Sunday, March 30, 2014

THE LARGER BATTLE - At this time of change, the BJP represents a complex reality

By Swapan Dasgupta

In his uncharacteristically over-stated proclamation of separation from the organisation that had nurtured him, veteran leader Jaswant Singh said that it was now a fight between the ‘asli’ (real) and ‘nakli’ (counterfeit) Bharatiya Janata Party. Although his outburst was couched in anger at what he quite bizarrely described as the party’s assault on his “territorial integrity” –a convoluted way of saying that it had fielded another candidate in his “home” constituency—the commentariat has broadly agreed with the suggestion that Singh’s exit was a landmark event. Read with the diminution of the so-called “old guard” it certainly pointed to an ongoing generational shift. However, far more significant is the question: is the Narendra Modi-led BJP travelling down a very different political path?

For a start, despite the professed assertion of a section of the Sangh fraternity that the outlook of the BJP is non-negotiable and determined by an uncompromising faith in an undefined Hindutva, the reality is more complex.

The Bharatiya Jana Sangh—the organisational precursor of the BJP—was established in 1951 as an alliance between former Hindu Mahasabha-ites such as Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu volunteer body that had hitherto stayed out of politics. Mookerjee was the face of the new party and did his utmost to bring together all the pre-Independence critics of the Congress (in the Liberal Party, Unionist Party and Hindu Mahasabha) into a more relevant new organisation. Under Mookerjee, the RSS was an element of the broader Jana Sangh coalition and not the dominant player. However, after Mookerjee’s death in 1953, the RSS had to step in and assume control to prevent the Jana Sangh from disintegrating. Indeed, since 1953 the RSS has played the role of an organisational adhesive to both Jana Sangh and BJP.  

The Jana Sangh existed for 26 years, making a modest mark on the life of a Congress-dominated nation. It certainly had a distinctiveness of approach and even drew a sprinkling of notables who were not otherwise attached to the RSS but electorally its performance was patchy. It is worth keeping in mind the fact that Jana Sangh was unable to ever win a state election on its own throughout its existence. The nearest it came was winning the Delhi Metropolitan Council election (the Capital was then a Union Territory) in 1967.

Whether the decision to participate in Jaya Prakash Narayan’s movement against the Congress signalled the movement’s breakthrough is a point of contention among scholars. There are those who believe that Jana Sangh basically ran the JP movement undercover and used the two years of the Janata Party Government to spread its tentacles. The alternative suggestion is that the Jana Sangh was always a low-key, junior partner in a movement whose direct benefits accrued to veteran Congress critics of Indira and the fractious Loha-ites. Whatever the reality, it is undeniable that in 1980 the BJP was only a part inheritor of the Jaya Prakash legacy. To prevail in the non-Congress space, it had to also upstage its other challengers who subsequently regrouped in V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal and its subsequent offshoots.

The point to note is that right from its conception in 1951and re-birth in 1980, the politics of the BJP has been marked by a combination of flexibility and discipline. The flexibility was dictated by the long-term, single-minded determination to emerge as what L.K. Advani liked to call the “alternative pole of politics.” The discipline was provided by a watchful RSS which played the role of both a mentor and, occasionally, a stern parent. At various point in post-1977 politics, alternative narratives have emerged in the non-Congress space. Yet, the BJP has never been completely overwhelmed partly because its organisational moorings are quite firm. The BJP always has a bunker it can retreat to in times of adversity.

This is not to suggest that the forward surge of the BJP has been dictated by ideological fixity. On the contrary, few organisations (with pretensions of being an ideological party) have demonstrated such a large measure of flexibility and innovation. In 1987-89, despite considerable internal misgivings, the BJP was broadly supportive of V.P. Singh’s anti-Rajiv Gandhi crusade. But this solidarity was also coupled by a dogged determination to steer the larger agenda into an issue of its choosing. When the BJP actually embraced the Ram temple movement in 1988, it had absolutely no clue of its potential. However, despite riding the crest of a Ram wave in large parts of India and emerging as the clear alternative to the Congress in 1991, the BJP was nimble-footed enough to effect a retreat after 1993. This shift of gear wasn’t compelling enough to secure Atal Behari Vajpayee a national mandate in 1996 but it set the stage for the National Democratic Alliance that was to emerge in 1998.

During the Janata Party phase, Advani had spoken of the politics of aggregation taking precedence over sharply defined ideological certitudes. In 1998, at the first BJP National Executive meeting after Vajpayee was installed as Prime Minister, Advani again spoke of a “New BJP” (those were the days of Tony Blair’s captivating New Labour) that would propel it into a ‘natural party of governance’. He didn’t elaborate too much but in 2004 there was the unique spectacle of the BJP contesting a general election on the strength of having achieved and bringing about an “India Shining.”

This attempt to emerge as a classical right-wing party in the European mould had disastrous electoral consequences. In the post-mortem exercises, both in 2004 and 2009, the BJP concluded that it could not afford to alienate its traditional supporters who saw the party as a bulwark of Hindu nationalism. At the same time, it recognised that the elements of economic modernity injected by the economic liberalisation process couldn’t be ignored.

The emergence of Modi as the leader who combined a robust leadership style with an unwavering commitment to make India an economic powerhouse helped tie in the two strands. At one time it seemed that the organisational hegemony of the RSS would be at odds with Modi’s emphasis on economic growth and individual aspirations of a Young India. But it was the pragmatism of the RSS leadership which realised that political advance was only possible through Modi that ended the impasse. The misgivings of an Advani or a Jaswant Singh were not account of any major ideological ruptures but to the primacy of Modi in the projection of the BJP. In any other party, the personality clashes and generational wars would have created major convulsions. It was resolved relatively painlessly in the BJP because of the RSS insistence on coherence which naturally meant keeping scepticism on the back burner and fighting a larger political battle with a united face.


The extent to which Modi represents a sharp rupture between an ‘asli’ and ‘nakli’ BJP will be judged after the election, especially if the NDA is victorious. Certainly Modi’s appeal extends to far beyond the traditional Sangh appeal and many of the new adherents have joined the BJP both out of commitment and expediency. The process of enlarging the social and ideological base of the BJP is going to be a complex process and it would be hazardous to make any predictions. All that can be said is that with their sullenness and small rebellions, many veterans have lost their capacity to influence future developments. It is entirely possible that Jaswant Singh and his backers will emerge from this election cutting a sorry figure. 

The Telegraph, March 28, 2014

NANDAN HAS AADHAAR, BUT CONG POLL PLANK DOESN’T

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is really not surprising that Aadhar cards have become a talking point in the election campaign of Bangalore South from where Nandan Nilekani, the former chairman of the UIDAI is contesting as a Congress candidate. Although Nilekani is otherwise very careful to focus exclusively on local issues and not allow the focus to shift to the fact that voters are not electing a local MP to fix their water and garbage problems but contributing to the formation of a government at the Centre, he has deviated from the script on the Aadhar card issue. He has flaunted the enrolment of 60 crore people in the Aadhar schema as a colossal achievement and made it a part of his “problem solving” credentials.

Nilekani has every right to flaunt his credentials as the architect of the famed “One Indian, one identity” scheme which the Congress counts among its significant achievements. However, in the light of a Supreme Court reaffirming that Aadhar cards are not mandatory for citizens to benefit from the government’s welfare schemes, it becomes necessary to ask whether a programme that involved a colossal amount of taxpayers’ money—the estimates vary wildly from the stated government estimate of Rs 37,182 crore for the entire project to other estimates of Rs 50,000 crore—was really money down the drain. More to the point, after the apex court’s strictures, the next government will have to ask whether the additional piece of plastic in people’s wallets can play any meaningful role in the future. In short, can Aadhar be salvaged?

Much of the problem associated with the Aadhar numbers stem from the constant shifting of goalposts. When it was first conceived, the card set out to facilitate direct cash transfers to beneficiaries of government schemes such as MNREGA, pensions, scholarships, etc. The idea was laudable and was aimed at reducing corruption and ensuring welfare benefits flowed to the beneficiaries in toto. Again, apart from the fact that each individual would have a unique number and get their biometric details registered to avoid duplication, it was a more evolved version of the direct-to-bank transfers thought up the Rajasthan Government during Vasundhara Raje’s first administration.

So what went wrong? To begin with, it must be stated that identity cards often end up with multiple uses, often far removed from their original purpose. A driving licence, for example, is a permission to drive motor vehicles. In reality, it becomes a proof of identity and even address, used for showing off to both bank managers and the CISF guards at airports. A PAN card too does more than facilitate money transactions and tax returns. It becomes a supporting document for passports, gas applications, et al.

From day one, as an official document, Aadhar was destined for multiple functions. The problem arose when its purpose was extended from receiving government benefits to establishing identity and permanent residence. In other words, what was a facilitating document for eligible citizens became an instrument for establishing the right to be in India and, by implication, citizenship. And this is precisely how it is being increasingly used by non-citizens as an additional documentation, along with ration cards and driving licences, to establish citizenship. Various sting operations have clearly indicated that it takes as little as Rs 500 to get a permanent Aadhar number for those not eligible to get it.

The point I am making is not unique. Throughout the debate leading up to the mass-scale issuance of Aadhar cards, various bodies including the Home Ministry and the Intelligence Bureau had stated their grave doubts over the long-term security implications of the card. Those with an interest in civil liberties had also pointed to the possibility that this data could very easily be misused by a vindictive and intrusive state to invade the privacy of an individual. Finally, a parliamentary committee on finance had studied the scheme and pronounced it to be a bad idea.

The point is that what the Supreme Court pronounced last week had been said by various authorities before. However, so profound was the political backing for Nilekani that his hugely expensive application to join the political class was rushed through, brushing aside all objections. A scheme whose implications affected the very “idea” of Indian citizenship was put into operation without the sanction of Parliament and without the cast iron safeguards that were needed.

The reason for the rush was obvious: the Congress leadership believed that Aadhar would redefine the rules of electoral competition and establish it as a natural party of government for the near future. Nilekani was in a rush to meet a deadline and hence the speed.

From all accounts Nilekani has achieved a target of sorts—though even he is clueless as to how many “non-Indians” and illegal migrants have acquired a card to establish a proof of permanent residency. However, the Supreme Court has proved a party pooper.

Nilekani is a talented individual with a proven record of corporate governance. Why did he rush into a venture knowing fully well its pitfalls? My real complaint is not that Aadhar was flawed—some of the best ideas need to be tweaked. The more important question is: what does it tell us about Nilekani’s intellectual integrity? What does it tell us of a political culture that involves spending public money to advance an individual career?


Nilekani may or may not win the Lok Sabha election but he cannot avoid being grilled for walking into a disaster zone with his eyes wide open. “When a man of great intellect goes wrong”, Nirad Chaudhury once wrote about Lord Curzon, “his intellect only makes his wrongness incurable.” 

Sunday Pioneer, March 30, 2014

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Why Nilekani isn't imagining India, but only Bangalore

By Swapan Dasgupta

In a curious and unintended sort of way, the election campaign of Nandan Nilekani in Bengaluru South has encapsulated the story of the Congress Party in the 2014 general election.

The allusion is not to the Nilekani family’s Rs 7,700 crore of self-made personal fortune which evokes admiration and some understandable envy. Nor is it centred on an aam-aadmi type outrage over a synergy between entrepreneurship and politics. Nilekani is a welcome addition to the political class and should be an inspiration to other successful professionals—and not merely lawyers—to dip their toes in the murky waters of public life. Indian politics is in need of a cultural revolution and talented individuals such as Nilekani can contribute to the process—even if it involves sacrificing a modicum of self-respect and issuing character certificates to a vacuous ‘yuva josh’.  

No, what is significant about Nilekani’s electoral debut is his sales pitch. As opposed to his Infosys days when he set about establishing the global credentials of an Indian company, Nilekani is now singing the virtues of what is derisively called ‘parish pump’ politics. Maybe all politics is local but it is nevertheless surprising that the themes Nilekani has chosen to highlight are “water, roads, traffic management, garbage removal and creating opportunities.”

The surprise is not on account of Nilekani applying his self-professed “problem-solving” skills to civic issues but that he chose a Lok Sabha election to peddle them. A well-informed person who has been grappling with complex Constitutional issues during his stewardship of the Aadhar scheme, Nilekani couldn’t be unaware that his pet subjects for this election are concerns of the state government and municipal authorities. In 1996-97, another illustrious Kannadiga, H.D. Deve Gowda was often described as the Prime Minister of Karnataka. Is Nilekani following his footsteps and aspiring to be the first MP to sit in the imposing Vidhan Soudha?

At the risk of flippancy, Nilekani’s ‘local’ campaign plank is about as relevant as those of the radical Left who contest student’s union elections in Jawaharlal Nehru University to register solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to Israel.  

Nilekani is no political innocent—his stint at the UIDAI has taught him more politics than he would care to admit. His decision to focus on the local problems of Bengaluru South is grounded in careful calculation. In fact, it amounts to a candid confession that the Congress Party finds the projection of national issues a grave liability.

In the past, Congress candidates, particularly in southern India, fought Lok Sabha elections on the shoulders of its national leadership—more particularly the legacy of Indira-amma. Today, Congress stalwarts believe that their only hope of bucking the fierce resentment against the UPA Government lies in somehow pointing the finger elsewhere. What Nilekani’s campaign demonstrates is that the Congress has abandoned hopes of forming a government at the Centre. Prominent individuals fighting on the ‘hand’ symbol are fighting a rearguard battle to somehow win their own seats by singing local tunes. The national jingle is proving very unappealing.   

Not since I.K. Gujral led a crumbling United Front into the general election of 1998 has an incumbent government—and one that retained a parliamentary majority till the very last day—given up the ghost so completely. The Congress began its election campaign two months ago flaunting Rahul Gandhi as its new, youthful leader. That aesthetically well-crafted campaign is now in tatters and has been so after the disastrous Times Now interview that exposed the heir apparent as a disconnected amateur. Far from being the new hope, the shehzada  is now an object of mockery. Changing course mid-stream, Congress has been reduced to competing for the anti-Narendra Modi mindspace with the flamboyant theatrics of Arvind Kejriwal.

The chatter is over Modi contesting two seats; for Congressmen even entering the race is proving injurious to political health.  Between the defection of a Purandeswari, the reluctance of a Manish Tiwari to return to Ludhiana and the sabbatical of P. Chidambaram runs a common narrative: the fear of not merely defeat, but humiliation.   

It is also the crafty sub-text of a brilliant individual’s journey from Imagining India to contemplating Bengaluru’s garbage disposal, a journey from the sublime to the expedient. 

Sunday Times of India, March 23, 2014



  

Influx of netas to BJP has begun again

By Swapan Dasgupta

Vidya Charan Shukla who died last summer was one of the most hated figures of the Emergency. He was entrusted with the responsibility of regulating the flow of news through rigorous censorship and he carried out Indira Gandhi’s command with effective ruthlessness.

I didn’t know Shukla during his halcyon days, when he also acquired a reputation for being a bit of a lad. Arun Nehru introduced us during the early days of the Jan Morcha, wich subsequently morphed into the Janata Dal. What immediately struck me about Shukla was that he was always immaculately turned out. Indeed, I have met no other person who wore a dhoti so elegantly.

Unfortunately, his overpowering sartorial grace wasn’t good enough to obliterate the past. To my generation, Shukla and the Emergency were inseparable. This may explain my disgust when I found him sharing the dais with L.K. Advani at an election rally in 2004. Shukla, for those with short memories, contested the 2004 poll from Mahasamund as a BJP candidate. He lost and shortly after left the BJP to make his way back to the Congress.  

I was reminded of Shukla while observing the steady stream of Congress worthies switching sides effortlessly and proclaiming their undying faith in Narendra Modi. Apart from the usual galaxy of film-stars and other performers who have developed an irresistible urge to enter politics—just look at the candidate list of both the BJP and Trinamool Congress in West Bengal—the new converts  include hardened politicians like Rao Inderjit Singh, Purandeswari, Sonaram Chowdhury, Jagadambika Pal, Satpal Maharaj and the habitually fickle such as Jai Narain Nishad and Brij Bhushan Singh. And I am not even including the ex-babus.

Many of them have been ‘adjusted’—a wonderfully evocative expression to denote amorality—and others given assurances about the future. Actually, the BJP’s record of keeping pre-election promises is rather good. In 2004, despite the defeat, the party accommodated at least four high profile new entrants into the Rajya Sabha where their total contribution to the revival of the BJP was an enormous zero. However, within the political class, the BJP has a better reputation of being specially accommodative towards those who have earlier drunk from a secular cup. Whether this stems from a genuine desire to broaden the party’s social reach or is a function of Hindutva ‘dhimmitude’ is for social psychologists to ponder.

In narrow political terms, however, there is no doubt that a steady stream of in-bound traffic does much to boost morale and demoralise the opposition. More important, in the context of the Congress (and AAP) bid to suggest that India will suffer a bout of communal indigestion if Modi is voted to power, the newcomers help expose the secular-communal divide for what it really is: intellectual self-abuse. Ironically, it also helps break down the spurious perception that the BJP is a rigid ideological party. The commitment to a particular stream of thought may have defined the party at one stage of its evolution but political power invariably results in the dissolution of inherited certitudes. Unwittingly, new entrants have helped the BJP’s unquestioned passage from Hindu nationalism to Hindu republicanism. Under Modi, the BJP’s evolution as a right-of-centre party with a focus on governance is likely to be more pronounced. This would have happened in any case if the party had not unexpectedly lost the 2004 poll and been overwhelmed by a leadership crisis subsequently. The likelihood of a Modi victory in 2014 has revived a process that was abruptly left incomplete ten years ago.

The movement from the margins to the centre inevitably involves the accumulation of diverse social forces and, predictably, some garbage. In 1991, the first occasion the BJP started attracting talent from outside the RSS fraternity, there was an overweight of retired bureaucrats and military officers among the new entrants. They included the likes of Lt-Gen Jacob, Lt-Gen K.P. Candeth, Brajesh Mishra, S.C. Dixit and B.P. Singhal. What is further interesting that most of these individuals didn’t desert the party after 1991 and, indeed, played a role in the process that led to a BJP-led government at the Centre. The willingness of the BJP to mop up the remnants of the Janata Dal also played an important role in the larger social enrichment of the party. At least two facets of the present BJP—its hold over the middle classes and its significant presence among OBC voters—have their origin in the open-door approach of the 1990s.

By contrast, those who latched on to the BJP in 2004 in anticipation of another term for Atal Behari Vajpayee turned out to be birds of prey. Most of the umpteen film-stars and other celebrities quietly moved out of the party’s orbit once it was clear that the Congress was back in the saddle. They left behind a trail of resentment in the party, particularly among the old faithful who had stood by it loyally through days good and bad. This may have been a reason why the involvement of the BJP’s traditional supporters in the 2004 campaign was so perfunctory. At the same time, the rapid desertion of the newcomers after the May 2004 defeat created a mental block in the party against newcomers, a block that overlooked the earlier experience. From 2004 till the anointment of Modi in September 2013, the BJP was deprived of new blood.
                   
Today, once again the BJP is witnessing a problem of plenty. Carefully handled, the process can devastate the Congress permanently while extending the BJP’s social reach. Ineptly managed, it could turn BJP into a party of rank opportunists. 

www.dailypioneer.cohtmlm/columnists/usual-suspects/influx-of-netas-to-bjp-has-begun-again.
Sunday Pioneer, March 23, 2014



Saturday, March 22, 2014

Past Forward

By Swapan Dasgupta

In the eight terms I spent in Oxford in the early-1980s, I developed a slight distaste for Neville Maxwell, then a Fellow at the Queen Elizabeth House. Differences over perceptions of Indian politics owed very little to the incompatibility. I saw Maxwell as a man whose understanding of contemporary India was caught in a time warp. To me he appeared to be a man frozen in his conviction that neither India nor its democracy was destined to endure—a belief he had stubbornly held ever since he pronounced the 1967 general election to be the last Indian election. I still recall the extra gleam in his eyes the day we got the news of Operation Bluestar. To him, the end of India was indeed nigh.

It is indeed possible that Maxwell’s gloomy prognosis for India stemmed from his bitter experiences with our country’s officialdom after the publication of his India’s China War in 1970. The issue was not so much that Maxwell’s portrayal of India as the inept aggressor who ended up with a bloody nose was in direct conflict with the injured victimhood of Jawaharlal Nehru. China, it must be remembered, was the flavour of the season for those who Leon Trotsky had described as “radical tourists”. Much before the horrific excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were known to the wider world, China was deified as a socialist arcadia by misplaced radicals in the West. Mao Zedong-worship resembled the intellectuals’ worship of the equally barbaric Stalin and the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Maxwell’s book became a great favourite of the Maoist-leaning radicals in India in the 1970s. Although I wasn’t remotely interested in the abstruse disputes over the McMahon Line, there were always enough Sinophiles in Delhi in the early-1970s who used to flaunt the Pelican edition of India’s China War—along with Edgar Snow and Han Suyin’s tracts on China—to remind us of the socialist paradise we were missing.

Equally, there were enough grim-faced babus holding an official brief who saw Maxwell as the contemporary equivalent of Major-General Dyer of Jallianwala Bagh fame. Not only had this journalist-turned-academic questioned Nehru and Krishna Menon’s version of the truth, he was also condescending towards India. Even after he settled down to a semi-scholarly existence at Queen Elizabeth House lecturing Third World bureaucrats on development and other lofty themes, he continued to be tarred with the brush of ‘anti-Indianism’, whatever that meant. And, since Indian officialdom was inclined to be incredibly petty and mean-minded towards anyone it perceived as being hostile to the great Nehruvian consensus, Maxwell must have been rubbed up the wrong way on innumerable occasions. I can only presume that his encounters with ‘official’ India made him quite bitter towards the country and, at the same time, endeared him to every Indian dissenter—and there were lots of those who hung around aimlessly in the universities of the West.

This exploration of the man who hung on to a copy of the ‘classified’ Henderson Brooks report on India’s military debacle in 1962 is by way of a diversion through a scenic route. But the detour is worth it for the very simple reason that Maxwell’s release of the closely typed report is likely to be partially submerged in the interrogation of the singer as much as the song. No doubt, Maxwell’s credentials as a Maoist fellow-traveller are likely to be resurrected.

Mercifully, 50 years is a very long time in the life of a country where the sense of history is fragile. Conceding that the Indian army’s own inquiry into the 1962 humiliation got the highest security rating, 50 years is about the absolute maximum that a report can be deemed to be classified. Just as Pakistan couldn’t permanently suppress the Hamood-ur-Rahman Commission Report on the break-up of the country in 1971—it was published by India Today in 2000—the Henderson Brooks Report has finally been outed. For his faith in the importance of history, Maxwell deserves unqualified praise. I don’t care what collateral motives he may have had. As someone who appreciates the importance of documented history, I have nothing but fulsome praise for his disclosure.

There are reports that some agency of the Indian Government has blocked access from India to Maxwell’s website that contains the full report. Apart from being a futile move—since copies of the report are obtainable through other websites—it displays a characteristic bureaucratic churlishness. The tendency of the government to declare almost every official file as classified is well known. But what is insufficiently appreciated is that this paranoid insistence on secrecy has led to only a small number of official records being transferred to the archives after the mandatory 30 or 50 years. It is bizarre that while the history of pre-Independence India is richly documented (thanks in no small measure to many of the files being lovingly preserved in the United Kingdom), the study of post-1947 India suffers on account of the huge gaps in official documentation. Crucial files are just not transferred to the archives. India does not have a proper policy for the preservation of historical records and access to these.

It is said that the Congress had a vested interest in keeping the records of the Nehru-Gandhi years under wraps. Access to the Jawaharlal Nehru papers, for example, is only possible after Sonia Gandhi has given her consent. The personal correspondence between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten is still blocked because the former Indian Prime Minister’s heirs haven’t allowed access. These anomalies have got to be sorted out and to that extent the unofficial release of the Henderson-Brooks report punctures the wall of secrecy.

Maybe, if India votes in a government unhindered by dynastic pressures, the study of contemporary history will receive a significant boost. 

Asian Age, March 21, 2014


   

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Kejriwal as the political troll

By Swapan Dasgupta


Arun Jaitley once recounted to me the story of a voluble Jana Sangh worker named (or so I recollect) Lalchand. An entertaining warm-up speaker at political rallies, Lalchand may even have contested the odd municipal poll where parties opposing the Congress had to literally scrape the bottom of the barrel for candidates. Anyway, the hallmark of Lalchand's spirited interventions were the rhetorical questions he posed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. "Jawaharlal", he would declaim, "answer  this question of Lalchand." 


Predictably, Jawaharlal never deigned to respond to Lalchand's insolence. No one even expected him to. But the puerile eloquence of Lalchand became part of the saffron folklore--a story fondly narrated when looking back at the decades of lost deposits. 


In today's 'connected' world, the contemporary Lalchand would probably have found refuge in the company of those who have come to be described as "trolls" on the world's most lively 140-character leveller, Twitter. At the risk of doing the reputation of a well-meaning political worker a disservice, I would locate the contemporary Lalchand as the person who harasses a public figure with abusive comments. The crowning glory for a troll is when a celebrity either responds to the abuse or insolence, or better still, blocks the troll. A response gets the troll a huge exposure and, in the process, some extra followers. Alternatively, he gloats over having been turfed out of the mind space of a person with a large public exposure. This week, for example, I received a twitter message from a troll daring me to block him. He proudly proclaimed that he had been blocked from some 150 twitter accounts.  


My own experience of the social media suggests that there are different types of trolls. Most are highly belief-driven individuals who are hamstrung by their limited vocabularies and inarticulation. But there are others with respectable (but humdrum) jobs who become monsters on social media--an interesting research topic for social psychologists. What unites these different types of individuals committed to making an absolute nuisance of themselves is the distaste for being ignored. They revel in being demonised, spat upon and abused. They just can't countenance being declared 'non-persons'. 


To me, the Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal is both a bore and a troll. He is a bore because he and some of his less-foul-mouthed Lok Sabha candidates are annoyingly sanctimonious. They began their political innings boldly asserting that all those who were not with them are corrupt--a crude message that his more intellectual followers attempted to nuance. Then they went on to suggest that all those who posed uncomfortable questions to them were in the payroll of Narendra Modi. And, finally, as their orchestral crescendo, Kejriwal (as reported in Indian Express) proclaimed to a gathering in Nagpur: "The whole media is sold out this time, it is a big conspiracy, it is a huge political conspiracy. If our government comes to power, we will set up an inquiry into this. And along with the media people, all will be sent to jail." 


Since this is a free country and remains so until the time the army of the virtuous sweeps the elections and form a government, we cannot fault Kejriwal for believing in a grand media conspiracy to keep India in the throes of venality and corruption. After all, every second troll on twitter has his/ her own pet conspiracy theory. Nor is it appropriate to ask what would have been society's response if, say, Modi had threatened his detractors with imprisonment on assuming power. To use the analogy from an earlier age, Jawaharlal wasn't expected to mirror the rhetorical grandstanding of a Lalchand. The fringe player is invariably allowed greater license than a serious prime ministerial aspirant, even if the former does occasionally ride a private aircraft for a short hop from Ahmedabad to Delhi. 


Make no mistake, Kejriwal loves it when a Rajat Sharma and an Arnab Goswami devotes an hour on prime time debunking his fanciful comments in Nagpur. As a leader of an organisation that is in a tearing hurry to get places but has no worthwhile organisational support system to bolster his electoral ambitions, Kejriwal believes that all media exposure is worthwhile. Ever since he was catapulted to the seat of local government in Delhi, albeit for a short span of 49 days, Kejriwal has perfected the troll methodology: using notoriety as a force multiplier. Whether it is harassing Africans in a Delhi colony, threatening to disrupt Republic Day, engineering an attack on the BJP central office, causing traffic disruption in Mumbai and threatening the media, Kejriwal has been driven by a single-minded desire to remain in the public imagination. 


It is a clever strategy and symptomatic of the asymmetric warfare perfected by the 'non-state actors' in another sphere of disruption. 


What Kejriwal seeks above all is a response from those who are at the receiving end of his poisonous attacks. And here too he has been successful. Even Reliance Industries was egged on to rebut his charges. Now, he is going for broke and demanding that Modi respond to his fanciful accusations. 


Modi knows the social media well. He should know that there is only one effective strategy to counter trolls: give them the royal ignore. Modi has so far not responded to the spit-and-run tactics of AAP. He should not do so in the future. As the old Arab saying goes: "Dogs bark, the caravan moves on." 

 

   Sunday Pioneer, March 16, 2014

Saturday, March 15, 2014

A change for the better - Nightmare visions are a well-worn strategy of tough elections

By Swapan Dasgupta


Hyperbolic scare-mongering is an essential part of election campaigns throughout the democratic world. Political parties and rival candidates are prone to paint exaggerated, caricatured images of their opponents in the belief that fear will motivate voters into voting against something, if not for somebody. The telecast showing a little girl quietly plucking flowers and being overwhelmed by a gigantic atomic mushroom cloud is said to have had a telling effect on the American electorate in the 1964 presidential election. President Lyndon Johnson would have won the race for the White House quite easily. The mushroom cloud adverisement on TV ensured that his awkward opponent Barry Goldwater was absolutely decimated . 



Goldwater, it has subsequently been remarked, was a figure so detached from the American consensus that it was a miracle that he got as far as did in national politics. Using the fear of nuclear war to devastate him in what was essentially a one-horse race was a bit like using a sledgehammer to squash an ant. 


Of course, it did not seem all that disproportionate to the LBJ campaign managers 50 years ago. In the heat of a campaign when passions run very high, a detached view of the pitch of the campaign isn't always possible. 


So it was in May 2008 during the election for the Mayor of London, a contest involving the old socialist warhorse Ken Livingstone and the endearingly buffoonish Boris Johnson. Looking back at that election, which Johnson won convincingly, it is quite instructive to recollect the quantum of anti-Johnson hysteria, especially after the opinion polls showed him having a clear edge over Livingstone. 


On May Day of 2008, The Guardian--a newspaper that sets the Left-of-centre tone in British politics--the writer Zoe Williams penned an article with the evocative headline "Be afraid. Be very afraid".  The newspaper presented it as an eminent Londoner's vision of what the city would be like "if this bigoted, lying, Old Etonian buffoon got his hands on our diverse and liberal capital." A great mistake, the writer suggested, is to think Johnson "singles out any one group for his casual bile. It's not just gay people or Muslims or Africans, it's not just people from Portsmouth or indeed anywhere else on the south coast. He despises people who are not of his class because he is a snob. That, pretty much, means all of us. A snob's London is a Monday-to-Thursday kind of affair, behind fusty doors, in clubs that only just let women in, let alone plebs, in restaurants that don't have prices on the menus...That is not London...We know what London is. Boris is not London." 


Since that article was written, Johnson has fought yet another election for Mayor of London against Livingstone and won it conclusively. With his impish sense of humour, his unkept looks and his incessant clowning, Boris has emerged as the favourite politician of the Conservative rank-and-file and, indeed, the favourite to succeed David Cameron as the leader of the party. London remains the care-free city it was in 2008 and hasn't been transformed into one huge gated colony where the plebs are firmly kept in their place. Reading the English newspapers regularly, I would be forgiven for imagining that the two issues that agitate Londoners are property prices and the rights of an ever-growing number of cyclists. Even his most die-hard supporters will not accuse Johnson of creating an environment where the poor, the non-whites, the sexual minorities and the other upholders of a permissive society feel threatened. 


So what was the 2008 fuss and alarmism all about? In hindsight, the fears of the soul of London being destroyed by a Conservative Mayor seem ridiculously contrived. Indeed, it seems like a familiar Left-wing ploy to overturn an electoral disadvantage by using the most over-used socialist weapon: the class war. However heartfelt and however poetic the fears sounded seven years ago, we can afford to smile indulgently at its very un-English hyperbole. 


The reason for invoking this ridiculous footnote from recent English history should be pretty obvious. As the Indian general election campaign gathers momentum, India's variant of the Guardian-readers are working themselves into a blue funk. The alarmist despondency has everything to do with the overwhelming impression that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi may be on the verge of creating a historic electoral upset. The very people who till not very long ago had flooded the columns of 'respectable' newspapers with the bold assertion that "Gujarat isn't India", that "Modi represents corporate India" and that "the idea of idea argues against Modi" have suddenly woken up to an unexpected uprising from below. 


The defection of the ultra-secular Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan, a politician who had walked out of the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government protesting against the Gujarat riots of 2002, has proved to be a veritable turning point. Till then there was the self-comforting belief that Modi was preaching to the committed and that subaltern India would ensure that a "polarising" leader would fail to forge a social coalition that would help him cross the 272 mark. Faith was also reposed in the BJP old-guard who would ensure that the Modi meter froze at the 160 mark, a fractured verdict that would ensure the Gujarat leader couldn't step out of Gandhinagar. Paswan jolted that complacency, not because he is an inspirational figure with a hold over Dalit voters all over India. His importance stemmed from the fact that he represents a large-ish sections of Dalits in Bihar. If a man whose social constituency was India's most disadvantaged could join Modi, it meant two things. First, that Modi's deep social penetration had been vastly underestimated; and, second, that secular grandstanding was negotiable. The opinion polls haven't suggest that the BJP-led alliance will secure an outright majority, but the example of Paswan has clearly indicated that many parties are inclined to cross over to the winning side if the opportunity presents itself. 


For the better-dead-than-saffron brigade there is an additional complication. Unlike 2004, there is no faith left in the Congress. The 10-year record of the UPA has provoked disgust, even among its intellectual beneficiaries. Rahul Gandhi does not inspire confidence, and the talk is of the a Congress resurrection in the future, minus the dynasty. There was jubilation that the Aaam Aadmi Party would somehow emerge as the preferred alternative but that does not seem to be happening. 


Consequently, there is a feverish bid to invoke nightmare images of the future. There are competitive assertions of drastic action in case the unthinkable happens--"I will leave India" is a promise that is unlikely to be self-fulfilling.   


Modi's victory isn't as yet assured: it will be if enough people vote for NDA candidates. Assuming he is sworn-in as Prime Minister after May 16, it is extremely unlikely the emotional architecture of India will witness a change. The committed will work towards a resurgent India with a double-digit growth; the time-servers will jockey for posts and official patronage; and the intellectuals will continue to lament over a lost idea of their India. In short, India will change, perhaps for the better, but the essence of India will be intact. And we may even look back at the imagined sounds of approaching jackboots for what they were: the alarm bells of a bitterly fought election. 


The Telegraph, March 14, 2014



 



Monday, March 10, 2014

Review of Last Moghul by William Dalrymple

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Saturday, March 8, 2014

Stirrings of a Right Revolution: Is this the end of Hindu victimhood?

By Swapan Dasgupta

Sometime in the mid-1990s, when Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and his able Finance Minister Manmohan Singh were busy rewriting the script for the Indian economy, I attended a small meeting of ‘like-minded’ journalists at the Pandara Park residence of the BJP leader LK Advani. Apart from Advani, the BJP was represented by KR Malkani who, apart from his long association with the ‘movement’, was also regarded as a party ideologue. The agenda was modest: to achieve a measure of clarity over a proposal to allow foreign equity participation in the media.
As someone firmly committed to the dismantling of protectionist barriers, I argued that the media could hardly claim special status. In any case, I ventured to suggest, the BJP should not be averse to the proposed move: it was a party committed to deregulation and nationalism. This assertion agitated Malkani no end. “Yes,” he snapped at me, “but not in that order.”
Malkani’s may have been a slightly irascible aside directed at someone he probably regarded as an ideological interloper but it encapsulated a dilemma that has confronted the BJP ever since India formally turned its back on the economics of socialism in 1991. Should the BJP be a classical Centre-Right party in the mould of the Conservatives in Britain and the Christian Democrats in Germany? Alternatively, should it place its commitment to ‘cultural nationalism’ above all else?
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The choices confronting the BJP aren’t unique. Almost all Centre-Right political formations have at some time or another been forced to determine the relative weightage to be accorded to market economics and national culture. This wasn’t much of a problem in the West in the days when there was a cosy Right-Left consensus over an ever-expanding state. Till the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan reshaped the political agenda, Right-wing parties were either staid ‘conservative’ parties emphasising the virtues of the Establishment, tradition, humane capitalism and benign (but robust) nationalism or groups that were inspired in different ways by militarism, street fights and flag waving. The Thatcher and Reagan revolutions not only re-established the moral and political superiority of market economics but also made it possible for the practitioners of statecraft to consider rolling back the frontiers of the State.
At the same time, the Right was confronted with a new problem. The growing primacy of market economics contributed to the steady breakdown of national barriers in the path of international trade and investment. From a ‘customs union’, the Treaty of Maastricht transformed the European Union into a super-state and the World Trade Organization eroded national sovereignty quite insidiously, but with the associated promise of material prosperity. With the ignominious Soviet defeat in the Cold War, globalisation did not quite end the emotional attachments of the nation- state. However, in the dominant discourse of the age, it made nationalism less ‘respectable’. It is significant that even the multiple voices opposed to globalisation are couched in either Leftist or ‘post-ideological’ idiom. The conventional nationalist espousal of national sovereignty has, by and large, been squeezed into the so-called ‘far-Right’ domain. In the popular imagination, the defence of the national in an increasingly shrinking world is a grandstanding associated with Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in a bout of frenzy in 2011.
The marginalisation of yet another pillar of conservative political belief has been equally dramatic. Till about the first seven decades of the 20th century, the established Christian churches were known to side quite unequivocally against the forces of the Left. In post-War Italy, the Catholic church was the most formidable and dependable bulwark against the Communists; in Britain, the dominant Church of England was also described as the ‘Conservative Party in prayer’; and in the United States, the equation of church and conservatism (extending along formal party lines) was almost complete. The social upsurge that began in protest against the Vietnam war and soon came to embrace issues such as race and gender led to a steady secularisation of European (and to a lesser extent, American) society. The moral authority of the established Christian churches was considerably eroded and modern common sense internalised the belief that religion should be kept out of public spaces, including statecraft. No doubt the collapse of the Soviet Union and the revival of Christianity in eastern Europe checked the quantum of secularisation—to which was added the growing popularity of Christian evangelism in the US. But overall, the intellectual mood became increasingly anti-faith. Quite paradoxically, the weakening of Communism as a political movement was also accompanied by the rising appeal of certain tenets of Left-wing faith.
To add to the muddle, there was the spectacular rise in the appeal of political Islam, particularly after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the victory of the mujahideen forces in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of that country. The notion of the Islamic ummah, which had hitherto been a subsidiary and largely ignored aspect of the larger Muslim faith, now acquired traction. Osama bin Laden and his dramatic displays of death and destruction conferred upon Islamism a global notoriety but it also reshaped the larger political assumptions of Muslims throughout the world. In the non-Muslim world, Islamism generated contradictory responses. To the metropolitan upholders of globalisation, it confirmed the efficacy of the secularisation process. Unflinching religious faith, it was concluded, was a regressive phenomenon and had to be firmly relegated to the fringes of modernity. At the same time, the opponents of George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’ believed that the rough edges of Islamism could be blunted through moral relativism and accommodation. According to the emerging Liberal dogma, ‘fundamentalism’ couldn’t be destroyed; it had to be tamed through multicultural initiatives. The threatened clash of civilisations, it was felt, could best be averted through the creation of multiple identities and a forthright repudiation of the very idea of national cultures.
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Indian politics has only too often been studied in national isolation, and without attaching undue importance to the larger global backdrop. This approach may not have been out of place till the end of the 1980s when India’s exposure to global influences was at best patchy and limited to a very thin layer of the elite and the Communist movement. The economic course correction undertaken after 1991 was a point of rupture. In the past 25 years or so, the quantum of economic growth has equalled that witnessed over the course of the preceding 150 years. The very slow, gradual social transformation that India witnessed throughout much of British rule and the Jawaharlal Nehru-Indira Gandhi years has been encapsulated in a remarkably short period. People’s living standards, awareness brought about by education and global exposure, and their collective aspirations have changed quite significantly in the course of a generation. These changes are now starting to be reflected in politics.
For the Indian Right, the effects have been dramatic. In the Nehru-Indira years, there were two strands in the political Right. There was, first, the Jan Sangh (the predecessor of the BJP) which was committed to a Hindu nationalism whose intellectual origins lay in the pre-Gandhian nationalist movement and Partition. Secondly, there was the Swatantra Party which was a strange amalgam of Princely India and embryonic capitalism. Neither formation could make any significant headway in the face of a Congress, which, apart from inheriting the political legacy of the national movement, also encapsulated the quasi-socialist urges of struggling Third World economies.
Two events catapulted the Indian Right to centre-stage. The first was the short-lived Janata Party experiment. Apart from institutionalising democracy, the Janata experience proved invaluable in establishing an alternative tradition based on coalition politics.
The second event in the form of the Ram temple movement was more consequential. For a start, the mobilisation spread over nearly five years enabled the Hindu Right to connect with peoples and communities spread across India that had hitherto not been exposed to alternative traditions. The direct impact of this was on the political fortunes of the BJP. By 1991, the BJP had successfully positioned itself as the ‘alternative pole’ of politics. At the same time, the passions aroused by the Ram temple movement led to a ganging-up of forces against the BJP. Because its spectacular surge had been due to its forceful articulation of ‘cultural nationalism’, the BJP became a single-issue force and was imperfectly positioned to respond to other issues and other forces.
After 1991, for example, there was genuine confusion inside the BJP over its responses to economic liberalisation. Instinctively, the party stood for deregulation, decentralisation and small government. However, since these impulses were simultaneously linked to the opening up of the Indian economy to global competition, it was unsure of whether to welcome the change or retreat into a swadeshiinheritance. Even today, the issue hasn’t been conclusively resolved and often reappears in battles over insurance, retail and rupee convertibility. Yet, the confusion isn’t as marked as it was in the mid-1990s. I recall at that time asking a very senior BJP leader whose interest in economic issues was perfunctory, how the party would resolve the problem. His answer was simple but memorable: “We will never fight an election on economic issues.”
The candour was revealing and, in hindsight, testified to the fact that the Indian political class was unaware of the extent to which politics and economics would merge to squeeze out the culture wars. The BJP fought the 1991 election on the Ram temple issue. In 1996, cultural nationalism was not that prominent but it was the memories of the Ayodhya demolition that ensured Atal Behari Vajpayee’s failure to secure a parliamentary majority after 13 days. What is significant is that since then, the BJP has fought its electoral battles over leadership, the promise of good governance and, in 2004, on an out-and-out economic platform.
In 2014, with Narendra Modi at the helm, the BJP platform is an epitome of conventional Right-wing politics: decisive leadership, rapid economic growth, a rollback of an inefficient state, uncompromising national security and an all-inclusive patriotism. Not once in his many speeches across the country has Modi mentioned the many little culture wars that agitate the minds of Hindu activists but leave the rest of India both irritated and exasperated.
Does this imply that Modi has succeeded in doing what Vajpayee set out to do after 1998: to merge the parallel strands of cultural nationalism and capitalism with an Indian face?
It is still too early to proffer a conclusive answer but certain trends are noteworthy. Modi rose to national prominence and acquired notoriety in liberal circles after his transformation into Chhote Sardar in the wake of the 2002 riots. There is no doubt that Modi successfully turned victimhood on its head and rode the crest of a Gujarati backlash in the election that followed the riots. However, since then Modi has successfully reinvented himself as the administrative and economic reformer extraordinaire—a man who is in a tearing hurry to destroy sloth, mediocrity and jugaad. Maybe, it was the image of a Gujarati Shivaji that endeared Modi to his party but the awesome incremental support he has secured all over India subsequently owes only nominally to his Hindutva credentials. It has almost everything to do with the fact that in a period of utter despondency, people see him as a leader capable of delivering an economic miracle.
For the Indian Right, the transformation promises to be revolutionary. The shift in relative weightage from culture to economics wasn’t the result of deep introspection. In fact, Indian politics still remains remarkably discussion-free. It was pressure from below that dictated the choice of its leader and his agenda. The cadres and political class merely responded to the stirrings on the ground. Success in the polls promises an enduring change in the character of the Right; failure guarantees regression and the rediscovery of Hindu victimhood.
India has changed dramatically and is in the process of reordering its priorities. The Indian Right is only beginning to learn that its old certitudes count for very little now.
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Swapan Dasgupta , a Delhi-based political commentator, is a self-confessed conservative and part of India’s beleaguered Right

Friday, March 7, 2014

Take Offence

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are many Indians who take every word written or said about the country in media overseas a shade too seriously. The same lot that peers at the global media through a microscope is equally inclined to treat every positive remark as a testimonial and every unfavourable review as a conspiracy of hate. Just as Mahatma Gandhi over-reacted to Katherine Mayo’s infamous Mother India, and Indira Gandhi went apoplectic over an episode of Louis Malle’s documentary Phantom India, Indian nationalists in particular tend to confer an extra touch of authenticity to foreign writers on the motherland. At the grave risk of sounding flippant, I would argue that had the now-controversial Wendy Doniger written under a suitably Indian pseudonym, her pronouncements on Hindu traditions would not have generated the same amount of heat. It was her foreign-ness that acted like a magnet, inviting the exacting scrutiny of all those who see themselves as custodians of the faith.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that this overall lack of equilibrium has a great deal to do with a larger sense of national inadequacy. This is most marked among those who use national sovereignty and, by implication, the defences of Fortress India to shore up a measure of astonishing mediocrity. When it comes to prickliness—an attribute that was elevated to the level of a foreign policy principle by, first, the irascible V.K. Krishna Menon and then, with greater effect by Indira Gandhi—there are few who can equal either the lesser bureaucracy or Indian academia. The biggest threat to their assured positions stem from the imposition of exacting global standards to measure performance. Consequently, they invariably fall back on a form of protectionism that involves acceptance of venal shoddiness.

For example, I was slightly taken aback at the venom that was recently poured on the writer William Dalrymple, who I like to describe as Delhi’s ‘White Moghul’. Apart from the familiar charges of racism—an occupational hazard for anyone who is a co-organiser of the Jaipur literary jamborree—and being anti-Hindu, which too is becoming distressingly routine, Dalrymple’s histories have been debunked by those Arun Shourie taunted as the “eminent historians.” The reasons for their hatred of this genial Scot are three-fold: Dalrymple writes readable narrative history; his books sell and has made him a celebrity; and in burrowing through dusty archives for untapped sources, he has exposed the inadequacies of the tenured cretins.

This is not to suggest that everything that originates from outside the national boundaries of India is necessarily more robust and virtuous than the home-grown variety. Over the past year, as the UPA-2 government increasingly ran out of steam, there was an exaggerated attention paid to the coverage of India overseas. It began with a local edition of Time magazine, a publication whose best days are behind it, putting Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on its cover. The scrutiny continued as more serious publications such as Economist proceeded to dissect the BJP prime ministerial candidate. In an editorial that seemed comically pompous to the uninitiated but seemed a matter of course to its editors, Economist wrote in December last year: “In the next five months Mr Modi needs to show that his idea of a pure India is no longer a wholly Hindu one…,  that he abhors violence and discrimination against Muslims… Otherwise, this newspaper will not back him.”

With barely 70 days to go before the verdict of the electorate is known, Modi hasn’t demanded that the Constitution be changed to make India a Hindu Republic. Nor for that matter has he even mentioned pre-existing religious faultlines in his many, widely publicised speeches. Will the editors of Economist now do the unthinkable and ask its readers—at least those who have a vote in India—to vote for the BJP?

Not only is that unlikely but it is not even expected. For a start, the foreign media in India—like foreign correspondents in most parts of the world—live in a ghetto. The Embassy or High Commission, the Foreign Correspondents Club and, in January, the Jaipur Literature Festival constitute their happy hunting ground. Their information on India is principally culled from three sources—the local English-language media, the expatriates working outside government and a small handful of well-connected individuals in Delhi and Mumbai who are inclined to apply the liberal parameters set by The Guardian and New York Times to India. And, of course, there is the ubiquitous taxi driver without whose earthy wisdom no despatch from the native quarters is ever complete. No wonder they very often fail to grasp emerging trends.

True, there are the exceptions. The business and financial journalists do end up meeting people beyond Nandan Nilekani and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, and often have a good feel of what is either driving or stalling India. And, of course, there are those who have gone ‘native’ like Sir Mark Tully of Nizamuddin, Ian Jack and John Elliot.

That all those I have named are nominally British isn’t exactly a coincidence. Call it a colonial hangover or Anglophilia but, as a rule, I have found Britons better able to get under the Indian skin far better than continental Europeans and Americans. Last week, for example, I read Delhi: Mostly Harmless, a vastly amusing account of life in Delhi by a young Oxford academic Elizabeth Chatterjee. Many Indians, however, are likely to find her cruel irreverence very patronising. But that would be missing the point. When we read an outsider’s account of India, we don’t necessarily expect to see the country as we see it. We seek to understand how India appears to people with a different set of cultural assumptions. A legitimate point of exasperation would be if the account was uninformed, superficial and needlessly judgmental.


There are many silly accounts of Indian happenings and Indian life. Like most things, the insightful blends with the banal and the jaundiced. But it prompts a very different set of questions. Why don’t Indians write about other lands and other societies, as Pallavi Aiyar has done on China? Is it because we are incapable of transcending India? Or is it because we too are incapable of understanding the foreigner? 

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, March 7, 2014

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