a subsequent occupation of these territories.” Should this happen, a part of Ukraine, to be absorbed into Poland, will automatically have NATO protection under chapter 5. What a development.

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How Muslims In Mandela’s Cabinet Outgrow Their Religious Identity

How Muslims In Mandela’s Cabinet Outgrow Their Religious Identity

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

When a school inviting me for a talk on Mandela Day last week, accompanied by my TV interview with Madiba, as he was affectionately called, I was transported back to one of the most exciting assignments I had done – the end of Apartheid in South Africa in February 1990.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the Soviet Union. This, in its wake unfroze conflicts across the globe which had been sustained by the West as assets in the Cold War.

I remember how Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and other Commonwealth leaders at a 1986 summit in London failed to persuade Mrs. Thatcher to stiffen sanctions against the Apartheid regime. “More sanctions would hurt black workers”, she argued.

Likewise Christian Democrats were kept in power with the unspeakable corruption which Italian judges subsequently investigated and exposed but only after the Soviet threat had ended. Under leaders like Enrico Berlinguer, the Communist party was a formidable threat.

The congealed sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was sought to be ended, resulting in the Good Friday agreement of 1998. Former Yugoslavia became seven independent republics. As many central Asian republics emerged.

The unforgettable drive through these republics left two indelible images on the mind.

Impeccably clad saleswomen and men supervised large, well-stocked stores of United Colors of Benetton, lined with fashionable clothes and multiple, expensive decorative items. Remarkably, there was not a single buyer in sight. This was a case of capitalism advertising itself.

The other image was of empty mosques but packed Orthodox Churches celebrating the post-Soviet “freedoms”.

In Northern Ireland, the sectarian animus ran deep, going back to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 when the Protestant William of Orange defeated the Roman Catholic James II. “Had William lost to James, the throne of England would have been Roman Catholic” Jack Sawyer, the distinguished editor of the Belfast Telegraph, explained to me.

This passionate desire for union with Britain in perpetuity stoked Catholic or Republican anger. Ultra-Right wing Unionists like Rev. Ian Paisley, shunned any accommodation with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), its political wing, the Shin Fein, or with Dublin. The language was particularly aggressive: “We shall never be under the Jack Boot of Dublin.” Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the Good Friday agreement was forged in 1998.

It is in this sequence that the West decided to free itself of the odium of sustaining Apartheid. It was as part of the choreography of this process that Mandela’s release after 27 years in the White man’s prison became its crowning glory.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a friend of Mandela’s and a distinguished leader of the anti-Apartheid struggle encapsuled the consequences of Apartheid in the course of one of his sermons. “When the white man first came to South he had the Bible in his hands, we blacks had all the lands. But as time passed our roles were reversed: we had the Bible and the white man had all the lands.”

To cover Mandela’s release from the Victor Verster prison, outside Cape Town, my crew and I would have to enter South Africa before Apartheid had formally ended. How does one enter a country with which India has no diplomatic relations? Informal arrangements were made with the help of the Joint Secretary, Africa, Arundhati Ghosh, a most helpful officer and friend.

Clearing immigration formalities was easy enough, but almost insurmountable was the customs regime. A closed society had exceptionally strict rules for TV cameras and other equipment. I had to find someone in Johannesburg who would stand surety for us. In other words, someone had to deposit half a million rands with the customs authorities. The sum would be returned on our way out “if the regime had found our behaviour satisfactory.” In other words, the guarantee was not so much for the equipment as for our journalistic behaviour. It was an unstated promise extracted from us that our TV shows would not embarrass the departing regime.

Among the phone numbers I had carried with me was one of Yusuf Cachalia whose father, Mohammad Cachalia figures in Mahatma Gandhi’s South Africa years. As soon as Cachalia learnt of our predicament he sent help to what is now Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo airport – a cheque by way of surety included. It was an extraordinary act of generosity because Yusuf bhai (as I began to call him) did not know me at all.

“I wanted an Indian journalist to cover the end of this cruel system.” Yusuf bhai and his wife, Amina, were friends of Mandela’s since his earliest days in the African National Congress (ANC) of which the two were also members before Yusuf bhai branched out into “stocks and shares” in the “interest of family and party comrades.”

It took me a while to understand the presence of nine cabinet ministers of Indian origin in Mandela’s first cabinet. One or two Indian diplomats took a dim view of the fact that only Mac Maharaj and Jay Naidu were Hindus. The remainder were all of Muslim origin. Quite remarkably, Frene Ginwala, a Parsee`, was the first speaker of the National Assembly.

Mandela’s Principal Adviser in his office was Ahmad Kathrada. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki maintained the pattern: his Principal Adviser was Essop (Yusuf) Pahad. There is a sociological explanation. When ships carrying the first batches of indentured labour docked in Natal in 1860 onwards, to work on the sugar plantations, a majority of their progeny joined the Tricameral legislatures established in 1984-94 to accommodate Indians and coloureds. There was no representation for blacks.

Later when Gujarati Muslim merchants arrived to cater to an expanding Indian community, their children had the means to acquire the best education outside South Africa. It were these graduates of Western enlightenment who returned to join the South African Communist party and the ANC, its affiliate. In the struggle of common purpose, these progressive ideologically motivated youth had miraculously outgrown their religious identity.

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Why Only Virtual SCO Under Modi’s Chairmanship After “Spectacular” US Visit?

Why Only Virtual SCO Under Modi’s Chairmanship After “Spectacular” US Visit?

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

The passing away of Subhash Chakravarty last month has not been much noticed because Subhash or Dada, as some of us called him, as a long time chief of Bureau of The Times of India did not have the exposure of, say, a Kuldip Nayar. More than his readers, fellow journalists would remember him. He was more of a newshound than a popular writer.

Editors got hooked on him because of the vast quantities of information he furnished for the editor to process. When N.J. Nanporia, the most erudite of editors, moved from The Times of India to The Statesman, his unofficial but regular “tipster” was Dada rather than his counterpart who was on paper’s staff.

The man who could walk unannounced into the offices of the most powerful in the land, was also extremely lonely in his private life. His extraordinary access to politicians like Pranab Mukherjee could be explained in parochial terms too –– he could not conceal his Bengali chauvinism.

In this he was not dissimilar to the late Abu Abraham. A superb cartoonist, Abu was also a Malayali chauvinisist, a tendency which erupted every time he touched on “north Indian culture”.

Dada and Abu have crept into memory simultaneously because they link up in different ways with a China story gestating in my mind.

Among the many remarkable cartoons the late Abu Abraham sketched the one he prided most was of Mao Zedong walking upto an Indian diplomat, Brajesh Mishra, smiling mysteriously, eye contact and all. The enigmatic smile, at a time when relations between two nations were in a “chill” phase, became the subject of continuous discussion and punditry. Abu’s caption of the cartoon were words of inspiration: “Mao-Lisa”.

The Mao-Lisa smile may well have been one of the ingredients in K.R. Narayanan being named ambassador to Beijing in 1976 after a 14 year lapse. The date of Narayanan’s appointment overlapped with the Emergency.

When Indira Gandhi was routed in the 1977 and Morarji Desai became Prime Minister, the Ministry of External Affairs fell to the lot of Atal Behari Vajpayee. The office he occupied near South Block’s main staircase was exactly the one that Pandit Nehru occupied as Prime Minister.

“I am about to occupy the chair on which Pandit Nehru sat.” Vajpayee was full of emotion.

Among his earlier visits as Minister for External Affairs, Vajpayee and his cerebral Foreign Secretary, Jagat Mehta, embarked on was to China, in February, 1979.

N. Ram, Dada and I were part of a small team of journalists invited to accompany the delegation. Dada was never short on tips on chopsticks at the Great Hall of the Peoples, the essential protocol of climbing the Great Wall –– with an empty bladder. In February’s biting cold there would otherwise be that embarrassing search for a toilet.

One big advantage of having Dada by our side was actually quite priceless. Since he called up his editor, Girilal Jain twice a day we were regularly updated on how our stories were faring. The Editor’s approval of the drift of one’s stories was clear from the display given to what one was writing. It was all very satisfactory until one reached Hangzhou, the great cultural centre.

After a memorable banquet by the local party chief, we retired to our rooms in an exquisite hotel. This was usually the time for Dada to walk to the press room for his confabulation with his editor. Such was Dada’s demeanour that it appeared to those who were listening to the conversation that Dada was actually scolding his editor. That was his style.

This particular conversation with Girilal Jain ended dramatically. Dada let the handset dangling by the spiral cord, rather like the climax of Dial M for Murder. He ran toward Jagat Mehta’s room and began banging on the door. “Jagat, open the door” he thundered ominously, “China has invaded Vietnam”.

It was feared from the first day of Vajpayee’s visit that Deng Xiaoping might actually do what he verbally threatened: “teach Vietnam a lesson.” Some action was expected after Vietnam occupied Kampuchea and removed the Khmer Rouge supported by China.

Considering that the Indian Foreign Minister was in Beijing on something of an epoch making visit, military action against Vietnam without as much as taking the visitor into confidence was construed an insult. What compounded the insult was the fact that the Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia who was in Beijing at the same time, was kept in the loop.

What took place in Vajpayee suite that night was something of a somber variant of pajama party. Vajpayee’s mind was made up. He cut short the visit and returned home via Hong Kong.

This was Chinese behaviour at a time when Deng’s four modernizations had barely been announced as state policy. China, like India then, was a poor, developing country.

Did China deliberately insult Vajpayee? I would say no. The element of secrecy with India was dictated by India’s deep relations with the Soviet Union. Vietnam at this stage was largely in the Soviet camp.

What Vajpayee’s successor, Narendra Modi is coping with is China risen to the height of Gulliver, challenging not India, but the US, India’s patron. Circumstances of a changing global order have placed India on a sweet spot, wooed by both sides. In this situation, India’s commitment to strategic autonomy is credible.

This credibility has to be sustained by managing the autonomy of action without ever looking like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Village “Nutts” walk on ropes tightly held by two poles. A fall, if ever, is after all only before a small village audience. A high wire act before a global audience the one India is embarked on demands exceptional agility. Just because we are satisfied with the optics of the US visit, we cannot let our guard down. Our slipping into a virtual mode for SCO will have the world scrutinize the shift. Strategic autonomy as a policy will have to be sustainable. As a trick it will be found out.

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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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