Why does the Anglo-American Media refuse to give Modi a Clean Chit on 2002?

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For a decade and a bit now, the English-language Indian media has criticised Modi rather sharply on his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim violence and Modi, in turn, had projected himself as a victim of a nefarious “limousine liberal” plot. In his aborted interview with Karan Thapar, for example, Modi flatly rejected any wrongdoing on his part with respect to 2002 and contended that this whole blame game was a “conspiracy of 1-2 persons (sic)”.

As the 2014 elections draws to a close, however, it seems that our journalists have had a near-miraculous change of heart and nowadays 2002 is rarely bought up, being palmed off with all sorts of non-phrases, the most popular one at the moment being “clean chit”.

This might be explained by some people by pointing to the overwhelming support large corporations have given to the Modi campaign, the same chaps who, as it would so happen, own the media houses. To this contention I would just repeat Ian Richardson’s delicious catch-phrase from the 90s UK TV show, House of Cards: You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

But Indian corporations, powerful as they are, do have a limited reach and their influence, unfortunately, does not extend much beyond the shores of our great nation. It is thus instructive to see just how excoriatingly harsh the Anglo-American press’ election coverage has been on our Hindu-Hriday-Samrat-turned-Vikash-Purush.

New York Times

America’s most influential newspaper published a 5minute video on its website providing a summary of the Narendra Modi. The video has the rather damning testimony of Celia Dugger who was the co-chief of South Asia bureau during 2002. She covered the riots and reported that the administration failed completely to prevent the violence:

"…witnesses were telling me that they had begged the police to intervene and stop the mobs and that they [just] stood by and that leaders of groups affiliated with the Bharatiya Janta Party were inciting violence."

2 months later, she even interview Modi himself. This is what she says:

“I asked him if he had any regrets about what had happened in his state in that period—women openly raped [and] 100s and 100s of people were killed. He told me his greatest regret was that he didn't manage the media very well. I left the interview feeling chilled by my interview with the chief minister. He had not shown any regret or expressed any empathy for those who had been slaughtered in his state on his watch"

Foreign Policy

This quasi-academic bimonthly American magazine published a critical account of Modi’s policies which carried the byline, “Gujarat’s shiny free market reformer has a dark side”. Of the many points it makes, the piece is particularly harsh on “clean chits”:

“In 2013, an investigation ordered by India's Supreme Court found insufficient grounds to prosecute Modi. He says he has been given a "clean chit." That is an exaggeration. The investigation found damning -- if not criminally prosecutable -- evidence of questionable actions (and inactions) by Modi, as well as indications that crucial records had been destroyed. Some of Modi's behaviour after 2002 is puzzling too. Why, for instance, did he in 2007 appoint to his cabinet Maya Kodnani -- a politician suspected of, and later convicted for, distributing swords to rioters and exhorting them to attack Muslims?”

The Guardian

Jumping across the pond, the Left-leaning Guardian’s economics leader writer, Aditya Chakrabortty, proposes a powerful "thought experiment" where he contends that if a British politician would have behaved similar to the way Modi had done after Godhra, he would have been "arrested for wilful neglect of duty, hate speech and for inciting violence.".

Chakrabortty also writes, somewhat bluntly, that "Modi bears a responsibility for some of the worst religious violence ever seen in independent India" and echoes Foreign Policy by pointing out that "there has been no "clean chit" for Modi. Courts in India are still hearing allegations against him."

The Economist

This newspaper, which describes its politics as classically liberal, actually did the unthinkable and anointed Rahul Gandhi as its choice to lead India in 2014. Why? Because 2002 ruled out Modi.

The paper pointed out that “one reason why the inquiries into the riots were inconclusive is that a great deal of evidence was lost or wilfully destroyed. And if the facts in 2002 are murky, so are Mr Modi’s views now. He could put the pogroms behind him by explaining what happened and apologising. Yet he refuses to answer questions about them.”

Language is always a powerful indicator of what you’re trying to say, so one should note The Economist’s use of the word “pogrom” to describe, well, the 2002 Pogrom. Currently no Indian paper does so as an editorial standard.

Explaining its choice, the piece says, “it would be wrong for a man who has thrived on division to become prime minister of a country as fissile as India” and goes on to point out that ”for now he should be judged on his record—which is that of a man who is still associated with sectarian hatred. There is nothing modern, honest or fair about that. India deserves better.”

The Telegraph

Completing the UK’s ideology triad, the right-wing Telegraph is the most critical of British newspapers, with its Delhi correspondent, Dean Nelson choosing to describe in graphic detail Zakia Jaffrey’s account of how her husband, with a rabid mob outside his door, called Modi for assistance:

“Far from offering help, Mr Modi had taunted him and even expressed surprise that he was still alive, Mr Jafri told those around him in his final moments. “No help will come,” Mr Jafri added.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Jafri’s wife, Zakia, watched in horror from a balcony as rioters marched her husband naked from their home and chopped off his fingers, hands, arms and head.”

This is a story that Indian newspapers have rarely touched and as the elections have approached it has been all but forgotten. It is, therefore, a mystery as to why the Telegraph finds it newsworthy.

The Financial Times

The only pink paper in our list has a piece by the FT’s Delhi correspondent in 2002, Edward Luce. Titled "NarendraModi: India’s Jekyll and Hyde”, Luce recounts the “inflammatory rhetoric” Modi displayed after the Godhra incident, especially noting his use of Newton’s Third Law to signal that he was fine with violence. “No one, Indian or foreigner, who covered the following, gruesome, 72 hours, was in any doubt about the meaning of Mr Modi’s signal.”

He ends with asking “whether Modi is a Margaret Thatcher or an Adolf Hitler” and “suspects” it’s the latter, warning that “either way, I would rather not take the risk of finding out”.

The Daily Caller

That is not to say that it’s all been negative for Modi. David Cohen, writing in the The Daily Caller, takes a strong stand and says that “Modi took several steps to protect the besieged Muslim communities, including imposing curfews, issuing shoot-on-sight orders against rioters, and calling in the army.”

What’s that you say? You’ve never heard of this newspaper before? Worry not, you’re in good company. I hadn’t either. It’s not really mainstream, being a small website based out of Washington. Not that there’s anything wrong in being small, of course.

***

Admittedly, just because The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Economist, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and the Indian media from a few years back agree on something doesn’t mean its correct. Maybe the Indian media’s new opinion about Modi is correct. Or maybe no one is correct. With a man accused of mass murder, a front runner to become PM, I say this is a good as time as any to go post-modern. After all, you might talk of massacres and genocides and clean chits, but, my good man, really, what is truth anyway?

First published on NewsYaps

The UPA’s Rights-Based Approach and its Impact in India

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The UPA, in the past decade, has introduced a new paradigm in India’s development story: the Rights-Based Approach. This article explores the origins of this strategy and evaluates its impact on India. 

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that the UPA is in a bad way. Large swathes of public opinion have turned against it, the media uses it as a punching bag and even its own leaders are convinced of the futility of the 2014 elections. All of this is for good reason, of course. The past 5 years have been a study in how not to run a government. Nevertheless, we must give even the devil its due. For all its ills, the UPA has, with its Rights-Based Approach, enacted a paradigm shift in the way development is thought of in this country. In a crushingly poor nation such as India, it has overturned conventional modes of thinking on development, the benefits of which have been and will continue to be significant.

The philosophical basis to the Rights-Based Approach has been principally provided by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum which is generally called the Capability Approach to development. As argued by Sen in his seminal book, Development as Freedom, development is a concept that should be directly and deeply concerned with the effective freedom – capability – of actual people to achieve the lives they have reason to value. Development, therefore, should be defined as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Some of the freedoms as enunciated by Nussbaum include being able to live up to one’s natural life span, having good health, having one’s bodily integrity secured (freedom from assault, having control of your reproductive abilities etc) and being able to make and participate effectively in political choices. 

Traditionally, though, development has been defined in far narrower terms, the most common being conflating it with the GDP or income growth. This lovely little illusion comes crashing down using two of Sen’s favourite examples: Kerala vs. Gujarat and India vs. Bangladesh. Gujarat has a per-capita income about 11% more than Gujarat. Yet in all real parameters of human development (see table below), Kerala is streets ahead. This comparison becomes even starker for Bangladesh and India. Our eastern neighbour leads us on a number of key human development statistics in spite of India’s GNI per capita being an impressive twice that of Bangladesh.

As is apparent from these two examples, incomes can hardly be used as a proxy for measuring development. A girl child would be better off in “poor” Kerala/Bangladesh than “rich” Gujarat/India. This, of course, does not mean that higher incomes cannot coincide with development. But as Sen has repeatedly pointed out, incomes are just one of the means towards development and in no way is it a necessary and/or sufficient condition. Of course, we tend to ignore this and mistakenly treat GDP numbers as ends to development and not means, as they are.

Given this false centrality of GDP/incomes in development, welfare programmes carried out by governments and aid agencies often functioned on a ‘basic needs’ approach in which elementary requirements of target groups were identified and then aimed to be fulfilled. Of course, given the fact that ‘development’ (i.e. GDP growth) was not directly linked to those needs, the needs were not given the highest of priorities. 

Enter, the Rights-Based Approach (RBA), which guarantees freedoms as a right.  Development now is meant to increase freedoms rather than push up a number such as GDP. Unlike the ‘basic needs’ approach which did not make it mandatory to fulfil needs, rights are justiciable. This approach allows us to keep our eye on the ball, letting agencies involved with development to actually focus on making lives better rather than be obsessed with figures such as GDP which are often not even directly related to actual human development.

The UPA has implemented the Rights-Based Approach using 5 acts: the Right to Information, the NREGA (right to work), the Food Security Act (right to food), the Right to Education and the Forest Rights Act 

The RTI has probably done more to change governance in India since 1947 than any other single measure. By making information a “right” (upgraded from being just a “need”), the act has made bureaucrats responsible for stopping it, thus remedying, to some extent, the huge imbalance in power between citizens and the government.  Citizens are using this new power to crack the whip and force the state to act. 

The NREGA has ensured basic livelihood security at a scale (in 2011, it reached 215 million households) which makes its impact almost revolutionary. The act has not only ensured income security but increased wages overall and has fundamentally changed the distorted relationship between farmers and labourers, giving the latter more of a voice. The World Bank (not the most enthusiastic supporter of the RBA, it must be pointed out) has hailed the act, noting that it “illustrates how good governance and social mobilisation go hand-in-hand”. It also commends the RBA of the scheme claiming that the “fact that the law is organized as a right motivates job seekers’ collective action to hold authorities accountable for supplying employment instead of siphoning off the allocated funds”.

Apart from income security, the tertiary effects of the NREGA on rural prosperity are also manifold: just to take one example, a University of Oxford study in 2013 has found that the NREGA has a significant effect on reducing child malnutrition.

The latest entrant to the UPA’s RBA showcase is the Food Security Bill which promises that most basic of human rights: food. The Bill expands the structure of the pre-existing PDS to ensure highly subsidised grain for “up to 75% of the rural population and up to 50% of the urban population”. This is critical in a country such as India which has some of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world, worse than even most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Some countries in which chronic malnutrition is less than India include Bangladesh, Tanzania and Niger. Even Rwanda, a country which has suffered the worst genocide on the planet since WWII, manages to ensure better nutrition for its children. Statistics such as these might explain Amartya Sen’s emotional plea, pointing out that the opposition and delay in passing the Food Security Bill was causing 1,000 child deaths per week.

In fact, the recent debate around the Food Security Bill (FSB) is instructive in order to observe the opposition to the RBA. This conversion of basics such as food or information from “needs” to “rights” has irked many supporters of “minimal government”. Their main argument rests around the issue of cost: is this extra financial burden sustainable?

At its core, this is a valid question: piloting schemes which bankrupt a government is not a very wise move. 

When we get down to hard numbers, though, fears that the RBA will have a significantly adverse impact financially remain quite unfounded. The FSB, as pointed out by Ashok Kotwal, Milind Murugkar and Bharat Ramaswamy, entails an extra expenditure which is less than 1% of the GDP. Similarly, the NREGA only involves a government allocation of 0.5% of the GDP. In contrast, military spending is 3% of the GDP. India’s fuel subsidy, benefiting its upper and middle classes is 1.3% of the GDP and tax subsidy to industry in the 2012 budget was a whopping 5 times of the NREGA allocation.

Clearly then, the money is there—the government RBA expenditure is a tiny part of its total expenditure and, given its impact, is money well spent—which makes opposition to these bills a bit of a mystery. 

Given its large scale impact, the UPA has clearly benefitted from its RBA approach. In 2009 the Congress won 206 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, a massive 42% increase from the 2004 results (the Rights-Based Approach Wave?). UPA 2, though, has paid far less attention to the RBA than UPA 1. It delayed the FSB significantly in contrast to the speed with which it passed the RTI and NREGA. Moreover, as Jean Dreze has pointed out, the FSB severely dilutes the RBA by allowing governments to select “eligible households” allowing for huge gaps in who does or does not benefit, thereby weakening the “rights” nature of the measure.

This, in fact, might be one reason why the UPA is so despondent about the next elections. Its forceful espousal of the RBA helped it in 2009; maybe its failure to do so during its second term will end up costing it the 2014 elections.

Given the approach’s success, it will be interesting to see whether the next government adopts it or not. Although given the UPA 2’s shabby treatment of the concept and the BJP’s ideological opposition to it, this, unfortunately, looks rather unlikely.

First published on NewsYaps

Faiz is Beautiful but Can You Really Call Him a People's Poet?

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I recently came across a short debate I had with Mr Sohail Hashmi on Kafila. I found rereading it quite interesting so thought I’d post it up here for posterity.

Mr Hashmi, of course, is a writer I much admire and I have, especially, read his writings on the architectural heritage of Delhi with great interest. In this instance he wrote a lovely piece on Faiz, Urdu’s greatest poet of the modern era. What I took issue with, though, is Mr Hashmi’s characterisation of Faiz as a “people centric” poet and one whose “ideas glisten with the truth and democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people”

My first comment on the article was:

“Thanks for this fascinating account Mr Hashmi.

Although, personally, I’ve always battled with the notion that Faiz’s poetry was “people centric”. If it was, it was in a very top-down, almost patronising sort of way. Can any poetry, written in Rekhta (and here I make a very stark distinction between Urdu and Rekhta as should be done) ever be truly “people centric”? Are “people centric” themes enough to award Faiz with the honour of the subcontinent’s most imprtant poet, this hardly a handful people in the sub-continent could actually understand his overtly Persianised Urdu? You must admit, to claim to talk on behalf of the people, when the people can’t even understand you is a bit rich.

Urdu is one of the few languages which exhibits such extreme literary diglossia that the literary form (at least in poetry) is almost incomprehensible to its native speakers. Bengali is another sub-continental language which did exhibit a similar trait with an artificially sanskritised form of the language (shadhubhasha: cholit bhasha :: Rekhta:Urdu) but thankfully, that elitist trend has died out and almost all literature in Bengali today is in cholit bhasa (i.e. the normal spoken language).”

To which Mr Hashmi replied:

“You have touched upon some very complex issues and no simple explanations are possible.

Between the time that Faiz began writing to the time that he died, Urdu ceased to be a language of public discourse in large parts of the subcontinent, at least in the parts where it was born as Hindavi, that is the Ganga Jamuna doab and in the parts where it grew into a full fledged language that is Deccani .

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

URDU became the official language of Pakistan where it was the mother tongue only of the Muhajirs and was banished from the land where it was the language of Prem Chand, Kanhaiyalal Kapoor, Krishan Chand, Ram Lal, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Tilok Chand Mehroom, Firaq, Arsh Malsiyani and also of Josh,Sahir, Shakeel, Jazbi, Majaz, Majrooh and Kaifi. Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them? I don’t know how many blacks had access to the English in which Langston Hughes wrote his anti racist poems, how many Russians understood Yevtushenko or Maykovsky, when they wrote on issues that concerned the working class of Russia.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas written in Awadhi,because he wanted the image of the ideal being to be presented before the people, has had to explained to Awadhis for the last 400 years, the same is true of Jaisi’s Padmavat and Rahim’s Dohas.

some of what a great poet writes about the people is understood by them immediately, some takes a while to be understood and some is understood after a couple of generations. it is this that makes him/her a great poet. the only way a poet can be understood totally by the people is for the poet to write not only in the language of the people but also write only about the here and now. This way lies 15 minutes of glory and impermanence and an absence of literature that speaks to generations. you can not demand that literature that lives beyond its time and deals with issues that go beyond the immediacy of now must also be understood totally, fully and completely by those who live at the moment of the creation of that literature.

Faiz has fortunately written both kinds of poetry, the time bound and the time less and that is one of the reasons of his being recognised as the greatest poet of the 20th century. He has written BOL, he has written Tarana, he has written Hum Dekhengegy, all three have become slogans of our times, he has also written hazar karo merey tan se, Nisar mein teri galiyon pe, Do aawaazen etc that need to be understood gradually. Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at.“

Me:

“Thanks for that detailed reply. Couple of points:

I should have done this earlier, but let me define the term Urdu (since the term means so many things). From my first post, I used ‘Urdu’ to mean the common spoken language of the urban people of much of North India. What you might call baazaari Hindustani. The term ‘Hindustani’ when used to mean a sort of middle language between High Hindi and High Urdu is fairly new. The term Hindustani was coined by the British and throughout the Raj the term was used as a synonym for what we call Urdu today. For example, John T Platts dictionary calls qaaf the “twenty-seventh letter of the Urdu or Hindustani alphabet”. In most of modern India, Hindi is also used as a synonym for Urdu. For example, Hindi Movies etc.

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

I fail to grasp how this is relevant to getting Faiz to write in a register which is widely understood but, for what it’s worth, the GoI’s attempts to invent a new standard (sanskirtised) register of Hindi-Urdu have failed rather miserably. That Gandhi anecdote is nice but only half true. Gandhi oscillated quite a bit on the language question (which was typical of him) between Hindustani in both scripts as well as only using the Devanagri script.

Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

That might be one reason. Or it just might be that he wanted to occupy a literary space that only Urdu could provide. Either way, Faiz is not at fault. What I am wondering is whether applying labels such as ‘people centric’ etc to his poetry is not misleading.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas…

Uh-oh. ‘Literacy rate’ refers to written not spoken language, Hashmi sahib. Jaahil bhi bol aur sun paate hain. If recite Bidrohi by Nojrul to an illiterate Bengali he will understand it. Prem chand would be understood by all Dehlavis; even Krishan Chandar. I doubt that the same could be said of say ‘Aaj Bazar Mein’.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them?

IMO, it would be crushingly patronising to not do so; reminds me of Gandhi’s pledge to not allow Harijians to run the Harijan Sabha but for it to be run by upper castes and Ambedkar’s rage at this.

Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at

Exactly my point; let us admire the beauty of Faiz without clouding his appraisal with terms that take his poetry beyond poetry into political activism. Art for art’s sake and all that; because as soon as we start assigning it some utilitarian function, say, we state that his poetry, to, quote Zaheer from your piece, carries “democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people” when the only a microscopic minority can even understand what he’s saying, that we start sounding rather hollow.”

Sohail Hashmi:

“you are absolutely right in using the term Urdu for the spoken language of much of North India, Urdu was the language of this region till a little after 1947, with the selection, on paper, of Hindi as The Official Language the spoken language of much of north India has undergone drastic changes in the post 1947 period and Urdu has by and large been replaced with a strange mixture of what you call the Bazaari Hindustani and the Sanskritised Hindi constructed by the Rahtra Bhasha Samitis in the post independence India.

The term Urdu, used for the language that was commonly spoken in the north Indian plains itself is also a rather recent development, the prose of Ghalib when it was first published was given the name Oud-e-Hindi by Ghalib, and Rekhta that Meer and Ghalib wrote their poetry in was derisively called Rekhta – mixed Language by the Persian Ustads of the immediate post wali period. So Urdu that was known as Hindi/Rekhta written in the Persian script by and large till the time of Ghalib and a little later was transformed at Fort Williams into Hindustani/ Urdu if written in the Persian script and Hindi if written in the Nagri Script

My reference to the divisive politics that created the language equals religion discourse was to the process, initiated at the fort williams and carried forward by the votaries of Hindi/ Hindu/ Hindustan and Urdu/Muslim/Pakistan that changed the very nature of the language that was commonly spoken and understood till the immediate pre independence period. It is this changed nature of the language that has created the situation in which most of Faiz’s poetry and also the poetry of Sahir, Majrooh and Kaifi and others begins to sound unfamiliar to those whose grandparents would have had no problem in understanding it.

As for literacy and illiteracy the point that I am making is that there is a difference between the vocabulary of the illiterate and the literate and therefore written language is always a little if not very different from the spoken add to that the difference that has always existed between the language of Poetry and that of Prose, Meer in his time and Firaq much later were two poets who wrote in a language that was closest to the spoken Hindi/ Hindustani/ Rekhta/ Urdu and still there is much in their writing that an illiterate will not understand.

Faiz was writing in a language whose literary traditions and style he was more familiar with and could therefore express himself better in. to my mind He wrote in a language that he thought he could best express himself in, that was a language he inherited as the language of literary discourse and he wrote on issues that were dear to him or he felt strongly about, issues that he grew up with and held dear I think he wrote poetry with a strong political message, you might not think so. So be it.”

A Short History of the Blasphemy Law Used Against Wendy Doniger And Why it Must Go

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The main stick used by Dinanth Batra to silence Wendy Doniger was a law called Section 295 (A) of the IPC.

I have a piece up on Scroll.in which goes back to 1920s Lahore and explores the history of how this blasphemy law came about [link].

P.S: Have you checked out Tarikh Par Tarikh?

Dedh Ishqiya and Urdu in India Today

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First published in NewsYaps

In a riotously funny scene from recently released comic thriller Dedh Ishqiya, Jaan Mohammad (played by Vijay Raaz) aggressively threatens a very drunk Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) to leave town so that he can win the hand of the beautiful Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit). In a twist typical of the film, fist fights and gun brandishing suddenly give way to poetry, as Khalujaan picks up the word “wādā” (promise) used by Jaan and starts taunting him using a sher. A gangster by profession and somewhat removed from the world of poetry, Jaan retorts as best he can by racking his brains and coming up with the only sher he knows on “wādā. This change of playing field from violence to poetry, though, can only end badly for Jaan. His verse induces derisive laughter from Khalujaan who then points out that Jaan’s original sher spoke of “bādā” (wine) and not “wādā” at all. Jaan just confused the two rhyming words.

It is credit to the competence of director Abhishek Chaubey that the Bombay theatre I was in found the wordplay funny and laughed along with Khalu, in spite of the fact that very few would have been able to point out Jaan’s mistake themselves. Anupama Chopra, movie critic for the Hindustan Times, though, might have empathised more with Jaan and his struggles with High Urdu. While generally praising the film, she did end her review with one small regret: “I also struggled with the Urdu,” she said. “It was melodious but I wish I understood more of it.”

This frank admission, and the fact that Dedh Ishqiya is the only Bollywood film I’ve ever seen with English subtitles, contains within it some stark irony for an industry which, it could be said, was born into Urdu. As Mukul Kesavan has pointed out, Bollywood with its fantasy, musicals and location (Bombay) was an almost direct successor to Parsi theatre. And like the theatre, the new film industry adopted Urdu, given that it was the only language at the time which had any sort of pan-national appeal. To churn out words for this new industry, were recruited large numbers of Urdu writers and poets from North India. Bollywood’s Golden Age from the 40s to the 60s was studded with Urdudāns such as Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and, most relevant to this movie, Ismat Chughtai. Lihāf (Quilt), Chughtai’s story of lesbian love between a begum and her maid, forms one of the principal subplots within Dedh Ishqiya. The movie itself has a subtle hat tip to this sourcein the scene where Khalujaan and Babban have been tied up by Para and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the shadows of the two woman making love flit across the screen—in itself a symbol from Lihāf—Khalujaan remarks impishly to Babban, “thand lag rahī hai? Lihāf māng le!” (Feeling cold? Ask for a quilt).

To grant Chopra her limited point, the language of Dedh Ishqiya is particularly “high” for the average film of today. But go back just 50 years, and you would find a very similar linguistic standard prevalent in the industry, especially in the music. Wonder how a film reviewer reconciles her job as a critic when a film of just 50 years back would be inaccessible to her. But then in an industry where Katrina Kaif, a person who plays all her roles with a thick British accent, is the dominant star maybe Chopra is doing all right. And of course, there is the point that Chopra would hardly be alone. Whatever be the origins of Bollywood, the fact is that a very large majority of Indians would be unable to understand the sort of High Urdu that the movie uses—it’s not for nothing that the film carried English subtitles.

In a mark of the intelligence of the film though, one of the themes of Dedh Ishqiya is this very hollowness of Urdu in India today. Urdu started life as a standardised register of the local language of Delhi. As SR Faruqi points out in his book Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, “Urdu” itself is a metonym for the city of Delhi. The name “Urdu”, though, is very recent and the language has variously been called Hindvi/Gujri/Rekhta/Dakhani and even Hindi; as late as the early 20th century, the words “Hindi” and “Urdu” were being used interchangeably.

The development of Urdu as an elite language though was a rather late development in the history of North India. Throughout the medieval period, Persian had been the region’s lingua franca and official language. In fact it was so ingrained in India that when the British proposed to do away with Persian in 1839, 500 citizens from Dhaka, split almost equally amongst Hindu and Muslim, vigorously petitioned the government to desist from such a foolish move. In spite of this, the British did replace Persian and, in North India, introduced Urdu in its place as an official language. Unfortunately, the legacy of Farsi was less easy to shake off. The Urdu that took root in the offices of the Raj was corpulently Persianised. This was maybe a deliberate tactic by the clerks—mostly upper class Muslims, Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khatris—who controlled the language and profited from the fact that the general populace was totally dependent on them for something as simple as comprehension. In many ways, this attitude was not dissimilar to that of the current Anglophone class which break out into paroxysms every time anyone so much as talks of replacing English with the local languages of each state.

As a reaction, the rural classes—who were mostly Hindu—championed the cause of Nagari using organisation such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (of Banaras) and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (of Allahabad), both founded at the turn of the century. In this way, the origins of modern Hindi were utilitarian and commonsensical—it aimed to simplify Urdu. Unfortunately, this straightforward matter of language, as we all know, got violently communalised and to top it all, the end result was a register which was de-Persianised, as promised, but also corpulently Sanskritised, leading us all back to square one as far as ease of comprehension goes. Alok Rai calls this new register “school Hindi” and wryly remarks that this leads to children across the length and breadth of North India to valiantly struggle to learn a language which is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is no wonder that all popular culture in India, such as Bollywood, steers clear of either extreme and sticks to the spoken speech of Hindustan.

In 1947 though, the sharp politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue meant that this “School Hindi” was adopted as India’s official language. Suddenly, in places like Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the birthplace of Urdu, Urdu stopped being taught and used in government. This lack of patronage had little effect on the everyday Urdu (or Hindustani) of spoken speech, a large portion of the language which was shared in common with Shudh Hindi. It did however have the effect of severelycurtailing the sphere of influence of High Urdu. A high or literary register without patronage is, by definition, not going to get very far and that is what happened. Post-1947, Urdu atrophied dramatically.

Normally, if this was any other country, High Urdu would have a dignified death much as Ottoman Turkish did when Ataturk changed the official language of Turkey to Modern Turkish. Indeed, since Urdu offers almost no economic benefits, the only people who study it today as a primary language are people who get this education free at madrasas and are too poor to pay for anything else. In India, though, the communal history of Hindi-Urdu, made Urdu one of various meaningless markers of Muslim identity that can be taken out and flogged whenever necessary. As an example, when AAP want to reach out to Muslims in Delhi, it releases an Urdu pamphlet. This is unneeded because firstly, a large number of Delhi Muslims would be unable to read the Urdu script in the first place and secondly, even those that do, will almost certainly read the Devanagri script better or, at least, just as well. If all AAP wanted to do was to communicate with Muslims, a Hindi pamphlet would have done a much better job. And of course, this was just a minor example. Governments have, for decades, used the “Muslim” symbolism of Urdu—a sort of internal Orientalism if you will—to great effect employing it as a diversionary tactic to get away with non-performance on rather more pressing issues such as health or sanitation.

Given that a majority of its characters are Muslims, Dedh Ishqiya might be classified as a modern “Muslim social”. True to its genre, the film does explore the stereotypical elements of elite Indo-Islamic culture. Dedh Ishqiya has havelīs, nawābs and begums, flowing sherwanīs and, of course, stars High Urdu. Unlike a traditional Muslim Social such as Umrao Jaan or Pakeezah (which would have High Urdu through and through), the movie functions on multiple planes of language. At the almost surrealistic mushairā-cum-swayamwar that Begum Para holds to choose a suitor for herself, the most mellifluous Urdu is spoken and, indeed, Chaubey and Bhardwaj take advantage of the register to produce some crackling repartee and wit. Things though start unravelling in the character of Jaan Mohammed, a local gangster looking to gentrify himself by marrying a begum. Respectability though needs to be earned and before he gets to become a nawāb he’ll have to get the language right.

Jaan’s battles with Urdu lead to some curious results. Throughout the movie he uses some high vocabulary (“shamshīr” for “talwār” and “gauhar” for ”hīre-motī”/) but slips up on the simplest of Urdu words, mispronouncing “Ishq” as “Issak” or “shart” as “sart”. And not only Jaan, for all the other characters, this High Urdu is just a mask put on to impress. Khalujaan, who is otherwise a talented poet, talks to his closest friend Babban in their common earthy register of Bhopali Urdu. The one time he does put on airs as a fake nawāb, Babban tells him rather plainly that “tumhārī sārī nawābīyat hai nā, picchwāde main ghusaid doongā” (I’ll stuff your airs up your ass). And when right towards the end of the movie, Jaan Mohammad despotically orders Para and Khalujaan to dance for him, one of his flunkies pipes up to complain, “Yeh itne dinon se ghazlein-wazlein sun ke nā badhazmī sī hoga’ī hai, sāli. Inse item number karwāte hain.” (I’m tired of all this high-falutin’ poetry. Let’s get them to do some item numbers).

This sort of linguistic meta-commentary is rare in Bollywood (Chupke Chupke is one exception which comes to mind), which is odd given how integral language is to the art of cinema. But Dedh Ishqiya does take a shot at it and skilfully uses the nuances of language to explore different shades of the story as well as make a larger point about the state of Urdu in India today. And that is just one the many reasons which make the movie a treat to watch.

A related post on the language Bollywood uses can be found here.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, all posts filed under language can be found here.

The Future Language of India

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First published on NewsYaps

In 1916, the Mahatma spoke in Banaras Hindu University on the question of English. He said:

“I am hoping that this University will see to it that the youths who come to it will receive their instruction through the medium of their vernaculars. Our languages are the reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thoughts, then say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better for us. Is there a man who dreams that English can ever become the national language of India? Why this handicap on the nation? Just consider for one moment what an unequal race our lads have to run with every English lad.”

I am unaware of the reaction to Gandhi’s confident claim expressing incredulousness at any Indian ever wanting English to be the national language. But the reaction to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s much more modest proposal that MPs in Parliament speak in Indian languages was met with a rather solid wave of disapproval. One headline from a piece published in the Mint called Mulayam “notoriously regressive” and attacked him for keeping “his people impoverished and vote-banked” (when nouns are being verbed you know things have gotten serious). The Times of India called the proposal “absurd” and opined that it leaked of “political hypocrisy”. The Indian Express, in an editorial, characterised this proposal as a “march to the past” and connected this with the overall failure of the SP government in UP.

That Mulayam’s proposal is impractical and will hardly change a thing is something which is obvious. In fact, this is a minor demand as far as he is concerned; in earlier times, Netaji had even demanded the banning of English from the country overall, the success of which can be gauged by having a look at the language this very write-up uses.

That being said, the reaction to this is almost as silly as the proposal in the first place. What our Anglophone class doesn’t realise is that there are large segments of the country which do have grievances with the heaven-born status that the language enjoys and it is this sentiment that Mulayam seeks to channel.

English as a glass ceiling

In a TV debate about this matter, Madhukar Jaitley of the SP rubbished claims to this being a regressive move and claimed that what was wrong was that you needed to know English—a language spoke by less than 10% of the country—to get a white-collar job. This is a point that is tough to argue with. India, burdened with the worst of colonialism and a particularly elitist culture, genuflects to English as few countries do. English, in India, is effectively a glass ceiling. You might be the smartest person out there for the job, but if you’re “Hindi-medium” then, well, you might as well forget it.

This extreme position that English occupies is something that a lot of the people who are befuddled by Mulayam’s stance don’t get. Yes, “we should love all languages” as Derek O’Brien condescendingly reminds us, but that’s easier said than done when this particular language is one of the major things that stands between you and social advancement. This is a point that many people who extol the English-is-global-language point don’t get. To quote from Sandipan Deb’s piece in Mint:

“Whether we like it or not—and Mulayam can have long discussions with Germans or Russians or Arabs about it through English interpreters—English is our planet’s principle medium of both communication and commerce... The Chinese, for instance, recognize that and have been pouring in enormous resources to teach their children the language.”

This is true. English is the principal medium of communication globally and if you wanted to have an international conversation, you would have to use English. But what about if each of these countries wanted to have an intra-national conversation? Would an Egyptian speak to an Egyptian in English? And Germany already follows Mulayam’s advice of using its native language in its legislatures. If Sandipan really did want to copy what the Germans, Arabs and Chinese were doing, he’d pretty much be agreeing with Mulayam. The point is simple: let us not confuse a global lingua franca—a link language—with our internal languages of business and governance. As far as the latter is concerned, Mulayam, the Germans, the Arabs, the Russians, the Chinese and almost every nation on earth agrees that a native language should be used. As for English being used as a global lingua franca, no one really disagrees with that, or should not at the very least. But as anyone who has observed India would know, English has gone far beyond being just a utilitarian global lingua franca and occupies a position of power today in India. If English was actually just a lingua franca, it would be absent in linguistically uniform places such as Delhi or not find a place in Bombay where, since it is understood by so few people, it would do a horrible job of acting as a lingua franca.

So why is English still India’s lingua franca?

Talk of lingua franca though brings us to another issue: India’s diversity. Not only was Sandipan’s comparison to Germany wrong because it ended up supporting Mulayam’s point, but it was also wrong because India is wildly multilingual unlike Germany. Not only does India need a lingua franca to communicate with other countries, its regions also need one to talk to other regions of India.

Here the contention of the Hindiwallahs is that since Hindi is already spoken by such a vast number of Indians (~33% speak it as their native tongue as per the 2001 census) it is the natural choice as a national language. Unfortunately, learning a new language is not a simple first-past-the-post exercise. For the huge number of non-Hindi speakers, learning a new language has to confer commiserate economic and social benefits for them to take the time and effort to learn it. Hindi clearly did not offer that in 1947. Yet Hindi was sought to be imposed, by fiat almost, on non-Hindi speakers. Almost as a back lash, non-Hindi speakers stuck all the more to English. As Anna Durai, put it across rather eloquently: “Why should Hindi be our national language? Is it because the majority speak Hindi? Then why is the Peacock our national bird and not the crow despite the latter being the most numerous?”

What is odd is that even after 66 years of Hindi promotion by the Centre, it has been unable to create enough critical mass for Hindi. This can be explained maybe by the fact that the Hindi promoted by the Centre is hardly even spoken by the 33% who label themselves as “Hindi speakers”. Our census, when it comes to Hindi is a bit of a joke. In 1881, for example, the census recorded 98% of UPites to be ‘Hindustani’ speakers. By 1951 that number had dropped to 10% and by 1961 to 0.1%! The truth of the matter is that Hindi, even in the Hindi heartland is an urban language and the rural areas speak a variety of languages such as Avadhi, Braj or what have you. To further weaken the cause, the Hindi that the Centre promotes is itself far removed from the urban Hindi of, say, Delhi, Lucknow or Kanpur, being highly Sanskritised and far removed from common speech. It’s a bit like the British Government promoting Shakespearean English today. Thus you have the extremely odd sight of signs in government offices in Patna or Lucknow which advertise and promote Hindi. I know off no other major language in the world which needs to be advertised to its own native speakers.

Given these deficiencies, Hindi is far from established in its own heartland, thus it’s not surprise that it hasn’t been able to take over the country. The elites prefer to stick to English and it remains the language of aspiration.

The Future

So is this the way it’s going to be? Is the rise and rise of English a fait accompli? It’s hard to imagine the decline of a language seemingly as entrenched as English. But the same could maybe have been said about Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India: both languages once were widespread and powerful but lie dead today.

Personally, I don’t think that English has too bright a future in India as a popular language. English is spoken by too thin a patina of the Indian population to ever be a true lingua franca except amongst the elite. In spite of the bungling and chauvinism by the Hindiwallahs, this lingua franca is still to be Hindi. Indeed, if we consider the spread of Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani over the past 400 years, it’s been nothing short of remarkable. What started out as the language of Delhi and a tiny sliver of Western Uttar Pradesh is now understood, at least at some basic level, from Peshawar in West to Calcutta in the East and from Srinagar in the North to Bangalore in South.  In the 19^th century, this was initially driven by the adoption of Urdu by the North Indian elite and the British Raj. The real fillip, though, came when the Bombay film industry, located far away from the Hindi heartland in Maratha country, adopted the simple spoken form of Hindi-Urdu as their language. If today the arcane register propagated by the Indian government drives people away, the shine and glamour of Bollywood has made Hindi appealing to large sections of the Indian population. This engine has driven the penetration of Hindi into far off regions like Kerala and rural Bengal. In fact, on a visit to Bangladesh, I found that while most couldn’t speak Hindi all that well, years of Bollywood had ensured that they understood the language just fine.

Of course, official languages require more than the entertainment industry. But as a popular language, the way things stand, Mulayam can take heart from the fact that Hindi has a far greater chance of becoming India’s lingua franca than English does.

Campa Cola Shows the Inordinate Power of the Middle Class in India Today

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First published on NewsYaps on 20 November 2013

So I’m sitting there, all of 8 years old, listening to the conversation of a gaggle of aunts and uncles at a cousin’s birthday party. The topic revolves around the perfidy of maid servants, always a popular topic at our family gatherings.

“And that’s it. She just left. Without any notice, no nothing. And after all that I’d done for her,” an aunt complained bitterly about a recent maid in much the same vein as one would about a bad break-up.

“These people are like that only, baba. No matter how much you do for them, it’s not enough. They know they can just skip to a different job whenever they want. They know that and take advantage of this fact,” chimed in an uncle sympathetically

“So true. Arre, it’s only us, the middle class, which has these problems. The rich, of course, have their own lives. And the poor, they don’t care. It’s us who get our backs broken,” said another aunt, following this up with an appropriate sigh.

This middle class lament, that they’re the only class with goodness, filled to the brim with virtues such as honesty, hard-work and diligence is rather common. Apart from this, another recurring theme is a narrative of victimisation: society, as well as the government, is out to get us and it’s only us and our hard-work that keeps us afloat.

Of course, like most self-portraits, there are large inaccuracies in how the middle class sees itself.  The exaggeration starts with the name itself. The middle class (defined liberally as those with an income in excess of 3.4 lakh per annum) actually occupies the top 15% of the country in terms of income. Looking at it mathematically, “upper class” would be a far more accurate name for this class of white-collar workers.

The other untruth of course, is this narrative of victimisation. This might seem like an obvious point—after all which state can victimise its richest, most powerful citizens?  Yet this narrative exists.  This was most recently seen in the Campa Cola Compound episode. Milind Deora’s letter to Sonia Gandhi captures much of this victimisation complex. The letter starts off with describing the residents as “law abiding middle class families” and then goes on to the blame the “builder/Corporation nexus” for this whole issue.

Of course, rather than abiding by the law, the residents were well aware of the fact that they were purchasing illegal flats. In February 2013, the Supreme Court itself stated that, “Although the members of the housing societies knew that the construction had been raised in violation of the sanctioned plan and permission for occupation of the buildings had not been issued by the competent authority, a large number of them occupied the illegally constructed buildings. ”

Most crucially though, rather than victimising the residents, the state went out of its way to help. In spite of the obvious illegality of the compound, so strong was the political class’ support that it bordered on the surreal. The Shiv Sena threatened to hit the streets against the demolition squad of the Shiv Sena controlled BMC, the Congress MP from South Mumbai, Milind Deora threatened Congress CM Prithviraj Chavan if action was not taken to stop the demolition and, of course, the cherry on the cake, the Supreme Court, taking suo moto cognisance of media reports, stayed its own demolition order.

Victimisation? Hardly.

To further make the case, the state has been far harsher with slums in Bombay, demolishing them at will.  The names of Golibar, Sion Koliwada, Ramnagar, Ambedkar Nagar and Ambujwadi come to mind where the residents were just as guilty/innocent as those in Campa Cola. But, of course, they had no media backing and had to go.

Following Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of bias in news, the English media pushes the interests of the middle class in order to keep up its funding which comes mainly via advertisements. Since its readers and the people who consume the advertisements are middle class folks, speaking up for their interests becomes mandatory for the English media. This media, thus, acts as a massive middle class pressure group.

Campa Cola is just one example amongst many of this phenomenon. This is the same mechanism at work which raises such a huge din when LPG prices are raised. Approximately 20% of India uses LPG and they are usually the richest 20% of India. Yet, the government subsidises this upper class and every small increase in prices is met with a strong push back led again by the media.

An even more egregious instance of this is the case of the BRT in Delhi. Multiple surveys have shown that the BRT in Delhi is actually hugely popular with bus riders, an overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Yet, the ruckus created by the English media has made it appear as if the BRT is a failure when the only people who think so are the tiny number of people who own private cars (for whom the roads have become more congested). So strong is this pressure that at one time the Supreme Court even cancelled the BRT system and the Sheila Dixit government has been forced to go slow on expanding the project.

In recent years, there has been a popular narrative of the middle class disengaging from democracy because, or so they moan and complain, there is no space for them here. The system is castigated loudly for being populist and politicians berated for pandering to "vote banks" (as if politicians hankering after votes in a democracy is just the worst abomination ever). Of course, as Campa Cola has most recently shown, vote banks are not the only things which push the levers of power. Far from being the frail little things the middle class like to cast themselves as, using their megaphone, the English media, they wield enormous power and influence in India; far more than the little power vote banks wield, in fact, as the sharp contrast between the treatment meted out to Campa Cola and slums of Bombay show. And as this middle class grows in size, its political influence can only get larger—something Milind Deora and the Shiv Sena seem to have grasped in this episode. This increased clout should certainly lead to interesting changes in the way politics is conducted in our country.

Modi and the Sardar: Same Same but Different

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First published on NewsYaps

Last week saw the resurrection of a rather old controversy: who owns the legacy of Vallabhbhai Patel? Invited by the Prime Minster to inaugurate a museum on Patel, Modi, with characteristic rudeness, used the platform to attack Nehru, bemoaning the fact that Patel wasn’t chosen as the first Prime Minster of a Free India. Singh, though, came back with a spirited reply, pointing out the fact that Patel, just like himself, was a Congressman and believed in secularism.

This is the latest outbreak of a long simmering controversy, the biggest expression of which (literally) is the Statueof Unity that Modi plans to build. A statue of Patel, the monument will be the tallest statue in the world and will cost a whopping Rs 2,500 crore. To put this in perspective, this is almost equal to the Rs 2,700 crore the entire state of Gujarat spent on education last year. Of course, in spite of this monumental wastage, unlike Mayawati’s rather more modest statues (2,987^th tallest in the world) there has been no brouhaha over it amongst the urban middle class. Welcome to post-caste India, ladies and gentleman, where some statues are more #1 than others.

Of course, much of this is a manufactured controversy. While Singh was factually correct when he pointed out that Patel was a Congressman, his implication that his legacy only belonged to the current-day Congress was not.

The fact of the matter is the both the Congress and BJP are miles away from the pre-independence Congress built by Gandhi and Singh’s party has no monopoly over claiming this legacy. Firstly, the Congress has ignored almost every politician who isn’t a Nehru-Gandhi. Ironically, even Nehru stands forgotten by the current party, with Rajiv towering over his naana if we measure stature by counting things that each have named after them. Patel’s forgotten legacy was ripe for the picking.

Secondly, given Patel’s largely Right-wing bent, it is hardly unnatural that the BJP/RSS would look to his legacy as a source of inspiration. Given how the hard Right (the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha) were mostly absent during the freedom struggle, Patel is a best fit.

In this whole rush by some sections of the Congress and the media to delegitimise the current Right’s claim on Patel, what is often forgotten is that the pre-independence Congress party was largely a Right-of centre part. It was pro-capitalist (being controlled by the middle and upper classes) and religion was a huge and, indeed, integral part of its functioning. It was also, almost exclusively, a Hindu party (in membership, not necessarily in ideology), its programmes being almost completely devoid of Muslim participation, a natural consequence of which was that in 1946, it failed to win even a single Muslim seat across the sub-continent (in the central assembly, which later on went to become the Constituent Assembly).

Of course, the Congress did have a Left-wing but it was feeble and largely ineffective. Socialist like JP and Kripalani were so powerless within the party that they eventually left the Congress to form socialist parties of their own.

Post-1947, though, Nehru, using his enormous utility as a vote-catcher, tried to effect a significant turnaround. Economically, contrary to the generally held view, Nehru was fairly open to foreign capital; indeed, he was desperate for it. Relations with Britain remained strong—the USSR alliance is more a creation of Indira than her father. It was with respect to religion in politics though, that Nehru was able to launch a determined and, in retrospect, remarkable rear guard action. In speech after speech, Nehru insisted that India was not going to become a "Hindu Pakistan" and that religion had no space in the business of governance in India.

In this, Patel, the tallest leader of the Right-wing (which was, remember, still the strongest bloc within the party) was less than impressed. Till his death Patel clashed constantly with Nehru and often had his way, installing Rajendra Prasad as the first President (whose abiding contribution to our history will remain his opposition and delaying of the Hindu code bills which modernised Hindu personal law) and PD Tandon as the Congress President, defeating Nehru’s candidate Kripalani. Patel was also the person responsible for initiating the Somnath Temple project and if it wasn’t for his death and Nehru’s opposition, Independent India might have started its innings as a modern nation by spending its time and resources building places of worship. But, of course, what endears Patel most to the BJP might be his hard-line stance on Muslims, post-Partition. The Sardar made it very clear that he did not trust Muslims after their role in supporting the League. In a letter to Nehru, Patel bluntly wrote:

“Muslim citizens in India have a responsibility to remove the doubts and misgivings entertained by a large section of the population about their loyalty [to India]”

In another remarkably Orwellian incident (that occurred, ironically, the same year that 1984 was published), Patel’s Home Ministry wrote a letter to the secretaries of all other departments instructing them to produce a list of all Muslim employees whose “loyalty to the Dominion of India is suspected”. Once identified for committing this Thoughtcrime, the members of this list would be excluded from “holding key positions or handling confidential or secret work.”

Given these facets of Patel, it's very understandable that the RSS/BJP would look to cast him as their political predecessor.

That said, for all his warts, Patel was still very removed in degree, if not in orientation, from the current ideology of the RSS/BJP.  This gulf becomes the sharpest when one recalls that Patel actually did what no Indian government could do after him: he banned the RSS. He called the RSS a “clear threat to the existence of the Government and the State” and blamed them for vitiating the atmosphere which led to his mentor’s murder. “The followers of the Sangh have celebrated Gandhiji's assassination by distributing sweets, " Patel complained bitterly in a letter to SP Mukherjee.

Even more remarkable was Patel’s position on the Babri Masjid controversy that had just broken out in 1948. In a letter to PD Tandon (and a key mover in getting the then functional masjid converted into a temple), Patel warned Tandon that “there can be no question of resolving such disputes by force. In that case, the force of law and order will have to maintain peace at all costs.” He also made it clear that the solution would have to be a joint one and “such matters can only be resolved peacefully if we take the willing consent of the Muslim community with us." A rather far cry from the BJP chant of “Babar ki Aulad, Wapas Jao” and “Ek Dhakka aur Do” as it illegally tore the mosque down.

And, of course, in what would be called “minority appeasement” today, Patel in a speech in the Constituent Assembly said, “it is for us who happen to be in a majority to think about what the minorities feel and imagine how we would feel if we were treated in the manner in which they are treated." How very sickular.

Right and Left are relative terms, and their meaning depends much on time and context. In Pakistan, the PPP, a party which banned Ahmedis from calling themselves Muslim (I would use the term ‘Orwellian’ but what’s the use), is considered Leftist.  In the Indian context, it's instructive to see how much the definition of the Right has changed. Patel—a man who banned the RSS, called for consensus on the Babri Masjid issue and spoke about the plight of minorities in post-Partition India—was once the leader of the Right wing in India. Today, the leader of the Right-wing in India is an RSS swayamsevak, belonging to a party which literally demolished the Babri Masjid and thinks that minorities, far from being oppressed, are “baby-making factories” which are being mollycoddled by the state.

Possibly, the real lesson from this attempt by Modi to draw a descent from Patel is to contrast the two and see how drastically and fanatically to the Right, India has shifted in the 60-odd years since Independence.

Modernity, Patriarchy and Love Jehad

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First published on NewsYaps

In 2005, a rather unusual book made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Written by investigative reporter Neil Strauss, the non-fiction book called TheGame: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists purported to, as the name suggests, describe the world of the “pick-up artist”. “Pick-up artists” are a self-defined community of men who train in the skills of finding, attracting, and seducing women. As described by Strauss, pick-up artists abide by a certain system, replete with its own methodology and even terminology with which they aim to seduce women. Pick-up artists feel that seducing a woman is as mechanical an activity as, say, learning how play the cover-drive which anyone, with hard-work, dedication and, of course, some skill can learn and be on their way to sleeping with hundreds of women. Pick-up artists keep score of the number of women they have slept with and often compete against each other on that number (a concept that Ranbir Kapoor and Axe seem to have adopted here).

As is obvious, this whole business is extremely demeaning to women. As the Guardian review of the book says, “a low opinion of the opposite sex is a prerequisite for sarging (the pick-up artist term for “seduction”).”

This belief in the stupidity of women, so that they can be manipulated like cattle by a puerile sequence of moves and techniques into loving and/or sleeping with you is basically what lies at the heart of the world of the pick-up artist. You might say that it's a stupid and sad way of thinking but like a lot of other things which are sad or stupid, it is unexpectedly popular.

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), half a world away a very different type of people also have similar views when it comes to the ability of women to choose their partners: right-wing Hindu zealots.

There are many ways to look at the Love Jehad bogey that has been raised (one of the outcomes of which was the Muzzafarnagar riots) but at the core of the matter lies the fact that this campaign is run by people who reject the right and indeed even the capability of their own female relatives to make decisions about their own lives. This is a description of Love Jehad that  Chandra Mohan Sharma, joint general-secretary of the Meerut division of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) gives to TheHindu:

“First, good-looking Muslim men are identified. They are given neutral names like Sonu and Raju.” These boys, Mr. Sharma says, are then given jeans, t-shirts, mobiles, and bikes and taught to behave. “They stand in front of schools and colleges and woo young Hindu girls. The first few times, our girls snub them. But then, they fall for it. This jehad is about pyaar se phasaana (entrapment through love).”

If Sharma is to be believed, Muslim pick-up artists operate in Western UP looking to “sarge” Hindu women. Neil Strauss would be so proud.

You could dismiss Sharma as a crack-pot but you’d be making a mistake. As popular as The Game was (it was even made into a VH1 TV show), Sharma and his views are far more popular and indeed powerful: some of the most influential people in the land subscribe to it and even the State deferentially bows down to it.

Just like the world of the pick-up artist though, even in Sharma’s world, women are largely passive players, very much puppets in the hands of men. Much as they would like to resist, however, the lure of powerful attractions such as “jeans, t-shirts, mobiles, and bikes” that these “good-looking Muslim men” possess is just too much for the female spirit. Entrapment is a foregone conclusion.

This term, “love jehad” first arose in Kerala and was even investigated by the state high court before being dismissed for lack of evidence. It was then taken up with ridiculous sincerity in neighbouring BJP-ruled Karnataka with the Karnataka Government even announcing that it was a “serious issue” (this after problems such as poverty, malnutrition and sanitation had been solved and become “not-so-serious issues”). Predictably, much of the political pressure was applied by the Shri Ram Sena (the same organisation that was involved in the notorious attackon women in Mangalore pub) with the BJP government in the state playing loyal second fiddle. Of course, no real evidence was found with respect to this massive, organised “love jehad” but by then the term had entered into the vocabulary of the Hindu right-wing and would  be used to fan fires at Muzaffarnagar. Mr. Sharma, whose description of “Love Jehad” we just read, was at the “mahapanchayat” which acted as a direct catalyst to the Muzaffarnagar violence. What’s more, the VHP’s sister concern, the BJP, in 2007, had even released a CD which shows Hindus and Muslims eloping as one of the pressing problems this country faces.

Very often societies that are facing pressures to modernise and change, do so grudgingly. But as Partha Chatterjee shows in his fantastic essay, The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question very often this modernisation leads to only a superficial change in the patriarchal structures that define the community. On the contrary, very often, the changes are utilised to repackage patriarchy, the end result being that as far as the status of women goes, very little changes. Chatterjee uses the example of Bengali nationalism in the 19th century to prove his point. As modernity knocked on Bengal's doors, large-scale scale social changes took place: the bhadralok took to Western education, dress and even food. With this modernisation, the earlier practise of the social exclusion of women—purdaah— became   untenable. However, also untenable was their wholesale Westernisation (even as the bhadralok did his best to become more Catholic than the Pope in his attempt to Westernise). A middle ground was struck which ensured that women receive education and drop purdaah.  However, the education that men and women received was to be different. The Westernised curricula so sought after by the bhadralok was thought to be unneeded by the bhadramahila. Instead, a separate female curriculum was defined. This education sought to inculcate in women the virtues of "docililty, domesticity and "spirituality" and burden them with the sati-savitri complex of being an “Indian woman” even as their menfolk tried their best to become perfect brown baboos. This ensured that even as the new upper-class Bengali woman was freed from purdaah and indeed educated, the traditional patriarchal set-up of society remained undisturbed.

A striking current-day day example of this can be seen in modern Islamic TV evangelism as represented by Zakir Naik. Naik takes great care to dress in a suit and speak in English thus placing himself firmly within a “modern framework”—after all he is no uneducated Urdu-medium mullah from UP but a member of the English-speaking gentry from Bombay. This is important because his target audience is the educated, urban Muslim for whom modernity is important and a marker of respectability and power. Yet, his position on matters such as the wearing of the Burqa is anything but modern—he encourages it wholeheartedly. Indeed, just looking around, the number of educated Muslims who wear the Burqa has actually grown in urban India and across the subcontinent. This even as the number of educated women has risen, leading to greater economic freedom. Much like the Bengali bhadralok of the 19^th century, the Muslim middle-class in India is also manoeuvring and position itself to ensure that when faced with new circumstances, old patriarchal systems remain undisturbed.

Of course, just like women’s education in 19^th century Bengal and the Burqaisation of the Indian Muslim middle-class, “Love Jehad” and the recent outbreak of Hindu-Muslims romance fears is nothing but another instance of society reworking patriarchal control in order to adjust to modernity. In fast developing Western UP, as Hindu women, in larger numbers than ever, taste economic freedom, something as basic as their ability to choose a partner is questioned as the male members of the community reassert their power and privilege which seems threatened by too much independence. Thus, even as the woman earns economic independence or the right to move around freely, the patriarchal leash is still tightly wound around her, this time with the bogey of the well-trained “Love Jehadi”, well equipped with “jeans, t-shirts, mobiles, and bikes” ready to boggle her “simple mind” and sweep her off her feet, unless, of course, her menfolk are there to protect her with their bahu, beti bachao andolans and what not. How convenient.

The Four Types of India-Pakistan Web Comments

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This is a Google ad which trumpets how awesome Google is. So awesome that it can even get past the greatest divider ever: Partition. It’s a rather heart-warming, lovely little ad and worth a watch if you have’t already seen it.

The basic concept of this ad—the bringing together of Indians and Pakistanis using the Internet—is actually true.

Freed from the ridiculousness of the nation-state and the tyrannies of incomprehensible scripts (someone had once said that the US and UK are two countries divided by the same language; it’s even more true for India and Pak) Indians and Pakis (it’s ok, we can use that term; we’re Brown too) in the past decade or so have been able to enjoy an unprecedented level of contact.

Where the ad gets it wrong though is that, usually, the contact isn’t this nice. Most India-Pak internet rendezvous, conducted under the benign anonymity of the internet, are rather ugly. There is gali-galauch and much ugliness when PORKI MUSLA DOGS meet SPINELESS HINDU COW WORSHIPPERS and do glorious battle.  Jinnah WHOTOREAPARTOURMOTHERLAND is bought in as is Gandhi THATEVILBANIYATWOFACEDDHOTIWALA. COWARDWHOLEFTHISRELIGION meets LOSERWHOCOULDN’TCOVERT. 1000YEARSOFGLORIOUSRULE! 1000 YEARS OF SLAVERY! WEAK VEGERTARIAN! BARBARIAN MEAT EATER!

Ah, what fun times. But no matter. You only get angry with people who you love. Or some such spaced-out shit. Plus who else can you abuse in Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi? What’s the point of having the same language/cultural tropes if you can’t nangofy the other person with it, eh?

In case you missed this, need a fresh dose or just feel like abusing the shit out of someone, this record’ll most prolly be playing at a YouTube comment box nearby. I have been a keen follower of the YouTube comment space for years now (one of my many varied intellectual interests) and while YouTube overall is a goldmine for Troll Watching, the Indo-Pak commentary on Bollywood/Coke Studio songs occupies a special space in my heart. After many years of pain staking research I have divided Indo-Pak commentators into 4 categories:

1. Out-and-Out Bigots: The easiest to spot, they go straight for the jugular. Prophets are summoned and insulted; god and goddesses targeted. These people are surprisingly well-informed about their opponents' religion, especially the embarrassing bits. A variety of sexual acts are also promised on the opponents female family members as a special bonus (this category is almost completely male).

Interesting at first, you quickly tire of them. Plus, it's really difficult to get past the all caps, the "you"s spelt with a 'u' and all those 'behenchods" spelt with only a "BC".

2. The Velvet Gloves: Much more subdued that the Out-and-Out Bigots but still not really open-minded. Usually don’t go in for direct religious slurs but play more on national stereotypes. Examples would include a small jibe at a recent terrorist attack or a little “ahem, cough cough, heard about that recent pogrom that took place. Hope all is well?”

These people could easily fool you into thinking that bear no malice but it’s always a joy when the realisation at last washes over you and you are in a position to appreciate the troll’s good work.

3. The Music Nerd: The confused-as-fuck guy who’s come to this page for the music. Frequently gets exasperated with all this religion and politics and would plead with the junta to “just forget all this Hindu-Muslim, this politics. It’s just a song, guys.” Heh. Bloody champoo.

4. The Candle-at-Wagah Wala: Eternal Kumbaya singer, this man is sad because we are One but just can’t get alone. Laments would include calls to our “common culture” and the “glorious 5,000 heritage of our common past.” “Come on guys, why do you have to fight, yaar? We are like brothers, no, Indian and Pakistani? Like brothers.”

Most Candle Wala comments come in unison since people gather up the courage to air their abnormal views only after seeing someone else do it first. Much like Karaoke singing, in fact.

“Completely like brothers, bhai,” another will chime in. “How does it a matter that we killed each other with nothing but our bare hands in the biggest killing spree ever just 60 years back? What matters is that we are...you guessed it: brothers.”

Needless to say, this sort gets it royally from both sides for a bit and are then just ignored like the senile old fools that they are.

In Opposition to the Death Penalty

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(First published on NewYaps a day before the four accused were sentenced to death)

As I write this, the fast track court set up to try the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape Case has found the four adult defendants guilty of rape as well as murder. Their sentence is awaited on Friday.

As all this goes on, most of India is up in arms to procure the death sentence for the accused. From placards at India Gate to rabid comment sections on websites, Indians, or at least those who are bothered enough to comment on this incident, have overwhelmingly spoken out in favour of killing the accused in return for their brutal behaviour on the night of 16 December. In fact, for some, even death is not enough; descending into a medieval eye for an eye form of justice, they demand the accused be tortured in the same way as they did Nirbhaya. I’ve even seen Afghanistan (!) and their mode of brutal, atavistic Sharia justice being held up as a model for India to follow.

All of this is in a way predictable. Our entire response to the rape has been far from enlightened. Most of the sound and fury, in the first place, was fired up by the characterisation of Nirbhaya as the “daughter of the nation” (desh ki beti), neatly slotting her into an acceptable role for a woman (other roles being ‘mother’ and, maybe, ‘wife’).  Not only that but most of the people protesting the rape have no views on, say, the mass gang rape conducted by the Indian Army in Kunan Poshpora, Kashmir or the organised state wide campaign of sexual violence carried out in Gujarat in 2002. Even opposition to something as horrible as rape is tempered by nationalistic and political considerations, it seems. Given these limitations in the reaction, the fact that most of us have a medieval urge to seek retribution (as opposed to justice) by murdering the perpetrators outright is hardly surprising. In spite of this popular support that the death penalty seems to have, the fact of the matter remains that this mode of justice is not something that should exist in any country that calls itself civilised and both morality as well as utility demand that it be removed.

Since most calls for the death penalty are always predicated on the brutality of the crime, let me start off by stating the obvious: my opposition to the death penalty does not mean I do not oppose the crime itself. What happened on the night of 16 December was and is horrible and there needs to be punishment for the perpetrators as well as justice overall. That said, however, the death penalty is not the way to do it.

The moral opposition to the death penalty is largely based on the fact that killing—any killing—is wrong. The State has no right to take what it cannot confer. And to do this in an organised way, using its full might is nothing short of barbaric. The death penalty also encourages a very grisly form of eye-for-an-eye justice that we should have done away with centuries back. If you think it’s logical for death to act as a punishment in return for murder, do you also think the State should set up a rape squad in order to rape rapists or beat people who have been convicted for assault?

The biggest moral opposition to the death penalty, though, is that our systems are imperfect and, sooner or later, you are going to kill an innocent man.  In the US itself, as per Amnesty International, 130 people sentenced to death have been found innocent since 1973; this in a rich, industrialised nation. Now imagine the number of mistakes India’s dilapidated, overworked and overburdened judicial system would make. Of course, mistakes can be made with other systems of justice as well; being imprisoned for life for a crime you did not commit is extremely bad. Unlike imprisonment, however, death is a mistake that cannot be rectified and is thus an extremely costly, unforgiveable error to make.

Moving on from out and out retribution, though, some supporters have a more refined argument: they claim that their support is based on the fact that  the death penalty acts as an effective deterrent towards future crime. This, if true, would certainly be a strong point. After all, who wouldn’t want fewer violent rapes in India? Unfortunately, it’s a big ‘if’. This conjecture, that the death penalty acts as deterrent, has no basis whatsoever in fact. The available data paints a rather different picture: the death penalty does not deter people from violent crime; the likelihood of being caught and punished does. So, if anything, better policing, not harsher sentencing acts as an effective deterrent. To quote from Amnesty International: “...research has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis. The key to real and true deterrence is to increase the likelihood of detection, arrest and conviction. The death penalty is a harsh punishment, but it is not harsh on crime.”.

From a 2009 study of criminologists in the US conducted by the National Research Council, over 88% believe that the death penalty was NOT a deterrent to murder. Even more compelling data is provided by comparing murder rates in US states with and without the death penalty

As can be clearly seen, murder rates are lower in states without the death penalty, effectively destroying the death-penalty-as-a-deterrent argument.

In fact, the perpetrators in the bus that night did try to kill the victim—a crime for which most certainly there is already the death penalty. As is obvious, the threat of this maximum punishment was not an effective enough deterrent to stop them from committing their horrible crimes.

Come Friday though, most of these arguments are going to not even figure as, in all probability, the accused will be sentenced to be murdered. It will be immoral and it will be ineffective but it will still be done. And on top of the ghastly crimes that were committed by these four on 16 December is going to be added one more, this time committed by the Government of India.