Re: Mahatma Gandhi Remembered: Sid Harth
chhotemianinshallah
In for a peasant surprise?
Rajdeep Sardesai
March 06, 2008
First Published: 21:27 IST(6/3/2008)
Last Updated: 16:05 IST(2/4/2008)
For someone who had finally been embraced by his party and anointed
its new poster boy, Finance Minister P Chidambaram seemed awfully
truculent a day after the Union Budget. Perhaps, it was the economist
in him who was worried about abandoning fiscal responsibility at the
altar of hand-outs. Maybe, it was the lawyer in him who was tired of
making out a case as to why he had decided on a Rs 60,000 crore farm
loan waiver to be written off in just four months. Or maybe, the
politician in him was aware that historically election budgets don’t
always bring in votes. Or maybe, he was just fatigued of pesky
journalists asking him where he was going to get the money to fund his
sop machine. Finally, in a moment of candour, the Finance Minister
admitted that he would rather not face election pressures every year
when delivering a Budget, and that state and general elections should
be held once every five years at the same time.
More than just playing kisan politics is required for the UPA to win
elections.Contrast the discomfort of Chidambaram with the euphoria
that his Budget seems to have generated within the ruling alliance.
The queues of party workers waiting to get a darshan at 10 Janpath
have lengthened, with farmers from Haryana leading the way in
genuflecting before the Congress leadership. Posters announcing Rahul
Gandhi as the ‘kisan ka neta’ have sprung up. Tired of their leader
being accused of spending too much time on the cricket field, Sharad
Pawar’s NCP has also joined the chorus, with full page ads lavishing
praise on the Agriculture Minister. In Parliament, there is a spring
in the step of the treasury benches, almost as if the chill of a
nuclear winter has now been magically transformed into a possible
monsoon of contentment.
To an extent, the celebratory air around the UPA leadership is
justified. After facing a mauling in state elections in 2007 (the
tally reads UPA 0, Opposition 5), the central government has been
desperately looking for an issue that could spur a momentum shift. The
original hope had been that an aggressive pro-reservation agenda would
effect the change. But in an environment of competitive reservation
politics, the Congress can hardly claim proprietorial rights on
reservations. An Arjun Singh may have used it to build his identity,
but the party was less inclined to follow suit. The Sachar Committee’s
recommendations on minorities were seen as another attempt at
recapturing a traditional Congress vote-bank. But here too, there has
been some hesitancy in allowing the Opposition to revive the plank of
minority appeasement. An 8 per cent-plus economic growth rate was a
possible calling card, but the fear of a ‘India Shining’-like campaign
boomeranging on the government was enough to spark off a defensive
reaction.
Enter the kisan: the traditional, ubiquitous symbol of the aam aadmi.
Much like the Indian soldier, the farmer is seen as a conscience-
keeper of a nation; agriculture is seen as an occupation that is part
of India’s moral core, the true grit of its people. Such are the
romantic notions that are still attached to land and farming that,
even in multiplex India, a Do Bigha Zameen can continue to evoke a
strong emotional connect. The ‘rural areas’ are a mantra to be chanted
whenever a moral point needs to be made. The backward-forward
reservation debate can be divisive, as can the majority-minority
equation, or the ‘India Shining’ slogan. But who would dare question
the right of the Indian farmer to demand more, especially when farmer
suicides are no longer just statistical data, but a grim reminder of
the failures of the State to build a more humane society? Any attempt
to question a loan waiver to farmers can be politically disastrous in
an agrarian society.
Contrast ‘farmer-first’ politics with national security and terrorism
— the BJP’s pet project — and it seems that the terms of political
engagement are heavily weighed in favour of the UPA leadership. The
fear of the terrorist is real, and there is growing evidence of the
dangers of ‘home-grown’ terrorism, and of the rising clout of Naxal
groups. But while the ‘soft on terror’ propaganda may appeal to the
BJP’s core middle-class constituency, it does not resonate with the
same vigour across the country. By contrast, farmers’ issues cut
across geographical barriers, with the result that they offer a
political party an opportunity to set the national agenda by appealing
to the bulk of the rural populace.
And yet, if the UPA believes it has found the mantra to electoral
success, it could well be guilty of premature celebration. If farm
loan waivers were enough to pile up the votes, then the likes of Devi
Lal, Charan Singh and Deve Gowda would have had permanent access to
power. Kisan politics can be a dangerous double-edged sword: while it
can provide opportunity, it can also quickly become a source of
despair. One of the biggest dangers that confronts political parties
at election time is the principle of rising expectations, with failure
to deliver resulting in what is now universally condemned as ‘anti-
incumbency’. By promising to complete the entire loan waiver scheme by
June 30, the government is setting itself up for the possibility of
encouraging a wave of unrealistic expectations among farmers, and then
finding itself trapped when it is unable to deliver on deadlines and
demands. And what of those thousands of indebted farmers who will
lose out because they remain outside the institutional credit system?
To understand just what can go wrong, look no further than the UPA’s
original Rs 12,000 crore flagship programme: the National Rural
Employment Guarantee (NREG) scheme. The first reality check done by
the Comptroller and Auditor General shows that barely 3.2 per cent of
the registered households could avail of the 100 days of employment in
the first year of the programme. The average employment provided under
the scheme was just 18 days as against the promised 100 days.
Ironically, the data on financial assistance under the NREG Act
(NREGA) showed that the performance of non-Congress ruled states in
implementing the programme was better than of the Congress-ruled
states. A recent television story exposed how even in the Gandhi
family bastion of Amethi and Rae Bareli, the NREGA projects were
caught in a web of bureaucracy and corruption. Will an even more
extensive loan waiver scheme also become a victim of its own ambition?
A morally acceptable idea if badly implemented can be a recipe for
disaster.
Moreover, the reality of contemporary electoral politics is such that
it requires more than just the announcement of farmer-friendly schemes
to translate intention into votes. While eyeing a 2008 election, the
UPA needs to ask itself: does it have the organisational muscle to
translate the Chidambaram Budget into an electoral victory? Can a
Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Discovery of India’ yatra be enough to galvanise a
dormant political organisation? Is there any evidence on the ground
that the party is on the comeback trail in politically influential
states like UP and Bihar? In the 2004 elections, in the 12 largest
states of the country, the Congress won just 100 of the 440 seats on
offer. Can the Congress claim with any conviction that there is at
least one large state where it is guaranteed a sweeping victory in the
polls? And are key allies like the DMK and the RJD confident of
repeating their 2004 performance this time round?
Perhaps, no one knows this uncertain political roulette better than
the Finance Minister who comes from a state where the Congress
organisation is decaying. With J Jayalalithaa threatening another
potential comeback, Chidambaram should be aware that his future, and
that of his party, could be determined by political forces that have
little connection with the Budget. The momentum in Parliament may have
shifted to the UPA after the kisan chemistry in the Budget. But in the
dusty tracks of Sivaganga, it could well be alliance arithmetic, not
budgetary chemistry, that will determine the fate of the next Lok
Sabha.
Editor-in-Chief, CNN-IBN
chhotemianinshallah
Two-timing icons
Indrajit Hazra, Hindustan Times
October 04, 2009
First Published: 02:16 IST(4/10/2009)
Last Updated: 02:21 IST(4/10/2009)
Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten smooching on the settee. If
those nine words haven’t already burnt a hole in your (now suddenly
ex-, eh?) favourite newspaper, read on.
In the early 90s, when the net had holes and the sky was blue and
your (now suddenly ex-, eh?) favourite incomprehensible Sunday
columnist was working in a chummy Calcutta newspaper, there was a big
kerfuffle when a Bengali daily published extracts of letters written
by Subhas Chandra Bose to a woman named Emilie Schenkl.
Bengalis have a special relationship with Netaji Subhas Bose© and it
was wonderful, many of us thought, that a publisher had finally
brought to light, outside the table lamps of academia, these personal
letters that made the icon so touchingly human. “I have been longing
to write to you for some time past — but you can easily understand how
difficult it was to write to you about my feelings... Not a single day
passes that I do not think of you, You are with me all the time. I
cannot possibly think of anyone else in the world,” read one such
missive, showing Bose yearning for the lady he loved.
The published letters struck me as a wonderful antidote to the stiff,
iconic, uniform-ed ‘Netaji’ whose tacky pictures (elevated to ‘kitsch’
collectibles these days) adorned many a calendar on the wall. His
words actually elevated the figure of Bose in my ranking of historical
heroes.
Well, try telling that to the Forward Bloc blokes who were up in arms
the same day, burning copies of the ‘lascivious’ newspaper that had
published ‘scurrilous’ extracts of their party founder’s letters. They
seemed confused about whether they were angry because Bose’s private
letters had been made public, or because he had been exposed as a
flesh’n’blood’n’hormones man. What they didn’t seem confused about at
all was that every copy of the newspaper had to be destroyed.
It’s true that Bose secretly married Schenkl, an Austrian, on December
26, 1937. Schenkl later explained that any public announcement would
have caused “unnecessary upheaval,” especially at a time when Bose
knew that he would become president of the Indian National Congress in
1938. But more than 50 years later, was it such a cataclysmic thing
for people, including admirers of Bose, to know that the great man
loved his wife? Nein, meine dumme Kumpel!
The latest noise over a feature film on the ‘relationship’ between
Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten is thankfully less cacophonic.
Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer (on which the proposed Nehru-
Edwina film’s script is based on) isn’t the only book that talks about
the ‘private’ affair. The fact that the two loved each other is well-
documented.
But popular reaction doesn’t stem from document-reading. It comes from
things like a ‘film version’ or a ‘media report’. (Which explains why
I haven’t become a household name even after suggesting in a novel
that freedom-fighter Kshudiram Bose and his fellow bomb-throwing boys
were rather hopeless at getting the right targets.)
But the rather moronic objections to the film’s script from the
Information and Broadcasting Ministry are on the old, well, moronic
lines of ‘Arrey baba, how can you show Chacha Nehru loving a woman,
and another man’s wife at that?’ One history-type even suggested that
a film on the relationship between two historical figures can only be
made if the relationship impacts “the course of events”.
I have a theory about why we flinch each time a national icon is
shown possessing human qualities. We find it horrific to consider
that such a ‘parental figure’ could have had an erotic, psychosexual
relationship with anyone else but the nation. Essentially, we want our
icons to only sleep with us.
...and I am Sid Harth
chhotemianinshallah
Oye Gandhi, Gandhi oye
Mrinal Pande,
October 07, 2009
First Published: 21:18 IST(7/10/2009)
Last Updated: 01:48 IST(8/10/2009)
Once again the silly season is upon us. This festival season, and like
the hero in Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye, we Indians have begun to chant,
“Mainu chaida, chaida, chaida” (I want, want, want). So dear reader,
if you live in Delhi’s high society and are considered one of its
‘Lukky’ (read: VIP) members, this Diwali you may receive the much
talked about white gold Gandhi pen from the house of Montblanc as a
corporate (tax deductible?) gift.
Each of these limited edition pens (241 pieces only, to mark the
number of days Gandhi spent on the Dandi march) has a Gandhi etched on
its 18-karat solid gold rhodium-plated nib, khadi chadar, bamboo lathi
and all. The 925 sterling silver mountings on its cap and cone are
shaped to resemble Gandhi’s humble spindle, and the silver has been
treated specially to make the texture look like handwoven khadi.
Price: Rs 11.3 lakh only. Nice.
As the landless daily wage workers in rural and urban areas of India
begin to use mobiles, and as knowledge and information expand as never
before even into the tiniest hamlets, Indians seem to have decided
that desire deserves to be encouraged rather than controlled.
Greed is good. As is stained clothes — ‘daag achhe hain’ — because
both will help sell products. Not self-control but the morning after
pill; not goat’s milk but a fortified commercially bottled yogurt
drink; not khadi but designer khadi are must-haves. Mainu chaida
chaida chaida!
As neo-converts, Indians are fast relearning what they want and how to
get it — not just at home but also in schools and the IITs and IIMs,
at the paanwallah who also sells sim cards, at the chai shop that also
keeps condoms, at malls and multiplexes where the government has
opened licensed vends for selling booze.
During the last general elections, while all major political parties
were busy co-opting Gandhi by making him speak for their manifestoes,
some forecasters — most of them advertisers and political publicists —
began feeding the media with the kind of stories about the 10 (or 20,
or 50) most powerful, best dressed, most iconic women in India.
There was soon going to be, we were told, a new emergence of ‘Woman
Power’ in India’s political firmament. What they meant by this was not
quite clear though. Were they ‘divining’ the arrival of yet another
pantheon of new market-friendly deities, or just inventing another
clever cover story (like ‘India’s Best B Schools’) to rake in
advertising for various goods and services?
Were they suggesting that the numbers of women parliamentarians were
going to swell dramatically and create the critical mass Gandhi and
feminists had been dreaming of? Or were they simply taking us for
suckers and suggesting we buy Sonia-Priyanka-like clothes, Jayanti
Natrajan-Sushma Swaraj-like traditional jewellery, and, of course,
diamonds that are being touted as reflective of a woman’s true self-
image by film stars?
In any event, as soon as journalists set out to look up hard facts and
gather evidence, it became clear that the answer was a clear ‘no’. No
political party was risking allocating 33 per cent tickets to women,
not even those headed by women supremos.
The size of party funds and profiles of fund-givers remained unchanged
— and male. The lists of candidates for the soon-to-be-held assembly
elections in Maharashtra and Haryana confirm this trend yet once
again. Why should you, Tharoor sahib, mourn the vanished power of the
usual Gandhi?
Mrinal Pande is the former Editor of Hindustan
bademiyansubhanallah
The truth is, Gandhi is less of a draw than Jinnah
M J Akbar Sunday October 11, 2009
It is curious that six decades after 1947 a debate on Jinnah can pack
halls in Delhi and Mumbai but a discussion on Gandhi might not fill a
front row. Is this because Jinnah offers the drama of a court trial,
the speakers being advocates for defense or prosecution, and the
audience a silent, but ultimately decisive, jury? Jinnah, one of the
great barristers of his age, would have relished the metaphor.
Has Gandhi become, in our subconscious, an irritating nuisance, a
mirror before our guilty conscience? Who wants to be measured by the
yardstick of a saint who was so disconcertingly honest that he turned
his autobiography into a confessional? Jinnah, on the other hand, was
so private, and even secretive in life that, in death, he is
vulnerable to endless post-mortem dissection. Gandhi has become as
ephemeral as an ideal. We can disturb the memory of Jinnah. Gandhi’s
memory disturbs us.
Where would Gandhi have been on his 140th birthday, October 2, 2009,
if he were not safely dead? He would have been on a fast in
Maharashtra. Why? The state police has slipped into the public space a
statistic made even more astonishing by the indifference with which it
has been received: there has been, on an average, a riot every 20 days
in Maharashtra during the last five years. Print media consigned it to
a couple of statutory paragraphs inside. Television, crowded with high-
decibel celebrities, ignored this completely. It seems that our
innumerable guardians of secularism need familiar villains for their
rage. Faceless violence is not attractive enough.
Gandhi placed the facts of violence above the politics of conflict. He
would have been an inconvenient presence for those who profess to live
by his creed today. As for the heroes of modern India: they would not
recognize him. There is no way to reinvent Gandhi as a happy symbol of
a rising sensex, checking out the value of an investment portfolio at
five every evening. It makes sense on every side to convert Gandhi
into a token portrait on the wall of a government office.
Jinnah’s problem, conversely, has been that he has been appropriated,
or misappropriated, by a range of vested interests, each determined to
resurrect him in its own image, to serve its agenda. Pakistan’s
political elite, forced to compromise with the culture of theocracy,
has converted the natty, lean, handsome owner of 200-odd London-
tailored suits into a shalwar-and-cap chameleon. If, instead of being
clean-shaven, Jinnah had sported a slight, fashionable beard, they
would have extended the beard by six inches in official portraits.
Most Pakistanis would be shocked today to discover that Jinnah did not
know Urdu, never fasted during Ramzan, had little interest in the
rituals of religion, and that his concept of spiritual sustenance was
very worldly indeed. Jinnah sent out invitations for a formal lunch-
banquet in honour of the visiting Mountbattens for August 14, 1947,
the day the new nation was born. The meal had to be cancelled when
someone realized that they were in the middle of Ramzan. Jinnah had
been oblivious of the fact that observant Muslims had been fasting for
three weeks.
Indian politicians have restructured Jinnah more subtly. Contemporary
Congressmen needed a cardboard Jinnah as the all-purpose villain who
could soak up all the guilt of Partition. An obstinate, communal hate
figure was planted into Indian schoolbook history. This was then
morphed into something more insidious.
When Jinnah’s utility as the father of Pakistan receded, he was
transformed, surreptitiously, into the symbol of the guilt of Indian
Muslims, who became the whipping boys of Indian nationalism as
practiced on all sides of the spectrum. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh,
forerunner of the BJP, latched on to this projection with great glee,
since it perpetuated the politics of isolation and accusation. Indian
Muslims, in this construct, were genetically unpatriotic and
therefore, deservedly condemned to the status of second-class
citizens. When Jaswant Singh challenged this single-dimension
mythology by lifting the record from the private domain of academic
archives and flinging it into public discourse, he had to be expelled.
He had spread the guilt to others, who were Hindus, and disturbed the
equanimity of a half-truth.
The secular parties, whose expertise in the dynamics of electoral
behaviour has always been more astute, quickly understood that fear is
the easiest route to the Indian Muslim vote. Fear of the past,
Partition, was compounded by fear of its future consequences. Muslims
had to choose between the communal cage and the secular trap. One
offered a diet of gruel, and the other a scrap of cheese. After six
decades, Indian Muslims are beginning to bang on the door of both the
cage and the trap.
Mahatma Gandhi would have heard the clamour.
Comments(3)
Rated 4.2/5 (28 Votes)12345
Comments:
Agree (10)
Disagree (2)
Vats says:
October 11, 2009 at 09:08 AM IST
In does not matter how many suits Jinnah had, how many cigaretts he
smoked a day, how many women he slept with liberally, how much Urdu he
knew or did not. What matters is that he displayed the obsessive
complusive disorder vis a vis Islamic identity and violence to satisfy
his revengefulness. At some private moment, this highly literate but
selfish man who cunningly passed himself as liberal, must have decided
that violence (direct action) was more acceptable to him than peace,
that the idea of Muslim majority Pakistan was more acceptable to him
than pluristic India. More over, himself once married to a parsee
woman, when Jinnah's daughter wanted to marry her Parsee lover,
Jinah's Islamic pride ensured that she remained unmarried for the rest
of her life than have a parsee man as the father of her children
(dilution of islam was not acceptable to this liberal). It is these
choices of Jinah that make him communal, divisive, contrived, short
sighted, and a man full of hatred and revenge. Let Akbar not indulge
in trying to project Jinah otherwise by saying how little Urdu he
spoke, how many western suits he had, and how he threw a dinner
invitation during ramazan.
Agree (9)
Disagree (2)
Nasir Khan says:
October 11, 2009 at 09:46 AM IST
It is the fact that Indian muslims paying a very heavy price of Indian
sub-continent partition. Need much more efforts from esteem patriatic
personnel to eridicate rebel label from Muslims and put them in nation
main stream.
Agree (5)
Disagree (2)
sam says:
October 11, 2009 at 09:59 AM IST
Gandhi and Jinnah are two different school of thoughts.You have to
judge the people based on what they do rather than what they eat or
wear.
There are two popular views for the creation of Pakistan.Jinnah's two
nation theory in the context of South asia is identical to Samuel
Huntington's clash of civilisation in the global context.
The difference is Huntington only floated his theory but Jinnah
actually implemented his theory and millions died.
There is another view which is believed by hardline clerics in Pakitan
which states that creation of Pakistan has nothing to do with
Jinnah.Pakistan was created on the day when bin Qasim attacked Sindh.
The slogan is "The day first hindu became a muslim, the day
Pakistan was born". Hardliner beleive that Jinnah only
facilitated the process.