Why Putin Will Not Attend G20; Will Xi Jinping?

Why Putin Will Not Attend G20; Will Xi Jinping?

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

It was known that President Vladimir Putin will not attend the G20, but will Xi Jinping attend? Let me take up Putin first:

Putin did not attend the Bali Summit last November. The reasons that kept him away from that meeting have not gone away. Why then would he have acted differently on this occasion?

Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, attended in his place. When he got up to speak, participants from the West walked out. The western media, in the drill for just such an event, took the focus away from all the wonderful things Indonesian President, Joko Widodo was planning for his guests.

Putin is a target in another league. He has been thoroughly demonized, painted in the most lurid colours as one whom Senator Lindsay Graham wanted to be assassinated and who the US President himself called “butcher, butcher...” so many times that this security staff were sprayed. Putin’s appearance would have inspired the media to a higher level of defilement. Never mind if the next morning serious G20 events appeared in very small print. Putin would have been splashed all over looking like Mephistopheles. So, just as well he skipped the meeting.

For the New Delhi summit President Joe Biden has already announced his participation. Indeed, he is arriving a day earlier. He will have enough time to twist Modi’s arm. Biden and his cohorts had more or less given notice that should Putin as much as peep into the summit through a crack in the door, they will raise such hell that Narendra Modi’s party will be spoilt.

There is sufficient trust between Modi and Putin that the latter’s non appearance will be seen for what it is. This outcome will also demonstrate a certain ambidextrous finesse on New Delhi’s part:

Sheikh bhi khush rahe

Shaitan bhi naraaz na ho

(Pleasing God without offending the devil)

The takeaway for Putin is the non mention of Ukraine in the final communique. European diplomats, with the Germans taking the lead, had tried every trick, at every level in South Block, to somehow insert Ukraine in the final document.

Even psychological games were played. “Indian position on Ukraine is changing” went the whisper in the galleries. Before this one had subsided, another rumour was floated, “Russian position is changing so a mention of Ukraine in the final document will be appropriate.” South Block has most skillfully walked through the minefield.

Regardless, the pressure from the West is relentless. “Can Volodymyr Zelensky be invited?” or “can he atleast make an appearance?”

Enabling Ukraine’s President to gatecrash into summits is not just an imaginary happening. The script was played out at the summit of the G7 at Nagasaki. Japan at the outset apparently said “no”.

President Emmanuel Macron of France has mastered the art of playing both sides of the street. Not surprising then that an official, French aircraft landed at Nagasaki with the embattled President of the Republic of Ukraine, Zelensky, holed up inside. Zelensky was not embarrassed; he appeared at the summit.

Similar maneuvers are on to give him entre at the New Delhi venue too. Modi, a master choreographer, is not going to allow any amount of arm twisting to spoil the décor of his show. But supposing he is presented with a fait accompli: Zelensky has been delivered at the main gate by, say, the Germans. Will the gate remain shut?

Xi Jinping’s arrival or non arrival is a different story. Modi and the Chinese leader met on the margins of the Bali summit as well as during the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. Peace and tranquility in the border areas and respect for the LAC were stressed. “Unresolved issues” are India’s concern and the two leaders agreed to work towards disengagement and de-escalation.

If Xi does not undertake the journey because of “other pressing matters”, the signal will be that the delegations are inching towards an agreement. As soon as the gap between the two sides closes, it will be Modi’s call – when to celebrate?

Now? Before the 2024 elections or afterwards?

Spokesmen for Xi and Modi cannot look credible saying the same thing from Bali, Johannesburg and now New Delhi. What is in the bargain is not just a border issue but what course lies in store for two ancient, proud civilizations, countries with the world’s two largest populations, vastly in excess of a billion each. These are easy comparisons. Thereafter, the complications begin. China is miles ahead of India in economic and military power and social cohesion.

India would obviously like to catch up. Towards this end it keeps a very firm line of friendship with the US which, unlike European nations, sees China as a threat.

As palpitations on account of China’s rise have picked up in Washington, so has the price tag on India’s friendship gone up in value? During his visit to Washington in June Modi picked up some rewards of goodwill. Rewards will keep increasing so long as India sustains its adversarial stance with China.

Against this background, all this talk of Xi and Modi walking under banners, buntings, confetti after a border deal is sealed, disturbs Washington, which bestowed on Modi the sort of defence technology deals which are meant only for close allies. The term “alliance” is anathema to New Delhi. It prefers “partnership”.

In its sole superpower moment, Washington had the might to obtain signatures even on blank affidavit papers. No longer, particularly after the drubbing the hegemon’s image has received in all its military outings since the Vietnam War, climaxed by the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and now fighting to the last Ukrainian towards heaven knows what end.

An anxiety riven headline on the cover of the Economist, “What if China and India make up?” comes across as a function of an acute lack of self confidence. In this state of mind, a Washington-Beijing entente, on the other side of the horizon, is not unthinkable.

The late T.K. Kaul’s description of the New Delhi, Beijing and Washington equation as “the tantalizing triangle” was apt.

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From Pakistan To El Salvador: The Bleak Future Of Liberal Democracy

From Pakistan To El Salvador: The Bleak Future Of Liberal Democracy

                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

Liberal democracy, the one that is yoked to capitalism, already in hopeless disrepair worldwide, received another drubbing next door in Pakistan. With innovative audacity, the establishment attempted to play Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The Prince, in this case, has been locked up in jail.

It happened like this.

The Pakistan Cricket Control Board produced a video clip on the history of Pakistan cricket. This was in preparation for the World Cup being played by 10 teams across 48 matches in every available cricket stadium in India from October 5 to November 19.

The existence of the video was brought to popular notice by the legendary Pakistani fast bowler, Wasim Akram in a tweet. Soon upon landing in Sri Lanka to cover one of the warm up matches for the World Cup, Akram received what he described as the “greatest shock of my life”: he found the “great Imran Khan’s” name missing from the video. And, Imran it was who, as captain, won the 1992 World Cup for Pakistan. How obviously malicious.

Whatever the political differences in Pakistan, said Akram, no one disputes the fact that Imran Khan is “an icon of world cricket and it was he who developed Pakistan into a strong unit in his time and gave us a pathway: PCB should delete the video and apologize to Imran Khan.”

Such spontaneous outburst from Wasim Akram, himself one of the all time greats of world cricket, could not have remained a solo reaction. Thousands of Akram’s follower who woke upto the scandal because of his tweet, have obviously saturated the twitter space with protests. How long does it take for such anger to spill onto the street or simmer in the basement?

The strength of popular mobilization behind the Tehreek e Insaf supremo must have hit the Pakistani establishment between the eyes. The PCB, in a state of funk, decided to take corrective action by resurrecting Imran – giving him his rightful place in the world cup 2023 promotional video.

The shoddy effort to deny Imran Khan a place in the cricketing universe is not dissimilar to the establishment hounding him out of the political turf on which Imran Khan happens to be the most popular politician in Pakistan’s history. Apparently the Board of Control for Cricket in India has measured upto their Pakistani counterpart. In their promotional video they have left out Babar Azam, world’s number one ODI batsman.

A bright 11^th grade schoolboy, a cricket freak, stumped me with his question: “If Imran Khan is the most popular politician in Pakistan, why is he in jail?”

Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Establishments have increasingly replaced the people as arbiters of electoral outcome. If people had been the arbiters, Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK would have defeated their rivals by wide margins.

A Fox News poll published in 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders had at +28 rating, above all US politicians on both sides of the political spectrum. This prompted Trevor Timm of The Guardian to do some plain speaking: “one would have thought with numbers like that Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering that the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans including Donald Trump. Yet instead of embracing his message, the Establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn.”

Let me give you just one tiny example of how establishments assert themselves in determining electoral politics. During the primaries for the democratic nomination in 2020, as in 2016, Sanders was galloping ahead of others in the field. To arrest his advance, Michael Bloomberg, billionaire and former Mayor of New York, entered the race. His entry had to be played up. Appeared two full-fledged op-ed columns by the NYT’s Thomas Friedman, who began one of his columns….”I like Mike because……..etc.”

Similar maneuvering in 2016 had the effect of bringing Donald Trump to power. John Kerry, Secretary of State, could not bring himself to consider Trump a serious happening. He met statesmen across the globe who, he said, were bewildered at the prospect of Trump entering the White House. Columnist Surjit Bhalla went one better: he lamented with all the amplifiers on, “Trump’s victory will be the end of western civilization.”

My stand had been straightforward. “If you make Sanders impossible you will make Trump inevitable.”

In the context of Pakistan, a variant of the same formulation applies. “If you make Imran Khan impossible, you make Army rule inevitable.” India qualifies for a critical appraisal too. It requires a separate column in greater detail.

Acquiescence in this general hollowing out of democracies will deliver us to a destination which the 11^th grader of this narrative will find deceptively attractive. The headline in a recent issue of the Economist is scary, and not only for Latin Americans. “Young Latin Americans are unusually open to autocrats.” The infection is spreading.

In a recent international poll in Latin America, respondents were asked to rate their approval of 17 world leaders on a scale of one to ten. On a list which included Pope Francis and Volodymyr Zelensky, guess which world politician has the highest approval rating among people across Latin America? This approval is even stronger among the young.

This extraordinarily popular leader surfaced in 2019 as 37 year old Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador wearing on his sleeves the promise of eliminating gangsterism, which is endemic in his country.

With such impunity did he embark on “gang crackdown” in March 2022, that 87 people were murdered in a single weekend. More than 70,000 young men are in prison. Bukele, who calls himself “The World’s Coolest Dictator”, is readying himself for 2024 general elections. With an approval rating of over 80 percent, the backwards baseball wearing dictator prepares himself to drive a nice, long nail in the coffin of liberal democracy, even as a peace of the graveyard descends on El Salvador. Remember, the President is only 41.

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Response To No Confidence Debate: Modi’s 2024 Election Speech?

Response To No Confidence Debate: Modi’s 2024 Election Speech?

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

Shart e saliqa hai har ek amr mein,

Aeb bhi karne ko hunar chaahiyey

                                                      Mir Taqi Mir

(There is a condition: you need skill,

Even doing the bad thing well)

The no confidence debate in Parliament was the opposition’s plan B. Since the Prime Minister Narendra Modi obstinately refused to make a statement on the three month long violence in Manipur, the opposition set up a debate as a frame within which it could slot Manipur.

In other words, Manipur would be a square on the chessboard and speakers on both sides of the aisle would have all the 64 squares to amble or sprint on in the course of the debate.

The strategy provided Modi with the opportunity to tease and taunt the opposition, to strut all over the board for 90 minutes of his 120 minutes speech without as much as mentioning Manipur. Only when an exasperated opposition walked out and the Prime Minister saw the last few opposition members sulking out that he swiftly switched to Manipur.

It was like a prank: I shall starve you of my voice on Manipur. Only when I see the backs of you will I give the House my take on the North East.

In the latter part of his speech, as in the earlier one, he proceeded to joust with the Congress and I.N.D.I.A., alternately. He extracted a giggle for his take on I.N.D.I.A. as “two Is inserted in NDA.” The Is, he suggested, stood for the all important Ego.

The second I presumably stood for Indira Gandhi who became the prime target as he turned his attention to Manipur. On 5 March 1966, according to Modi, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered aerial bombardment of Manipur. He did not spare Jawaharlal Nehru either.

What was Nehru to be blamed for? Well, during the 1962 debacle with China in a radio broadcast Nehru said his heart went out to the people of Assam. Not a word about the North East.

When Modi had a formidable list of Congress misdeeds in his bag he started trotting them out, one by one. What followed sent something like this:

Modi: Who ordered air strikes on Manipur?

Treasury benches in chorus: Congress!

Modi did this serially, his MPs picking up the cue like they had been in the drill for years. I doubt if Lok Sabha had ever witnessed such a circus. And the performance was only for the TV cameras. The opposition had walked out by now.

Modi’s control on his flock is breathtaking.

Opposite this brigade, in perfect lock step, was the nascent I.N.D.I.A. alliance, the glue still fresh between the crevices.

Modi almost gave notice that he will do his best to disrupt the new alliance. A simple ploy to keep the alliance unsettled is to project the 2024 general elections as a Modi versus Rahul Gandhi contest. The allies will be scared stiff at this projection and some may even jump off.

It is a disruptive issue to be raised at this stage of the proceedings. That is why it suits Modi’s election machinery of which a large section of the media has chosen to be a part, to play Modi and RG as principal combatants in the 2024 electoral Kurukshetra.

There persists, nevertheless, a coterie of the impatient who privately believe this projection is valid. Why not, they ask, after the new image RG has acquired? Which new image? Well, RG’s image has received a considerable boost after the success of the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Also the smooth functioning of Malikarjun Kharge as party President and RG as one team is laudable.

Descendants of Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist party are now in the new alliance. They were reminded by Modi of Lohia’s sharp criticism of Nehru, including the latter’s neglect of the North East. This is just a foretaste of the assaults on the alliance which will become sharper as campaigning picks up. In many ways Modi’s response to the debate was his first 2024 election speech. The slogan for the campaign was clear as daylight: give me a third term and I guarantee that “we shall be the world’s third greatest economy.”

There are minefields I.N.D.I.A. has to go through before it welds into a stable front. One example of a mine which could impede progress is the Congress’s equation with, say, TRS (now Bharat Rashtra Samithi). Pundits had earlier placed Congress at number 3 in the race. The real tussle was between TRS and the BJP. More recently punters are changing their bets. The closest contest could be between TRS and the Congress. How will these swords be placed in the same scabbard? Contradictions are strewn all over the turf which straddles I.N.D.I.A.

In the three day debate why did RG choose to make an appearance on the second day when a large number of TV watchers did not expect him to? There was great expectation on the first day. What was the advice from the media team, assuming that the party has one? By switching his slot to the second day, RG, Congress and I.N.D.I.A. lost hundreds of thousands of viewers.

There are two broad questions being asked of his performance. Does he have the making of a statesman of gravitas who marshals his facts and develops the architecture of his presentation in a forum like Parliament?

The other is: Has he outgrown his somewhat boyish demeanour? Let us face it, with considerable brevity he was able to pin Modi down with sharp questions. Why have you neither visited Manipur nor spoken on the state which has been burning for three months? And, why are you trailing, with a matchbox in hand, the kerosene (communalism) you have sprinkled across the country? Ofcourse, Modi said nothing.

Sadly, there was no one in the opposition ranks or on the treasury benches who could ask RG and his cohorts “Why have you not visited Haryana which has been on fire since July 31 – it is barely an hour’s drive from New Delhi?”

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Communalism In Haryana Wasn’t As Catastrophic As Its Authors Intended

Communalism In Haryana Wasn’t As Catastrophic As Its Authors Intended

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

If the purpose of the communal flare up in several districts of Haryana was to condition the electoral trend in Rajasthan, create the “suitable” mood for the 2024 general elections, boost chances of Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s third term and spread some tension in the National Capital Region, I am afraid the BJP will have to do better. This soufflé did not quite rise.

Much to BJP’s chagrin, an obstacle in their path is the evolving Jat-Muslim social cohesion. This almost organic Jat-Muslim evolution has to be disrupted to make way for politics of polarization.

Effort is on in Haryana to create a cleavage between Muslims and Jats. At Mandkola, a Jat village in Palwal, a gathering was addressed by the members of the Bajrang Dal exhorting “Hindus” to consolidate against Muslims.

The divisive effort did not go very far. A panchayat in the neighbouring Muslim village of Kot the very next day was devoted almost entirely to maintaining communal harmony at all costs. That it was a Muslim village is misleading. Let me explain.

A Paal in the local system is a part of a “Khap” a Jat or Meo group which maintains the tradition social hierarchy. At the panchayat in Kot, the Muslim “Paals” – Shiklot, Magariya, Damrote and Hindu “Paals” – Rawat, Saushet, Sahrawat, jointly endorsed “harmony at all costs.” The infection from Kot and Mandkola will spread making wider concentric circles.

What must remain a puzzle to people who, over the past 40 years, have grown accustomed to Hindus and Muslims at loggerheads, is that the two major communities in a neighbouring state under BJP rule have established a bond of peace.

One reason for this harmony in the past centuries was the Meo’s unabashed contemplation of themselves as converts from Hinduism – they took pride in the culture derived from their Hindu ancestry.

A progressive Meo I met retained his name which clearly revealed his ancestry – Zafar Meo Yaduvanshi. In our caste-religion ridden system, the integrated aspects of Meo culture have not found multitudes of admirers.

The surge of Muslim reform movements had their impact. The reformist “Mullah” found Meo culture too “Hindu”. Hindu society gradually under the spell of Arya Samaj and later political Hinduism found the “reformed” Meos “too Muslim.” Buffeted from both sides, some Meos began to change.

I remember distinguished Meo lawyer, Ramzan Chaudhry, make a clear admission. “I was embarrassed that my mother did Goverdhan puja.” Despite all the exertions for the “Islamization” of the Meo and Hinduization of the Jat, how have the two come on the same side?

A simple reason for Jats being against the Centre is official indifference to the agitation for Jat reservation.

Second, and much more important in welding Jats and Muslims, was the Kisaan Andolan or the Farmers’ agitation in which the Meos stood four square with the Jats. In this regard the Jats of Palwal, Sohna, Gurugram sentimentally remember “our Sikh brothers”. The generosity with which they opened “langars” or feeding centres is the stuff of legends in the Jat belt.

To run these large feeding Centres over months, the Sikh organization occasionally needed help from Jats. In one instance the Centres needed hundreds of litres of milk.

Jats, who once kept cows and buffalos have, in many instances moved on to other means of livelihood. Gujjars now keep dairy animals but they are traditionally opposed to Jats. They refused to help in this instance. The shortfall in milk was made up by Meo Muslim dairy farmers, a fact that the Jats will never forget.

In the recent agitation by women wrestlers, who happen to be Jats, the community again had total support from Muslims.

In other words Jats and Muslims are arrayed against the Bajrang Dal’s efforts to consolidate the Hindu fold. Brahmins, Thakurs, Gujjars are on the opposite side.

There is a huge lesson in the Meo-Jat bonding. This is the secularism of joint struggle and common purpose, infinitely more durable than the shallow secularism of mutual tolerance. There are some vulnerabilities. Saturation coverage given to the foul allegation during the peak of Covid pandemic that Muslims in the Markaz at Nizamuddin were deliberately spreading the virus, had its fallout in Haryana too. Anyone who looked like a Muslim was avoided by all Hindus. Jats were no exception.

How did the trouble begin?

Society, Andy Warhol said, had reached a stage when everybody will be famous for a few minutes. The most notorious Bad-Men in Rajasthan and Haryana at the moment are Monu Manesar and Pintu Bajrangi. They are alleged to have burnt alive two Meo-Muslims in Rajasthan last May. The incident itself and subsequent police lethargy ignited Muslim anger in the entire Mewat belt.

Anger simmered. Then, in late July posts on facebook announced Monu Manesar and Pintu Bajrangi’s participation in a Vishwa Hindu Parishad sponsored yatra starting July 31 from the Nalhar Mahadev temple in Meo dominated Nuh in Haryana.

Facebook posts by Monu and Pintu asked people to turn up in large numbers to garland them. They taunted the Meos to receive their “Jijaji” or “brother in law” with some fanfare. Meos sent back equally vicious rejoinders.

When the procession started, Muslim youth pelted stones but their principal targets were the elusive two – Monu Manesar and Pintu Bajrangi. Where were they hiding? Maybe in the cars parked nearby. The cars were burnt.

In a small living room of a local Jat leader, both Hindu and Muslim lawyers, social activist, panchayat leaders spoke in and out of turn, each being the other’s proxy.

They all seemed to say the same thing:

Jats took no part in the yatra which was armed with swords and rods. The Muslims, also armed, were in a position to surround and kill indiscriminately. “The Bajrang Dal plan was to have atleast a hundred martyrs, their bodies to be paraded throughout the Hindi belt” – Godhra on a larger scale.

Muslims showed restraint even though Muslim shops, houses were gutted.

There is curfew in several districts. Mosques have been burnt. Communal clouds still hover.

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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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