The Modi visa denial has been discussed to death. For the latest update go to Manish at Sepia Mutiny. Modi will be speaking via satellite to the Association of Indian Americans of North America, (what part of “Modi is responsible for the murder of hundreds of people” don’t they understand?) There is a protest planned which will begin at 4 pm in front of Madison Square Garden, Sunday March 20.

Also there is an excellent post by Abhi about the various conspiracies that are swirling around at the moment. Which brings me to my own conspiracy theory. I think its the BJP leadership more than the Congress leadership that wants to clip Modi’s wing, and not because they are less communal than Modi. Despite their public outcry against Modi’s visa denial, Modi has become a liability for them. At least thirty five MLAs rebelled against Modi a couple of weeks ago, complaining about his “high handed” manner. Which is sort of short hand for Modi’s administrative style, which doesn’t quite indulge in pork barrel politics. One of the reasons the BJP lost the Lok Sabha elections in Gujarat was because the powerful rich farmers lobby went against the BJP. The lobby wanted free electricity, which Modi refused, and invoked their anger. While chatting with people in Gujarat in December, I was told that Modi told the officers of the administrative service that he wanted the state to be run in an efficient manner and in return they would not be troubled by politicians, (except when it came to his pogrom project I suppose), this has been very unpopular with the other politicians in the state who are a lot more corrupt, and probably upset about not being allowed to line their coffers. At this point, I can’t resist pointing to Ashis Nandy’s account of meeting Modi:

More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him along with Achyut Yagnik, whom Modi could not fortunately recognise. (Fortunately because he knew Yagnik by name and was to later make some snide comments about his activities and columns.) It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term `fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.

Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he makes the “trains run on time.”

It looks like no political party has won a majority in Bihar and President’s rule might be declared. Bihar has the reputation of being one of the most backward states. Of course the green fields of Punjab wouldn’t be so green and the factories of India wouldn’t chug along without all the labor and raw materials that come from the state. So it pretty much suits everyone that it is underdeveloped. In the middle of all this is the impossible figure of Laloo Prasad Yadav. Here is a little bio:

Born in 1948, Yadav was elected to the sixth Lok Sabha at the early age of 29 years in 1977. In 1989, he became the leader of the opposition after being in the Bihar Legislative Assembly for two terms before becoming Chief Minister of Bihar in 1990, a post he held till 1997, when he was forced to resign on widespread corruption charges. Handing over the reins of the state to his wife, he served prison sentences before being re-elected to the 12th Lok Sabha for a third term.

He has a degree in law and his interests vary from reading revolutionary books to writing articles on politics and debating. But his real passion seems to be surviving in politics, a skill he has mastered like few others. Critics point to the worsening socio-political scenario of Bihar while he and his wife have governed the state, but he has his legions of admirers, who are ready to die for him.

Laloo Prasad has managed to survive without completely aligning himself to the Congress (which has generally been the junior partner to his RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) party) nor the BJP. He seems to be a populist whose corrupt practices have not harmed his political fortunes, except this time round. Despite his bad record on development, he has a very good record on communal politics and violence in Bihar, as this article from Indian Express (archived on Communalism Watch) points out:

Although the Sangh parivar never got to rule Bihar, it had attained more power on the streets of the state than in the Patna assembly. Riots would rage for a month and administrators would not know how to control them. In 1990, when Laloo Prasad Yadav came to power, the Ayodhya movement was at its peak. Muslims in the state were living under a pall of fear. Certainly, riots broke out even under Laloo’s guard but he knew how to control them. When violence erupted in Sitamarhi, for instance, the man who for many was only a ‘joker’ camped in the city, holding a torch in one hand and a danda in other. When a riot broke out in Nawada, Laloo was in Delhi on an official assignment. When news of the riots came in, he dropped everything and rushed to the trouble spot. The riots were controlled in a jiffy.

Among other things Laloo Prasad did a guest appearance in a Bollywood film, “Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav,” which seems to have done very badly. It would probably have been a better idea to do the film on him or at least a musical!

Gandhi’s march to Dandi to break the salt laws in 1930 is being re-enacted. While it may be a gimmick on part of the Congress party, their answer to the Hindutva rath yatras, the salt march is a seminal event for Indian history worth remembering. The Hindu has an article on the history of the march. One of the things I learnt was:

The salt tax was no trifling matter. As many essayists sought to demonstrate, a tax of about 1,000 per cent on the cost was “the worst blot on our revenue system”. Although difficult to imagine now, we should bear in mind that in 1930, Indians were forced to spend a considerable fraction of their income on salt. People could not manufacture their own salt and most of it was imported. An astonishing five per cent of national tax revenue was from salt!

The article mentions a painstakingly researched book on the march by Thomas Weber, On the Salt March: The Historiography of Gandhi’s March to Dandi, it seems that Weber was a journalist in the 30′s. To understand the significance of salt, Mahasweta Devi’s story Salt in the collection Bitter Soil is a good introduction, it tells the story of a poor tribal community that steals the salt licks from a reserve forest. For an interesting social history of salt, there is Salt: A World History. And for the situation of salt workers in India see Kerim’s blog.

The Nanavati Commission has determined in its investigation of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984:

(That) the violence that followed the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was “organised and systematic” in several areas, the entire Congress apparatus could not be held responsible for the acts of individual politicians, hooligans, depraved people and local gangs.

Sounds a little bit like the “a few bad apples” theory. There have been ten commissions of inquiry to date, makes depressing reading as chronicled by Dilip D’Souza, when people like Sajjan Kumar have been let off the hook:

A CBI team went to Kumar’s home to file the charges; his supporters locked them up and threatened them harm if they persisted in their designs on their leader.

In retrospect, 1984 feels like a dress rehearsal for Gujerat. When powerful people subvert the law, it does not go unnoticed, and those who would follow them refine the tactics they have learnt, knowing they can do so with impunity.

The Nanavati Commission however does recommend that the most egregious culprits, HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Dharam Das Shastri be re-investigated. But when you read accounts of people like Advocate Harvinder Singh Phulka, it becomes clear that while people haven’t given up, the tactic of bureaucratic delay makes the prospect of justice seem rather dim. For more information on this and other Human Rights issues look at Jas Karan’s blog at the Harvard Law School.

Back in the city after a month long sojourn in India. It was a very exciting trip with work, travel, and family fun thrown in. I will write about it as I sort it out.

I hadn’t been back in four years, and the last time was too full of family events to pay any attention to the place itself, so in effect it was like going back after almost ten years. My first impression, once you bypass the usual–”the place is bursting with people and there are a lot more cars on the streets,” was how many ugly little temples had sprung up on every corner.

My hometown of Dehradun isn’t a big place for religious activities, despite its proximity to major pilgrimage spots, Rishikesh and Hardwar; so it was a little surprising to see so many of these monstrosities in places where I played cricket as a child. And its just not Dehradun, it seems that the VHP plans to install 600,000 Ram statues (and judging by the icons I saw, bound to be ugly) in villages across India, in just such unaesthetic structures I suppose. Anything that creates such ugliness is surely a sign of degradation.

When I spoke to my friends they expressed hope that such a hijacking of public space would come to an end with the defeat of the NDA government, with its history of granting land to ideologically preferred religious groups. However, what was striking in my conversations with my friends was that despite their hope, just how scared they seemed to be, especially if they were non-Hindu. It wasn’t as much as what they said, but how they said it, when I asked about the current political climate, their voices would lower, and they would start looking furtive and uncomfortable. At least a couple of people told me horrible stories….some spoke of migrating, others seemed to have become even more religious than I remembered them. So what is one to make of the NDA defeat in the last election? Radhika Desai has an excellent article in the New Left Review unfortunately it is only available by subscription.

Hindutva Halted?
Ambiguous reasons for the unexpected relief of the BJP’s ouster in New Delhi: less a clear-cut verdict on Hindutva or neoliberalism than vicissitudes of regional power-broking and first-past-the-post electoral lottery? Congress caught between loyalty to the stock market and pressures of the poor, as it seeks to recover its position as the mainstream reference of Indian capital.

Desai essentially says that the BJP has replaced the Congress as the party of the bourgeoisie, and its defeat is a temporary setback in its fortunes, as the Congress behemoth breathes its last.

Last week Sepia Mutiny posted on the Yes Men’s hoax. Here is an interview from Democracy Now (thank you Shaila Mehra) with the Yes Man who perpetrated the hoax, it has the BBC interview as well. They would have preferred to be on Fox News, and after the hoax was discovered they released another press release:

….we felt that we owed Dow some public relations work so we issued an explanation by Dow that in fact the Jude Finisterra fellow in the morning had not been their representative and that in fact everything he said was incorrect. Then we proceeded to outline exactly what was incorrect. Dow was not going to remediate the site even though it wouldn’t cost very much; they were not going to compensate people to more than $500, $500 was in fact enough for an Indian, plenty good for an Indian, etc., etc. Everything they were not going to do we just spelled it out for them, since all they had said was he was not their spokesperson. We thought that was insufficient.

Body and Soul has an excellent post about the hoax. She points out the callous disregard of not only Dow Chemicals, but of the media’s attitude of, “life is cheap in the third world,” and its professional lapses.

I suppose that is why we depend on the fake news with Jon Stewart to get to the real news. Here is an extensive interview on Rediff about the the sorry state of affairs.

If you have been following the Kanchi Muth murder mystery, you will probably not be surprised by the following article from The Telegraph:

The chisels for Ram have been replaced by guns to protect the mahants.

On the eve of the 12th anniversary of the razing of the Babri Masjid, fear hangs over this temple town. But the insecurity is not over another violent agitation for a Ram temple but the bloody succession battles among priests and heads of trusts that have claimed several lives.

Several hundred trust heads have either acquired arms or have applied for gun licences. Of the 100 applicants whose cases are before the Faizabad district administration, 60 are mahants, police confirmed.

It seems that several priests and administrators have already been killed, The Telegraph thinks that the deflation of the Ayodhya issue is responsible for the priests turning against each other, as old rivalries resurface. The priests themselves have the perfect answer for everything:

Gyan Das was flanked by armed men even in his office near Hanumangarhi. He argued that the trusts and akharas had been created to protect the Hindu religion. So they should be armed. What if the arms are used to settle scores with rivals of the community? “That is there,” he said, “but God will save them.”

The only thing missing is a visit from Charlton Heston of the NRA, after all he did play Moses.

The election result has been having a strange effect on my friends and colleagues, there is uniform hand wringing, displays of bad temper, in my case add paranoid anxiety–understandable if you read this article from the normally staid and fuddy-duddy New York Review of Books about surveillance and secret persecution by the State. All in all resembling symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. So thanks to Amardeep Singh for linking to this excellent blog, Easily Distracted by Tim Burke, which has somewhat alleviated my suffering.

Rediff has an interview with Khushwant Singh, now in his 90s. For those unfamiliar with him, Khushwant Singh is a veteran journalist and writer, a fixture on the Indian scene for close to 50 years. Sometimes aggravating, sometimes insightful, and always fun to read. In this interview he talks about Indira Gandhi, the person and the legacy:

People would say the Cabinet has only one man (Indira Gandhi) and that the rest are all hijras (eunuchs), but the fact is she reduced them to that level.

The BBC reports

The high court in the Indian capital Delhi has dismissed a legal petition that sought to legalise homosexuality.

Basically they are refusing to repeal an antiquated law from the late 19th century that criminalizes homosexuality, all on the basis of a technicality, it seems the “wrong group” petitioned. According to a Professor Rao

It’s about time the government woke up from its slumber and caught up with its reading. Far from being a western import, homosexuality was known and practised in ancient and medieval India unselfconsciously. The Kamasutra takes note of it. In their book Same Sex Love in India, Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita inform us that Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva had a love affair, that led to the birth of Ayyappa.

It seems that Sanskrit has words that describe several kinds of sexualities not just homo and hetero, so it seems there is nothing “un-Indian” about alternate sexualities. So something that has been criminalized for only two hundred years or so takes on the mantle of tradition, while the VHP agitates to bring “Ram Rajya.” Its troubling that both Prof. Rao and myself feel compelled to invoke an ancient tradition to criticize a law that is clearly unjust, and should be repealed for that reason alone. How the terms of the debate have changed….