Why Don’t Channels Clear The Air By Telecasting Kanhaiya’s Speech

Why Don’t Channels Clear The Air By Telecasting Kanhaiya’s Speech

                                                                                            Saeed Naqvi

Arnab Goswami of Times Now Television, runs his show rather like an animal trainer in an old fashioned circus or an Al Capone like gangster, terrorizing his minions, which is what the panelists palely peering out of those windows begin to look like, by the time Arnab is through with them.

It is in this galaxy that Sambit Patra, BJP Spokesperson, has been shining these past few days with incomparable light. Arnab runs a clip showing Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends, raising their hand and throwing their heads back. There are no words, only cacophony. Sambit Patra provides the missing slogans. “Afzal hum sharminda hain; tere qatil zinda hain.” (Afzal Guru, we are embarrassed that your murderers roam free).

Flushed with success from Times Now where, with Arnab Goswami, he had helped viewership ratings sky rocket on the JNU issue, Patra turned up at the India Today Television, to test his luck. He will rue the day he accepted anchor Rahul Kanwal’s invitation.

Shouting slogans in support of Afzal Guru is a powerful allegation against the JNU demonstrators. This has become particularly so for the millions who watch Arnab’s show. This vast viewership is liable to swallow the allegation unhesitatingly simply because it does not have the background. This audience does not know that the anniversary of Afzal Guru’s death has been observed all the three years since his hanging – religiously in Kashmir and in liberal enclaves like Jawaharlal Nehru University.

True, Afzal Guru’s crime was heinous. He was supposed to have master minded the December 13, 2001 attack on Indian Parliament, barely three months after the 9/11 attack in New York.

The Supreme Court judgement handing him the death sentence did not satisfy everybody. The Honourable Court admitted that the evidence was circumstantial, but went onto argue that the “collective conscience of society will be satisfied only if the death penalty is awarded to Afzal Guru.” Critics found it unfortunate that a court of law decided to pander to its assumed notion of “collective conscience” rather than abide by points of law.

The hanging too was most mysterious. Without informing his family, Afzal was secretly hanged and buried in Tihar jail. Since then there is a demand in Kashmir for his remains to be returned to the family. Is it an unfair demand?

In Kashmir, Afzal Guru is not a closed chapter because of the circumstances attending the disposal of the case. But buoyed by political power, this time the Sangh Parivar decided to push for charges of sedition against Afzal Guru’s sympathizers. This is part of a larger game spelt out in an article in The Pioneer published in June 2014 soon after Modi came to power. The author K.G. Suresh is a versatile journalist and a member of the Sangh Parivar think tank. He said: “Augean stables of that hallowed institution called JNU must be cleaned. They have over the years, become dens of secessionism, Maoism and terrorism.” Was it not Subramanian Swamy whose name was being mentioned as the possible Vice Chancellor? He showed his hand the other day when in the context of the current agitation he asked for the university to be shut down for four months. But for the time being sedition charges on the leftist union leader would suffice.

For this line of action to succeed, choreography of the whole Afzal Guru show in JNU would have to be couched in clear cut anti India rhetoric. In this, the Sangh Parivar goofed up in its co ordination with the JNU authorities and the police. First, the Vice Chancellor permitted the show. But when the youth wing of the Parivar, ABVP protested, permission was withdrawn.

The university administration’s indecisiveness became yet another nugget in what to me has been the finest piece of oratory since the days of Prakash Veer Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee. In his February 9 speech, Kanhaiya Kumar “left the audience spellbound” according to eye witnesses. It was imaginative of the Indian Express to have published an English translation of the speech under the title “Is this Sedition?”

By now Arnab and Sambit Patra – and sundry other duets – were on the move providing lethal voiceovers to clips showing Kanhaiya and his friends shouting inaudible slogans which were alleged to be anti Indian.

“We shall avenge Afzal Guru’s killers; we shall breakup the country; Pakistan Zindabad and worse.” We have Sambit Patra and Ravi Shankar Prasad’s testimony that this was the anti national fare dished out at the JNU do.

Secure in the conviction that he had won the propaganda war for the Sangh Parivar-ABVP, Sambit Patra sought to push his luck a little further with a different channel – India Today Television.

Rahul Kanwal’s advantage is that he is a reporter as well as an anchor. First, with great craft, he lulled Patra into a sense of false security. How cleverly had Patra been channel hopping armed with the video clip of Kanhaiya’s anti national sloganeering which has been dominating “some channels” Rahul said.

He then led Patra to an in house computer whizkid who, quite expertly, separated the Kanhaiya clip of 9 February, with crisp and clear sound quality from the doctored clip of 11 February where the sound has been deliberately muffled to warrant outside commentary – Patra’s in this case. Rahul’s sifting of the grain from the chaff left Patra tongue tied on live TV. He made cow eyes at Rahul. He looked like Surma Bhopali caught lying within Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra’s earshot in Sholay.

Meanwhile, Kanhaiya in his speech has challenged the ABVP to debate him on nationalism. This is the crux of the matter. Here is a TRP spinner for the channels to pick up. Or atleast the speech can be telecast so that the nation can distil the truth from the concoction the ABVP and the Police have poured into the JNU cauldron.

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A Sanders, Trump Clash: A Dream For Film Script Writers

A Sanders, Trump Clash: A Dream For Film Script Writers

                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

A Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders clash in the US Presidential elections could be God’s Gift to political cinema.

Some outlines for a script come to mind: Clarence Darrow versus William Jennings Bryan, on two sides of the famous Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.

Or, the epic battle between Ed Murrow of CBS News and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti communist witch hunt.

One can pack Trump’s anti Muslim, anti Hispanic invective in the script. But where is Sanders in all of this?

I suspect, the Darrow-Bryan contest will work better. The scene is set in the criminal court of Tennessee. On trial is a substitute High School teacher, John Scopes, for violating the Tennessee Act which prohibits teaching human evolution as enunciated by Darwin. The result was the classical Fundamentalist-Modernist clash focused on whether or not any reality exists outside the Bible.

In a country where evangelicals constitute 40% of Republican voters, a debate on Homo sapiens evolving from apes may yet raise a storm in pockets even today.

William Jennings Bryan, who felt that a study of human evolution was anti Christian, actually contested the Presidential race on three occasions. He was Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, later humiliated by the famous Defense Attorney Clarence Darrow. Bryan and Trump come from an abiding tradition of anti intellectualism.

Darrow and Murrow represented the streak in American liberal decency which makes Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination so compelling.

The world changed when the West, led by the US, interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union not as a victory for freedoms but as the triumph of the Market, of rampaging capitalism.

Nation states, more petrified than elated, allowed themselves to be stitched together as two party systems, beholden to corporate and global finance. Within a short span, every electoral democracy gave out a foul stench of crony capitalism.

Establishments across the board had lulled themselves into complacency. The global media, Murdochized, would manage public opinion in their favour. This turned out to be a delusion. Murdoch today is a bad name in serious media circles.

Remember how new media technologies were being developed in Washington to create colour revolutions – orange, rose, cedar – bypassing local controls. Soon, advanced models of these technologies were available with every West Asian terrorist group. Lightening spread of the internet has opened up a plethora of the new parallel media, more credible than mainstream information sources.

Not just electoral democracies but all other systems of government are now under scrutiny by the people. The result is that two party systems in democracies are being challenged. People are placing question marks on other forms of government too.

When the Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited the Arab Spring by setting himself on fire in December 2010, ordinary people began to occupy centre stage for the first time in dictatorships. The late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, sensed this settlement at the grassroots. He played the only hand Saudis know: spend money to divert trouble. He rained $135 billion on his people.

Then, step by step, the Syrian and Yemeni theatres were opened up to externalize internal upheavals. Today, the Saudis are riding two tigers from neither of which can they dismount. If they did the ground at home would heave.

In India the electorate demonstrated its autonomy from the two party strait jacket by delivering 67 out of 70 seats in the Delhi state assembly to a barely two year old party called AAP.

Joko Widodo in Indonesia, Pablo Iglesias in Spain, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Antonio Costa in Portugal, Justin Trudeau in Canada all newcomers, represent a wholesale rejection of new economic policies bringing corruption and economic disparities in their wake. Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the British Labour party, and series of electoral verdicts in Nordic and East European counties are also a manifestation of disgust with establishments.

This global trend would tend to suggest that Bernie Sanders, self avowed Socialist, is not a rank outsider anymore. But his popularity among young voters is pitted against the powerful establishments behind Hillary Clinton. And establishments are at this stage being corroded, not exactly toppled. But the process of toppling them is seriously underway.

Hillary has been First Lady for two terms, Senator and Secretary of State. Does her performance as Secretary of State commend her as President? Under her watch, Ambassador Christopher Stevens was brutally killed in the US mission in Benghazi.

There she was announcing to the media “I came, I saw and he died”. She was talking of Qaddafi’s death. This alongside footage of Qaddafi sodomised by a knife.

The next memorable image of Hillary concerns her management of the Syrian crisis. “Get out of the way, Assad” she proclaims with an imperious wave of the hand. And Assad is nowhere close to bowing out.

If voters persist with their quest for the novel, how is Hillary Clinton a repository of any novelty?

And yet, the celebrated intellectual, Noam Chomsky is probably right.

“Bernie Sanders is a decent honest New Dealer.” A “New Dealer” Chomsky explains is “someone who is far out to the left of the field.” Chomsky spots the conflict between the people and establishments doggedly fighting to stay on.

Sanders is unlikely to make it to the White House in the system of “Bought Elections”, Chomsky says. How then has he come this far?

How does Chomsky explain Trump’s popularity? “It is a reflection of depression, hopelessness, concern that everything is lost.” Trump’s propagandist strategy is in line with a history of directing anger “on straw men such as immigrants, welfare cheats, trade unions and all kinds of people who you think are getting everything you are not getting.”

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Rohith And Other Dalits: Carl Sagan To Sewage Cleaning

Rohith And Other Dalits: Carl Sagan To Sewage Cleaning

                                                                            Saeed Naqvi

Rohith Vemula, a Ph.D. student, focused on the interstellar spaces and Carl Sagan. In a different location, a sewage cleaner looks for live cockroaches in the sewer, which ironically give him a sense of security: he can now clean the sewer without fearing death from foul gases. One day he miscalculated. He died. One is a real life character, the other from a masterpiece film, Court. But they are two sides of the same reality.

Rohith had a life of the mind, and he wrote sensitive prose, reminding us of the reflective student in our university days, exactly the one we chose to share our secrets with.

At this point, the Dalit in him becomes irrelevant. He could well have been one of us. That is why his suicide touches us more than the self immolation of a teen aged girl in Telangana: her parents did not have the money to build a toilet. She was ashamed.

Reams and reams have been written on Rohith’s predicament and there is yet no end to the things in the heart. One reason for the endless outpouring maybe our incapacity to access an educated, 28 year old Dalit’s mind. We are groping.

Sisyphus, the giant, has been asked to push a boulder up the mountain. From the peak, the boulder comes rolling down and Sisyphus has to resume his labour – push the boulder up again.

In the 60s, every University coffee house existentialist contemplated Sisyphus, as the ultimate metaphor for life’s futility. It was a fad. But for a Dalit tailor’s son, life’s meaninglessness must seem very real because now an educated mind has been placed on his shoulders. This, as the establishment’s walls grow higher each day even as universities churn out more and more Dalits, some quite as exceptional as Rohith. The Rohiths of this world have no network, no ties of school or blood to enable them clamber onto a higher rung. The sewage cleaner has no aim other than a mechanical desire to keep sewers clean. Rohith has been cursed with aspiration. They represent two tragedies.

Visit a five star hotel and statuesque men and women, impeccably clad, populate the main lobbies, arrival desks, restaurants. In sharp contrast are the keepers of the toilets: these are smaller men and women of weaker bone structure, more frugally dressed. These are Dalits, (I believe Valmikis are preferred) hired on contract from private agencies. The picture is similar in shopping malls, hospitals, airports, restaurants.

Placing Dalits on the rolls of these establishments would be risky: men and women employed to clean toilets and keep the establishments tidy would begin to look for upward mobility outside areas of sanitation. This would upset the unstated caste balance in the job market.

Caste hierarchies are thus regularized in collusion with the state. How would the state expect hundreds of thousands of Rohiths to cope with this confusing reality.

Some years ago, there was a minor agitation in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences against three upper caste candidates (two Brahmins) who inveigled themselves into the sanitation department. Marxist leaders intervened to call off the agitation. They thought the trend should be encouraged. Brahmins joining as sanitation labour was a revolutionary social advance.

The reality was different. The upper caste men never touched the broom or actually worked as sanitation labour. Soon enough, they were promoted as supervisors and accommodated in departments far removed from sanitation. Entry as sanitation labour was a ruse.

The Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan may be trapped in a paradox. Dalits can’t be made supervisory officers; officers will not pick up the broom.

A look at some of New Delhi’s garbage dumps revealed a startling new reality. The new safai mazdoors at these dumps are not the traditional sanitary workers; many of them are Muslims. Sachar Committee report on the socio economic condition of Indian Muslims may be in urgent need of revision. All of this is not unrelated to the condition of a sensitive Dalit like Rohith.

Nothing in recent years has encapsulated the Dalit predicament better than Court, the film I mentioned at the outset.

Narayan Kamble, a folk poet extremely popular among Dalits, is arrested on a ridiculous charge – that his poetry may have been responsible for the suicide of a sewage cleaner, who died by drowning in the sewage.

The police has been used by the system to silence a poet whose hold on the Dalits may be exploited by the political opposition. The voluntary act of suicide denies the sewage cleaner any sympathy for dying in his line of duty. His death is a political act.

The prosecution lawyer argues against the poet being given bail. The Sessions Judge obliges. There is absolutely no connect between those administering justice and those in need of it. In the latter category is Rohith too.

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India’s Capacity To Deliver On Projects Seriously Doubted In Iran

India’s Capacity To Deliver On Projects Seriously Doubted In Iran

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

The nuclear deal with Iran was a milestone, ofcourse, but the lifting of sanctions last week freed Tehran to sign contracts left, right and centre. A thousand such contracts were signed on Sunday alone.
 

There was an impression that New Delhi would be ahead of others in the queue boosting economic ties with Tehran. But, alongside all the goodwill in Tehran is also a growing scepticism about India’s ability to meet deadlines?

Negotiations for building of the Chabahar port on the Persian Gulf was signed in 2003. The cabinet approved $85 million for the first phase. But nothing has moved, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the UFA summit for swift clearance.

Iran’s National Railways signed a deal in 2013 for 2,50,000 tons of rolling stock. The first phase of the transaction should have been completed by now. But Tehran does not know what the last minute hitch is?

New Delhi must speed up its implementation process. A new and vibrant Iran with the world knocking at its doors, will go elsewhere. The attractiveness of Iran cannot be overstated against the rest of bleak and dismal, war ravaged West Asia. Iran’s clout is already in play in the evolution of the Syrian script towards the Geneva process.

US Secretary of State, John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are trying to shepherd all parties to the Syrian conflict in the direction of Geneva. Notwithstanding their determination to set into motion the Geneva process between Damascus and the Syrian opposition, ground realities inside Syria continue to alarm.

Even according to the United Nations, 4,40,000 civilians, elderly and the very young, are either besieged by rebels or government forces in the country.

This is not all. International Red Cross in Syria confirmed to me over the telephone other forbidding data: nearly four million people cannot be accessed at all. Either roads are not motorable or gunweilding men and occasional snipers keep aid workers at bay.

High pressure diplomacy by the US and Russia is trying to douse the flames but the conflicts continues on two planes – the battlefield and the media. A series of tactical battles are raging across Syria.

These are little proxy wars. At his crowded press conference at New Delhi’s Leela hotel, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem was quite firm: only Syrians will be allowed to attend the Geneva conference on Syria’s future. “Those fighting inside are actually proxies of outside powers. Since these powers are financing the groups, they will determine the stands of the various delegations.” Muallem shrugged his shoulders. “That is the reality – we can’t help it.”

Riyadh is in difficulties trying to put together its preferred delegation because it’s would be nominees are in common parlance “terrorists”. The definition of “terrorists” has therefore been contested in the Syrian context. King Abdullah of Jordan was tasked by an earlier conference to identify terrorist groups. He threw up his hands in despair because one country’s terrorists were another’s freedom fighters.

Saudis are in a tizzy on another count: the entire leadership of Jaysh al Islam, the group they had diligently nurtured, was wiped out in one rocket strike three weeks ago. Meanwhile, Damascus has also scored a string of battle victories.

History will measure Secretary of State John Kerry so much more favourbly compared to his predecessor, Hillary Clinton. He has invested everything into a series of diplomatic successes – Cuba, Iran and now possibly Syria. Moscow too has not had a Foreign Minister of Sergei Lavrov’s stature – atleast not since Andrei Gromyko.

Look at the determination of the two competing statesmen. Riyadh and Ankara would like their proxies in Syria to be in control of more area to be able to play a better hand at Geneva. Towards this end they would like the conflict to drag on. During this period there may emerge from the motley gangs in Syria groups that look like segments of an opposition. So Riyadh hopes.

This dilly dallying had the potential of delaying the January 25 deadline set for the inauguration of the Geneva process. With lightening speed the Kerry-Lavrov duet turned up in Zurich to plot the journey forward.

Kerry then flew to Davos to announce the scheme. Initially, the meeting in Geneva of the Syrian parties will be “proximity talks”. Representatives of the government and the opposition will separately meet the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, who will shuttle between rooms.

“You are not going to have a situation where people are sitting down at the table, staring at each other or shouting at each other”, Kerry explained. “You are going to have to build some process here.” The idea of this Unity Transitional government was “proposed by the Iranians”.

At this particular moment in history the script is evolving favourably for Iran, Hezbullah, Russia and the Syrian regime. But four million people in Syria remain in peril because of the unpredictability of what a country like Saudi Arabia might do in desperation. Saudis have support even within an incoherent western camp. Remember British Prime Minister, David Cameron told the House of Commons that there were 70,000 moderate fighters in Syria.

Really, moderates with guns?

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