Usual Suspects

By Swapan Dasgupta

 

Opposition MPs were right to point out the apparent inconsistency in the government opposing a parliamentary resolution on the Gaza conflict and then voting against Israel at the UN Human Rights Commission last Thursday. If, as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj maintained, India should maintain equidistance between two friends who have got embroiled in a conflict, it follows that neutrality should have been maintained in a multilateral forum as well.

 

Logically, India should have abstained from the UNHRC vote in Geneva. Yet, its representative joined other ‘non-aligned’ countries in censuring Israel for its allegedly disproportionate retaliation against the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip. Worse, India’s Permanent Representative in the UN used strong language in the Security Council attacking Israel.

 

Those diplomats, both retired and serving, who have maintained that India’s position in the UN (and, for that matter, at the BRICS summit) was consistent with its earlier stand on the issue cannot be faulted. If foreign policy is judged by adherence to continuity, India’s position was consistent. Despite the change of government, India has stuck to the principle that the ever-deepening ties with Israel must exist behind a purdah; in public and for ‘secular’ domestic consumption Delhi must be seen to be endorsing the Palestinian cause.

 

If the Narendra Modi government has indeed taken the view that the fundamentals of Indian foreign policy must remain unchanged and that the priorities determined by Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi must be preserved as a national treasure, there is nothing more to say. In that case, the only job of the Ministry of External Affairs is to safeguard the spirit of the Nehrus and Gandhis in a fast-changing world—a task better suited to theologians than diplomats.  

 

In the 19^th century Lord Palmerston suggested there are no permanent friends and enemies, only permanent interests. In the India of 2014, there appears to be a section that believes friends and enemies are constant and that only the national interest is negotiable.

 

The position is untenable even if the principle of Congress-decides-BJP-upholds is accepted as the gospel. In recent times it was P.V. Narasimha Rao, a Congress Prime Minister, who took bold steps to extricate Indian diplomacy from an ossified Nehruvian vision. In 1992 India and Israel entered into full diplomatic relations, overruling the objections of those who felt that this would have devastating consequences for Indian interests in West Asia. Rao signalled to the world that India has its own national priorities that go beyond friendship with Yasser Arafat. If there were misgivings in the Arab world over India cosying up to Israel, they must have been communicated in invisible ink.

 

In the past two decades, the relationship between India and Israel has developed exponentially. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Israel occupies a special place in India’s strategic ecosystem. Much of the relationship is wilfully kept below the radar but it is based on discretion and absolute trust.

 

At an individual level some Indians may not like Tel Aviv’s over-robust response to Hamas’ provocation. Others may feel that Israel needs to walk the extra mile to make the two-state solution a meaningful reality. These concerns are reflected in the debates within Israel as well. However, it is important to demarcate doubts over Israel’s no-nonsense national security policy from the visceral anti-Semitism that is the hallmark of Hamas and its backers. The former explores routes to a durable peace while the latter proceeds from the assumption that the state of Israel is illegitimate.

 

It is sad that Indian diplomacy is unable to make this crucial separation because ‘secular’ politics has deemed that Palestine affects the entire ‘ummah’.

 

As the new government gains in self-confidence and prioritises national security and economic growth, its foreign policy has to be fit for purpose. The vacuous preachiness of the past must be replaced by a focussed perusal of national interests. Last week’s UN vote was an opportunity to signal a small shift. It was muffed for two reasons. First, because a conservative bureaucracy prefers continuity over breaking new ground; and second, because there was insufficient political application of mind.

 

The lessons are obvious: foreign policy demands a political direction. This has not been in evidence so far. 

Sunday Times of India, July 27, 2014

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By Swapan Dasgupta

 

Last week, I visited the beautiful home of local businessman Thirukumar Nadesan in a part of Colombo-7 that is so reminiscent of Kolkata’s Alipore of yore. There are three facets of Nadesan that strike me as significant. First, he is a Jaffna Tamil now living in Colombo; second, he is an extremely devout Hindu, with a fully functioning puja room and even a goshala in his back garden; and finally, his wife Nirupama, a MP for the ruling SLFP, is a niece of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

 

Nadesan, who values his religious and cultural identity, has like many other Jaffna Tamils patronised the Ramanathaswamy temple in Rameshwaran, just across the Palk Strait. Each year Nadesan would make it a point to go on pilgrimage to Rameshwaran and then proceed to visit other temples in India. On January 10, 2012, while entering the temple for puja, he was set upon by a determined band of pro-LTTE activists who assaulted him and chased him out of the shrine. With no assurance of personal protection forthcoming from the state government, Nadesan hasn’t been able to re-visit the temple—although he has been to other temples in India.

 

As an Indian I find this assault on Nadesan’s rights as a practising Hindu outrageous. What is even more surprising is that none of our defenders of India’s ‘secular’ inheritance has deemed this to be an attack on religious freedom. There have, for example, been attacks on Buddhist pilgrims from Sri Lanka who use Chennai as a transit point for their journey to Bodh Gaya. And even Opposition leader Ranil Wickremsinghe faced mob fury when he visited Chennai three years ago.

 

Worst of all—and cricket-crazy Indians will understand this—for the past three years Sri Lankan cricketers have been targets of an unofficial ban against them playing any matches in Chennai.

 

To those engaged in formulating ‘nuanced’ policy towards the neighbourhood, these incidents may seem trivial and small details of some ‘misunderstandings’ vis-à-vis a small neighbour. But imagine a situation if an extremist body in Sri Lanka was to impose such a ban on Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team or if a group of Hindus from India visiting the Sita shrine near Kandy was set upon by a clutch of Sinhala chauvinists. Wouldn’t the shrill TV channels be demanding strong Indian retaliation to avenge national dishonour, as they often do when Indian fishermen are arrested for straying into Lanka’s territorial waters?

 

It is healthy for foreign policy to be subjected to domestic scrutiny. However, when the interest takes the form of ill-informed rhetoric and mob action, it is time to put correctives in place. For too long, India’s policy towards Sri Lanka has been viewed exclusively through the prism of the Tamil question and the 30-year civil war that, mercifully, came to an end in May 2009. Indian diplomacy has scarcely been able to rise above debates over the 13^th Amendment and the tensions that mark relations between the Northern Provincial Council and the central government in Colombo. There is an impression that India is the reserve army of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in the North and East, an impression that translates into conviction with the Tamil National Alliance.

 

The problem with this preoccupation with only one aspect of Sri Lanka’s national life is that many more important questions are left either unaddressed or de-prioritised.

 

Many Indians would, for example, be surprised to learn that nearly 70 per cent of the freight traffic handled by the bustling Colombo part is devoted to India’s imports and exports. India needs an efficient Colombo port just as Colombo port needs Indian custom. There is total inter-dependence. India will benefit from the further upgradation of facilities on the Colombo waterfront and Sri Lanka stands to benefit from India’s rapid economic growth.

 

Take another factoid. Tourism accounts for nearly 25 per cent of Sri Lanka’s GDP and contributes immeasurably to generating local employment. And, of the tourists, nearly 70 per cent are from India. Add to this the investment of Indian entrepreneurs (both big and small) in the infrastructure of tourism and we see another facet of the deep economic linkages that bind the two countries.

 

How much of this economic bonding was government-driven and how much was a function of market logic is difficult to ascertain. However, considering the fact that Sri Lanka cannot market its tea to India or that there are serious impediments to the island selling its world-famous pepper and cinnamon to India, there is an unavoidable conclusion. Sri Lanka and India have forged deep business links despite the babus. This is something for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ponder over.

 

The one area where the government could have played a role, its intervention has been found wanting. Last year, the exhibition of Buddhist relics from Kapilavastu drew spectacular crowds in Sri Lanka. Much of these relics were sourced from the Indian Museum in Kolkata which seems to have neither the imagination nor the inclination to display much of what it possesses. The Madhya Pradesh government, on the other hand, has been more forthcoming in forging links with Sri Lanka for Buddhist studies. However, the efforts have been patchy and there is need for a show of political will to drive the Buddhist heritage project.

 

I have been travelling to Sri Lanka from 1987, a time when the island was crippled by war. During my initial visits, I was fortunate to meet many of the political old-timers. Almost all of them had deep personal links with India forged during the 1940s and 1950s. The new generation of the Sri Lankan elite don’t share those experiences because somewhere along the way the two countries went their separate ways.

 

It is time to re-forge those links not through politics but by blending heritage with trade and commerce. Indo-Sri Lanka relations are crying out for a strategic shift. 

Sunday Pioneer,July 27, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Swapan Dasgupta

By Swapan Dasgupta

By Swapan Dasgupta

 

Like most people I too had never heard of Professor Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, leave aside being familiar with his work, before he was appointed as the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research earlier this month.

 

This ignorance could be on two counts. First, even as a lapsed historian, the study of ancient Indian history has never been among my priorities. I blame the unimaginative ways of my teachers and my unfamiliarity with classical languages for my inability to get passionate over India’s supposed Golden Age. However, far more than my personal partiality for the modern India that emerged after the death of Aurangzeb, my unfamiliarity with the new ICHR chief had precious little to do with my formal detachment from academic institutions. It is among the quirks of national life that far too many of India’s historians have acquired their public reputations, not on account of path-breaking scholarship, but on the strength of their interventions in the political debates of the day. To the best of my knowledge, Rao hasn’t notched up any brownie points by appending his signature to the innumerable petitions that do the rounds of the academic and are faithfully reproduced in the columns of Economic and Political Weekly and reported in The Hindu. To the extent that the petition-writers never even thought it worthwhile to even approach for his endorsement for any perceived injustice, he can hardly be said to fit into the category of those Arun Shourie sneeringly described as India’s “eminent historians.”

 

In her spirited intervention on the ICHR appointment by a Human Resource Development minister who is apparently “unfamiliar with academia beyond the school level”, Professor Romila Thapar, arguably the diva of the community of Indian historians, has indicated another reason why Rao’s credentials are a matter of speculation. In an article in India Today, Thapar has argued that Rao “has published popular articles on the historicity of Indian epics but not in any peer-reviewed journal, and the latter is now a primary requisite for articles to be taken seriously at the academic level.”

 

The implication of Thapar’s assertion is quite interesting. She is, in effect, suggesting that the community of professional historians is akin to a private members’ club: to be acknowledged as a proper historian one must be acknowledged as such by those who have already secured recognition. In short, to be deemed a historian is to be part of a self-perpetuating cabal.

 

This reminds me so much of a conversation I once had with a tenured history professor who insisted that a book by Niall Ferguson—incidentally, a professor at Harvard and a Fellow of an Oxford college—could not be recommended to undergraduates because the writer wasn’t a “proper historian.” I presume the academic notable meant that just because Empire had stemmed from a TV series aimed at a popular audience, it lacked the necessary gravitas.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I am not for a moment that a historian must necessarily add media presence to academic accomplishments in order to be regarded as a historian. It isn’t obligatory for every historian to be another AJP Taylor whose TV and radio appearances, not to mention book reviews for the popular press, made him a celebrity. However, just as his popular touch became an issue among crusty Oxford dons and was a factor in his non-selection as Regius Professor (an appointment that, incidentally, is decided by the Prime Minister of Britain), Rao’s authorship of ‘popular’ articles on the epics doesn’t necessarily warrant condescending asides. Rao may or may not be an accomplished practitioner of the historians’ craft but I don’t think there is any pre-determined criterion for being acknowledged as a historian. Certainly, if the judgment of publishers is solicited, it would seem that the best books on history have invariably been written by individuals outside academia. 

 

In any case, the relative academic worth of an individual is extraneous to the present debate. The post of ICHR chairman is not akin to that of India’s chief historian or even a National Professor of History. The ICHR is a completely redundant government body set up by the then Education Minister S. Nurul Hasan in the high noon of Indira Gandhi’s socialism to guide historical research through government patronage. Its purpose was out and out political: to redefine the contours of historical research.

 

In theory at least a determined government can appoint its chosen hatchet-persons as chairman and members of the council and thereby determine what subjects of research will get official funding and what would be deemed ideologically tainted. In the past, Congress ministers have frequently outsourced the management of history to those who have championed both “scientific” and “secular” history. Some members of the academic Praetorian Guard have been card-carrying Marxists while others have been less dogmatic. But the consequences of their sustained control over the levers of academic funding have resulted in a large measure of ideological regimentation and, more important, the transformation of history into an abstruse, peer-regulated discipline. Equally, there has been a definite shift from rigorous empirical research to purposeless and self-indulgent theorising.

 

That the composition of the ICHR is politically determined is undeniable. In the past, Marxists and the so-called ‘secular’ historians ruled the roost and now the Bharatiya Janata Party is desirous of controlling the body. However, this does not necessarily imply that the new dispensation must be a mirror image of the past. The answer to Left thought control must not be a BJP version of the same. Nor must it mean that all official funding for historical will be diverted to attempts to establish either the authenticity of the Ramayana and Mahabharata or to prove that all scientific wisdom had their origins in the ancient texts of India.

 

To my mind, there are two clear priorities for the ICHR (but not the ICHR alone). First, the study of Indian history has to be freed from ideological regimentation. There are multiple ways of looking at the past and this pluralism has to be officially upheld. This implies that the control of the Left on history departments must be broken. Such an exercise cannot be undertaken by replacing one set of over-politicised academics with another. The political project of the ICHR and, indeed, the HRD Ministry as whole, must be to depoliticise the liberal arts.

 

Secondly, as repeated controversies have indicated, history is too serious a business to be left to “eminent historians”. For the past few decades, India’s awareness of its own past has shrunk on account of the growing insularity of its historians. Judging by the dense and jargon-infested prose, India’s historians are no longer communicating with the wider world but engaging in closed-door conversations. This has to change. Even at the cost of offending those who believe that understanding the past first necessitates grasping their social systems and modes of production, the endeavour of the ICHR must be to make history accessible to an audience that extends well beyond the historians themselves. That means a conscious attempt must be made to re-embrace narrative history, if only as a means of telling a story.

 

In an increasingly globalised world, the government must give a leg-up to all attempts to promote enlightened nationalism. A debunking of the nation’s heritage is the democratic right accorded to a political minority. But surely the taxpayers’ money need not be used for this intellectualised self-flagellation. After all, there are perfectly decent and richly-endowed universities with post-modernist and neo-Marxist agendas on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Telegraph, July 18, 2014

By Swapan Dasgupta

 

If Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget speech was as crisp and focused as his post-Budget interview to Doordarshan, it is almost certain that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s many supporters and well-wishers would have had an extra bounce in their steps. Unfortunately, Jaitley’s maiden exercise in reading from a prepared script left just too many viewers—apart from those deeply involved in finance and industry—completely underwhelmed. Apart from the fact that the entire exercise in the Lok Sabha took up more than two hours (with interruptions), the speech meandered its way through a dhobi list of proposals, some critically important to the future of the Indian economy and taxpayers and others that seemed remarkably trivial. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Jaitley, a remarkably good lawyer, is better speaking extempore than reading from a prepared script.

 

In the 1960 debate during the US presidential election—the first time such an event was broadcast over the electronic media—there were two very distinct responses. Those who watched the debate on TV—and most American voters did—were quite emphatic that John Kennedy had outscored his rival Vice President Richard Nixon. At the same time, the minority who heard the debate on radio were equally emphatic that Nixon was the winner.

 

In a similar vein, Jaitley’s Budget proposals are calculated to look far more appealing when presented in a capsuled form that when heard live. On the floor of the Lok Sabha, Jaitley’s presentation lacked a sense of hierarchy and, apart from the first few paragraphs that outlined his larger political philosophy, the listener was left in some confusion as to what it all added up to. In the interview room, Jaitley explained the overall thrust of the Budget with such lucidity that the plethora of details fell very neatly into place. It almost seemed that Jaitley had dictated the initial paragraphs of his script and outsourced the rest to his Finance Ministry officials who put the unmistakable stamp of babudom on the speech. Indeed, had the Budget not unscrambled by the Minister, the immediate ridicule it attracted in the social media would have become conventional wisdom.

 

First impressions, unfortunately, tend to linger and Jaitley’s Budget speech conveyed the impression of both lacking focus and being dreadfully boring, even if the by-now mandatory poetic finale was lacking.

 

Jaitley should be grateful that a Budget speech, unlike many other ministerial interventions, has a lengthy shelf life. Therefore, despite this surprising—by the exacting standards set by Team Modi—failure in political communication, the end message is likely to endure. And this message was overall positive.

 

In attempting a balancing act between the over-optimism of achche din and the grim realities of a severely depleted state exchequer, Jaitley emphatically sided with the forces of fiscal prudence. Maybe there was a bit of needless bureaucratic conservatism in maintaining that the starting point of the fiscal deficit was 4.5 per cent of GDP—a figure that conventional wisdom deemed the financial community would be able to digest. But the road-map he set for bringing the deficit down to 4.1 per cent has appeared credible because the promise of fiscal consolidation was not accompanied by a rash of populist, but ultimately self-defeating, schemes. For a change, a government has drawn the right messages from the uncomfortable realities of an empty treasury, low growth, the unexpected rise in petroleum prices following the Caliphate problem in West Asia and the likely drought in central and western India. It has acted with exemplary responsibility.

 

The Finance Minister’s task was to accept the lack of elbow room and yet, within this limitation, to create the conditions that would get India back on a higher growth path. From all accounts, both industry and potential investors believe that he has taken many right steps in that direction. The significance of the complicated changes in excise rules and tax procedures were possibly understood only by Chartered Accountants and a few affected parties, but by detailing them with the exactness of a corporate lawyer, Jaitley appears to have revived a great deal of confidence in the Indian business environment. To secure a better ranking for India’s ease of business index will possibly take more sustained effort and lot of actual movement on the ground. However, Jaitley has taken the right steps in the right direction.

 

This restoration of business confidence is of more importance to India than the political class would acknowledge. Unless, investors start putting money back into India, growth will not return and there will be little hope of meeting the demanding revenue targets the Budget has set for the government. Worse, unless growth returns, Modi can say goodbye to all his ambitious schemes to create smart cities, create a diamond quadrilateral and give jobs to the impatient youth that voted for him in such large numbers.

 

The Modi government appears to have learnt a few important political lessons from the experience of the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime. The Vajpayee government was often insufficiently mindful of the concerns of the vast army of the lower middle class that constitute the electoral backbone of the BJP. It was their indifference to the lofty reforms process that contributed to the NDA’s unexpected defeat in 2004. This time, Jaitley’s Budget has addressed their expectations.

 

The cuts in personal taxes may not be dramatic and just about keeps pace with inflation. However, by accepting the principle that individuals must have more money to spend on their families, he has signaled the government’s responsiveness to their concerns. Widening the tax base is a principle favoured by economists. At a time of slow growth, the Budget has recognized that taxing people less is preferable to taxing more people. This is an important area of difference between the low tax principle favoured by the BJP and the over-zealous “tax terrorism” of the UPA.

 

This Budget has a huge amount of saleable items to India’s very different stakeholders. It is this message the BJP has to disseminate because the larger political message wasn’t very clear from Jaitley’s Budget speech. Next year, he must devote as much time to crafting his Budget speech as he does to actually formulating its details. A Budget is too important to be left to babus with no commitment to the politics of this government. 

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, July 11, 2014