Mandir Wahi Banayenge!

Mandir Wahi Banayenge!

Whenever, it would seem, the BJP grows uncomfortable with its Hindutva roots while in power, it automatically provokes the fates, goes into decline electorally, and is decisively turfed out at the next general elections.

While the precedents don’t go very deep as the BJP only ruled at the Centre once before,  the post mortem of the Vajpayee government’s ouster shows up this factor as an important one. 

This is probably because, without Hindutva, it has no real USP to distinguish it from the Congress in public perception. Nuanced differences in governance and approach look like so many blurred, self-serving, and expedient lines. And the BJP is seen as a bad copy of the original. The rank and file BJP and RSS/Sangh Parivar worker, bred on ideology, is both demoralised and demotivated.

The Vajpayee administration lasted a full term with an unwieldy coalition, but distanced itself from the RSS, and turned its back on Hindutva issues including the special status of J&K, the Ayodhya Temple movement, the Uniform Code Bill, and other such matters. It cited the constraints of “coalition dharma”, but just how convincing is this?

Vajpayee could, after all, be bold to get what he wanted. He enjoyed great personal popularity cutting across party lines, he detonated the bomb just 13 days into office for the second time, he initiated visionary and far reaching infrastructure development, and presided over a worthwhile economic performance.

Whatever applied to Atal Bihari Vajpayee can be  at least doubled in the case of Narendra Damodardas Modi. Here is a person who was an RSS Pracharak for years, a man who wanted to join the Belur Math as an ascetic and priest before that to wit.

Politics and power might have given him distance from those formative years, but he  didn’t win the first parliamentary brute majority in 30 years without invoking Hindutva, and receiving the extensive help of the RSS and the Sangh Parivar.

“Vikas” as a central Modi poll plank is all very well, but the Congress and others in the regional Opposition can lay fair, if not equal claim, to development and progress.

If Modi fails to self-correct in the remaining five months, he could well lose power altogether. There is an urgent need to enthuse the core BJP supporters. They seem to be upset, staying away in significant numbers from the voting booths or pressing the NOTA button. To them, he has neglected Hindutva issues, besides starting the building  of  good roads towards the Char Dhams, inaugurating a railway line and stop to facilitate Amar Nath, and putting in world class ropeways to Vaishno Devi and the like.

While the delivery of Acche Din too leaves much to be desired, as the Opposition never fails to point out, the BJP voter is willing to give Modi more time to deliver on all that. It is unreasonable to expect a man to do in 5 years what has not been done in over six decades.

But, a majority saffron government, it is commonsensical, is definitely expected to deliver much more on Hindutva. It is here that the BJP has an opportunity to regain the initiative after a string of electoral losses including the recently concluded “semi-finals”.

There is a feeling that the Supreme Court may reserve its judgement till after the general elections, even if it sits on the Ayodhya title suit on a daily basis starting in January 2019. If this happens, or if there are further delays for the hearings, it becomes very important for the Modi government to act.

It must proceed with the construction of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya on the disputed site by using an ordinance. If this government initiates the construction of the Ram Mandir, it will greatly encourage the Hindu masses in the critically important states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and indeed in the entire Hindi Heartland. Of course, a communal backlash and Opposition howl can be expected, even though it will be very difficult for the Congress to oppose the Mandir without being squarely accused of minority appeasement.

On the other hand, if the Modi government does nothing, even if the SC does not proceed, it will be seen as a great let-down, not only by the greater Sangh Parivar, who have been clamouring for the commencement of construction, but by the rank and file BJP supporter too.

The Modi government cannot hope to get away with an appeal to the modernist forces that support “Vikas”. Its very roots come from much older impulses – from the soul of “Bharat Mata” herself, rather than the British inspired “India”.  A half of which India has been torn asunder at Partition anyway, and the remainder is much more the province of Congress.

Lest we forget the basics of the Saffron Party’s genesis, amongst the shilling, scripted noises of an exaggerated farmer distress, a spurious attempt at  equivalence in corruption, and other Opposition planks, we need to recapitulate.

In recent history, the Lotus bloomed as a symbol of approaching national power with LK Advani’s “phenomenally” successful Rath Yatra of 1990. This was post the 1989 general elections to the 9^th Lok Sabha that threw up an unstable coalition.

The BJP had campaigned using the Ayodhya movement, the Lord Ram katha and symbolism that resonated with the, till then, politically unawakened Hindu masses of North India. 

The Saffron Party then, and for years going forward, was vilified night and day by the Congress and others as “communal and untouchable” for voicing such blatant Hindu aspirations. Such bogus propaganda dropped the first, 13 day Vajpayee government for want of one vote.

Nevertheless, that Hindutva was a potent threat was obvious, because it flew in the face of the established Nehruvian “secular” political narrative. BJP won a significant block of 85 seats in 1989.

The late Pramod Mahajan collaborated with LK Advani to create the Toyota mini-bus Rath thereafter. It wended its way from the Somnath temple in Gujarat, reconstructed by Sardar Patel in 1951, through the Hindi Heartland towards the Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya.  The Somnath Temple as starting point, was probably chosen for the symbolism. It  was not only very sacred but had been repeatedly destroyed by Muslim invaders.

Lalu Prasad Yadav arrested LK Advani at Samastipur in Bihar before he could take the Rath all the way into Ayodhya, but the desired mass  mobilization and momentum, had already been created.

The Babri Masjid was demolished by Kar Sevaks just two years later. For BJP, the Rath Yatra itself delivered 120 seats in the 10^th Lok Sabha of 1991, which lasted a full-term, despite being a minority government, under Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. 

Going back further, the revered Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, martyred to the nationalist cause in Kashmir at the young age of 53, was the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal.

The Hindu Mahasabha, established 1915, was really the parent of the present Hindutva movement, and there were other highly respected leaders such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who also came from it.

Mookerjee it was however, who established the   Bhratiya Jan Sangh in 1951, the precursor to the present day BJP, established only in 1980. Mookerjee set it up as the political wing of the RSS, and not the Hindu Mahasabha.

Mookerjee not only professed a blend of Hindutva, Capitalist and Nationalist views, having been instrumental in saving West Bengal as part of India at Partition, but was keen to put forward an alternate ideology to the Fabian Socialism imported by Jawaharlal Nehru.

At this present juncture, it is important for Narendra Modi to remember all this, and deliver satisfaction to his voters.  It is a time to reassert a commitment to the BJP’s core beliefs, and start the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. He should realize that the Congress does not stray very far from its pseudo-secular roots, and it would be a grave mistake to become an also ran.  

It is time, not only to make a beginning, but proceed with all pace to build a magnificent Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. It should become not just a place of fervent worship and assertion of Hindu identity, but an architectural beauty for the world to marvel at.  This work, if begun, will deliver a very good chance to the BJP to romp home in 2019.

For: The Sunday Guardian

(1,385 words)

December 27^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

Elections 2019: The High Road & The Low Road

Elections 2019: The High Road And The Low Road

A first-time president-elect in the US, innocent of the true ways of the highest office in the land, starts receiving daily intelligence briefings, and a tight, vastly enhanced secret service detail to protect him.

Overnight, the light of knowledge begins to glow in his eyes as he is given a bite of the proverbial apple. Things don’t seem so black and white anymore. The outgoing president, his bitter rival till the other day, is no longer someone to rage against and ridicule. In fact, a new admiration for him dawns in the president-elect’s eyes, to come and sit next to the aforementioned glow of knowledge.

Is the forthcoming national election going to be won by the person, party and alliance that fired the aspirations of the youth in 2014, so that he and they can largely complete the transformation promised by Modi’s “New India”?

Has Modi not set about making good on a lot of this already- to wit, strengthening our neglected defences, boosting infrastructure, ramping up connectivity, renewing the Indian Railways, providing electricity, cooking gas, neem-coated urea, much greater nationalism in foreign affairs, a cleaner Ganga, a dynamic ISRO, fledgling Skill India programmes, a modicum of success on Make in India in cellphones and automobiles?

Will the efforts of an opportunistic, power-hungry, disparate, notional gatbandhan, be seen as the irresponsible rantings of an Opposition with a narrow focus that plays to the gallery? The Opposition, by definition, has none of the responsibilities of power.

The Congress scion, that is making the greatest number of wild charges, has never held a public service job in his 47 year old life, and knows nothing of its practical nuances in a national, let alone global sense. Can it collectively and severally fool the voting masses with negative propaganda, scaremongering and the lure of freebies? That Congress is struggling to make good on its pledges wherever it has recently won is a testament to its irresponsibility.

Rural distress may be a good campaign slogan but it has many dimensions.Many of the farmer suicides are coming from the apparently better off owners of 2 to 4 acres of land. The whole issue needs to be looked at in much greater depth. It calls for mechanization, technological transformation for productivity and handling, massive modernization and increase in value-adding food processing, an effective cold chain and so on. Farming today employs too many people and is returning lower and lower figures to the GDP calculations. This even as most people in rural India are actually employed in providing services, rather than as farmers or farm labour already.

The Indian voter has proved to be wise, sagacious and far-sighted time and again, from early on, when the founding fathers made bold to embrace the ideal of universal adult franchise.

And in 2019, India will be 73.  Our voters, the world has begun to see, are no longer plagued, as they once were, by chronic illiteracy, ill health, poverty and destitution. In a few years, such deprivation will be history for all the people of this hugely populous country of over 1.3 billion people.  Already, demonstrating the disposable income in their fists, the rural population, 60% of the whole, are buying 45% of all the FMCG in India!

The Modi government has made a number of medium to long term structural and legislative changes that have helped to restore the macroscopic economy to health. India is no longer part of the “fragile five”. Its growth rate, deficits, foreign exchange reserves and inflation, are all under admirable control, more so given the stagnation and turbulence seen in the global external economy. 

The Congress and other elements of the Opposition want to see the NDA out of power at any cost, fearing for their very survival otherwise, and claim that Narendra Modi has lost his appeal.

Little does it realize that Modi intends to take this country to the first rank of nations and become the third biggest economy in a few years. This calls for a massive push of modernization and efficiency on multiple fronts, and a changed mindset that emphasizes productive and professionalized governance.

Quick fixes, divisive politics, and rank populism as practiced by the Opposition in the hope of upsetting the NDA applecart, is harmful to this great objective.

But having succeeded in wresting victories in some of the recent assembly elections, the Opposition believes the road to power lies in economically reckless socialism of the old school. That it will surely lead to a state of flux and weakness is a price the Opposition is willing to pay at the nation’s cost.   

The government is equally if not more concerned. In addition to a plethora of yojanas aimed at rural upliftment that have made considerable difference, it is making ready to approach the question of rural distress not with farm loan waivers, but with farm produce price supports/subsidies. The aim is to stabilize farm incomes for all seasons. The final Union Budget/Vote-on-account coming up on February 1^st  2019 is said to be working on this. Meanwhile, the much reviled GST too is heading towards a single tariff of 18% as revenues from it country-wide continue to improve for the rest of India. 

As the next general election looms ever nearer, the narrative seems to be proceeding simultaneously by both the High Road and the Low Road. Narendra Modi tends to occupy the High Road, as most leaders who occupy the top job necessarily must.

Modi  has become, in just 55 months, an international statesman, able to favorably influence world affairs. His government has substantially improved the ease of doing business in India, spoken out against the scourge of international terrorism, and shepherded an economy that is almost at 5^th position in the world now.

Rahul Gandhi, as an aspirant to the top job from the Opposition, has appropriated the Low Road, and is doing his best to destroy the credibility of the NDA regime and the prime minister in particular. Ignoring or even trying to obscure the UPA record for corruption and misgovernance, he talks of farmer distress/loan waivers, “Gabbar Singh Tax,” ruinous “Demonetisation”, destruction of institutions, attacks on the Minorities - rounding off all this with the corruption counter-charge of “Chowkidaar Chor Hai”.

Some of this is working with the masses as well as the classes. It is undeniable that the string of NDA losses from bye-elections to assemblies in the year or so just past, are definitely warning shots through Modi’s bows.

But is the general election truly up in the air? The Congress strategy is negative, populist and economically fraught. It has been adopted as a method to hoodwink poor farmers and disgruntled tribals to vote for it. But Freebies have to be paid for, unfairly, by the honest taxpayer, and creates an ecosphere of wanting more from where that came from. 

Almost bankrupt states, including the ones that the Congress has just won, are left begging the Centre for more money to make up their shortfalls. The anarchy created by promised loan waivers leads others to default as well, causing massive NPAs ! Besides the knock-on effect on the nation’s finances and external credit ratings are likely to be disastrous. All the good work done on the economy over the last 55 months will go to waste if this becomes the norm, and the situation will be rendered precarious again.

A deeper look at the options before the voter offers it an alternative to the Opposition’s recklessness. It should be enough to let Modi win a second consecutive term and get on with unfinished business.

 (1,264 words)

For: My Nation

December 25^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

BOOK REVIEW: MAKING OF NEW INDIA EDITED BY ANIRBAN GANGULY//BIBEK DEBROY//KISHORE DESAI

BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: MAKING OF NEW INDIA-TRANSFORMATION UNDER THE MODI GOVERNMENT

EDITORS: BIBEK DEBROY/ANIRBAN GANGULY/KISHORE DESAI

PUBLISHER: WISDOM TREE - IN ASSOCIATION WITH DR. SHYAMA PRASAD MOOKERJEE RESEARCH FOUNDATION

PRICE: Rs.   995/-

The Transformation Underway

It would have felt better if one was reviewing this book in the aftermath of a triumph at the recently held assembly elections. But alas, it was not to be, at least for the ruling dispensation, that managed to lose all three states in the “Hindi Heartland” in a straight contest with the Congress.

This impressive book is the best effort yet by the intellectual engines of the Modi government and its sympathisers to articulate its achievements and challenges.  It has been anchored and edited by the BJP think-tank Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation (SPMRF), through its Director Dr. Anirban Ganguly, and Niti Aayog using the services of Dr. Bibek Debroy, Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, and his OSD Kishore Desai.

Its given importance is underlined by the fact that it was launched by presenting the first copy from the hands of the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to the President of India Ram Nath Kovind on the 27^th of November 2018 at a  formal occasion at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Unveiled before an audience of some of the 56 individual contributors, Union Ministers, Members of Parliament, and a select few invited guests.

The nearly 600 page hardbound book has come at the four and a half year mark of the Modi government. While its tone is self-congratulatory, the stark realities of the angry rural and urban voters, once ardent fans of Narendra Modi, not being impressed by the   apparent non-delivery of “Acche Din” hangs like a shadow over the exercise.

The Finance Minister made the point in his introductory address, that nearly 80% of the country’s revenue was now flowing to the states, in an unstated but exemplary push towards greater federalism and empowerment of the states.

Presumably this will make it easier for the newly won Congress states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and the earlier win in Karnataka to waive off small farmer loans as promised. But, this, as we know, is easier said than done.

Notwithstanding the fact that a large number of the states now have BJP governments, even as the bulk of the Opposition derives its salience from one or the other of the remaining ones, there is a deep-seated problem of fiscal extravagance in the states of the Indian Union.

Sajid Chinoy of Morgan Stanley, one of the able contributors to this book, makes the telling point that the states were responsible for an ever widening fiscal deficit, which, in turn, was impacting the excellent fiscal management of the centre. It was driving up overall borrowing costs and making the private sector and foreign investors wary. This excess of borrow and spend, needs to be better managed. Of course, a few months before the general elections, this is unpopular advice.  

Having said this, the Modi government has succeeded in putting the country on a sound economic footing with robust growth trajectories. This, after coming to power in May 2014, with a very strong political mandate, but a correspondingly weak economy with a huge bad debt problem. India’s economy was dubbed, at the time, as being part of the “fragile five” emerging market economies by international observers.

But poised as it is politically, with a strong and credible challenge after the 5 state “semi-finals”, the BJP and the NDA must perforce look at greater populism in its final budget presentation on 1^st February 2019. This may not be good news for the economy, but survival is likely to come first.

So is this book already out-of-date? Is it looking in the rear-view mirror or the road ahead. There has been disappointment on the creation of jobs, rural distress, anger at the ignoring of long pending Hindutva issues, lack of effective action against the corrupt  and so on.  It is also true that no BJP government, or for that matter, any government, other than one led by Congress has ever enjoyed two consecutive terms. 

To change this “default position”, as Rahul Gandhi put it, is going to take some doing.

It is interesting how there is an immense defensiveness that permeates essay after essay in this book, as the writers first state and then argue against various Opposition accusations.

This even though it was written when there were no threatening clouds in the sky.            

However, the “revival of nationalism” as Professor Makarand Paranjape put it, is definitely an endeavour of this Modi government.

Another, widely acknowledged plank of a “corruption free government,” at least at the top, has many takers.Open Magazine Editor Prassannarajan praises the mass connect of using Mann Ki Baat on a retro medium like the radio.Rajiv Lall extols the massive gains made by the wide implementation of the Aadhar Cards as identity authenticators. The Bankruptcy Act is lauded by famed economist Arvind Virmani. Somdutt Singh argues the government’s thrust towards “skill development” will, in time, bring on the jobs. Sadly, this is probably too slow for the voters.

There is an implied criticism in the way “employment is measured” in  the article by TCA Anant and the one after it by Pulak Ghosh and Somya Kanti Ghosh that speaks of gathering “payroll data” from the informal sector.The government’s controversial targeting of “black money” and its achievements of better tax compliance is written about by Mukesh Butani. The tackling of “benami transactions” in real estate and the promulgation of RERA is the subject of Suparna Jain’s article.The visionary “Sagarmala” project seeks to implement port based development as per Vishwapati Trivedi’s essay.

Hardeep Singh Puri writes on the “Smart Cities”. Kishore Desai, one of the editors of this volume, points out the strides made in the electrical power sector. The Ganga clean-up effort is written about by Harikishan Sharma. Education, Health, Nutrition, the Swacch Bharat Mission, rural modernization has largely remained a set of good intentions, but not if you read the chapters related to it. 

Make in India has not progressed beyond cellphones and  cars but again, that is not how the government sees it, drawing even the micro lending of the Mudra scheme into its purview. Defence and national security gets quite a few chapters  and perhaps deservedly so, because the Modi government has  shifted the inertia that plagued this area. Foreign policy and India’s soft power gets good marks since the Modi government took over. There has been a positive rebooting of India’s relationship with multiple countries and several chapters dwell on this aspect.

All in all, though parts of the book seem hagiographic, what is obvious is the enormous scope of works undertaken by  this government in what is just four and a half years. It is, in the end, a very good reference book to have in one’s library on Modi’s first term in office.

(1,119 words)

For: The Sunday Pioneer, Agenda, BOOKS

December 18^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

Betrayal Begets Anger: Where Are The Acche Din?

Betrayal  Begets Anger: Where Are The Acche Din?

We have many questions from the grassroots that the good macro statistics have not managed to answer. The electorate has been fretting for a while, but persuaded itself to give the charismatic prime minister more time. But that patience seems to have run out with the drubbing it gave the BJP in three important states in the Hindi heartland.

The poor and dispossessed in the rural areas have run away to the promises of succour from a Congress desperate to make a comeback. The urban poor in the three states and even the elite Rajputs of Rajasthan have also voted against this government. Anti-incumbency and jaded chief ministers may have played its part, but rank anger at being ignored and cheated with unfulfilled promises by Narendra Modi himself was the dominant emotion. The assembly election vote says I have stopped believing in you and you have only yourself to blame.

Nationally too, first, there are the emotive issues on which those who backed the Modi government feel utterly betrayed. Where is the pro-Hindu government, in place of a pseudo-secular minority favouring dispensation, ask a phalanx of Hindu Nationalists, the poor and the youth?  This, even as Modi has found time and inclination to execute some initiatives to help Muslim women.

And why is the Kashmir Valley allowed to get away with its sedition, terrorism, murder and mayhem, while the government does nothing? It even allows the Army and Police in J&K to be censured! What about abolishing Article 370 and 35A to bring J&K into the Indian mainstream?

And if this government with a brute majority, the best in 30 years, cannot start the temple building at Ayodhya, then who can? What makes it think it can hide behind a partisan and unsympathetic Supreme Court and its endless delaying tactics?

Why is the Modi government hitting out at the small traders with taxes and sealings, when it is they, most of all, who formed the support base of this government long before the Rath Yatra undertaken by LK Advani ? Did he throw them over in favour of the poor rural/urban masses that he has also failed to satisfy?

Why has the middle class been totally ignored?  Why has the Finance Minister been allowed to ignore their aspirations in successive budgets and in-between actions like the fuel taxes?

Is this “Vikas” a mere slogan, no better than Indira Gandhi’s “Garibi Hatao”. Where are the troops of competent people from the middle class ranks who needed to be inducted to make this government run well? Why has the bureaucracy not been licked into shape to deliver fast and efficiently?

Why are BJP media spokespersons, almost always sub-standard?? They are unable to portray the achievements of the government in a favourable light.  

How do the dozens of seriously corrupt people from the erstwhile UPA government  era manage to cock-a-snook at this government? Why is Narendra Modi so timid about sending them to jail? And how did so many fugitive businessmen manage to run away abroad under this government’s watch?

The writing has been on the wall for some time. If a down and out Congress has benefited from all this, it is largely the BJP government and the party’s own fault.

Incumbency riddled Gujarat was won with difficulty, and yes, a Left enclave fell in with Tripura. But after that, there have been no more wins, not even municipal elections and a variety of bye-elections.

Karnataka was narrowly lost, and then the BJP failed to secure a government there, perhaps due to its own hubris. Congress stole a march from under its nose and formed the government there.

And now, there may be jubilation amongst those who dislike Modi, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, but there is sorrow in the hearts of Modi’s supporters. And this, not for the defeats themselves, humiliating as they are, but because it is true that this government has failed to deliver much by way of the promised Acche Din. It has become difficult to defend a non-performance.

The macro figures, though disputed by the Opposition, are good, and getting better. A fundamental thing like electricity to every village if not yet to every home has been accomplished at last. Cooking gas, both subsidized for the poor, and at full price to others, has indeed penetrated its way to 90% of households.

There are a plethora of yojanas aimed at the urban and rural poor that claim to have touched their lives, and subsidies do now reach the intended recipients. There is the banking of the unbanked, Mudra small loans, and many other things, and yet the public thinks these are just small efficiencies, and not the big expectations it had from Modi.

No incomes have gone up to speak of. There is no boom to be seen anywhere, property prices are depressed. There has been little creation of new jobs, or livelihoods for that matter. At least, none in proportion to the demand.

The taxation however, has increased substantially, either in actual terms, or because the net is wider now, ubiquitous, and better enforced.

The infrastructure development, always a BJP strength, will no doubt better lives in the long run, but accomplishes little for the people here and now.

The Opposition, particularly Rahul Gandhi, has got away with virulent criticism and outright lies, mainly because there is no one effective to counter him. The prime minister refuses to do so on a day-to-day basis, and no one else is tasked to do so either. Congress, on its part, has several articulate former ministers, mostly top flight lawyers, defending their first family and other seniors all the time.

It is surprising that not one prosecution worth the name has resulted in any of the corrupt from Congress actually being installed in jail. So much so, that the Congress is able to openly threaten the officials of the ED and CBI to beware of retribution when they return to power.

While the litany of woes resulting from ineffective governance, promises not kept, awkwardness and timidity, is long, the time has come to recognize that the BJP is in serious danger of being voted out of power altogether in 2019. If it doesn’t altogether lose, it is almost certain to be considerably weakened.

What therefore can it do in the remaining months before the Code of Conduct puts an end to any new initiatives? It must grab the attention of its core voters who have perhaps been taken for granted. So much so, that they stay home on voting day in many instances. This means delivery on some of the ignored Hidutva issues - such as J&K’s status, and Ayodhya, and a renewed promise to implement a Uniform Civil Code if it is voted back to power.

It also needs to implement some economic benefits for Hindus in particular- traders, middle class, urban and rural folk- things that do not fight shy of announcing that they are not universal in nature, but specifically meant for Hindus of all castes.

It is a mistake for Narendra Modi not to put the corrupt from the UPA in jail, even if it is pre-trial detention without bail. Their supporters will, in any case, never vote for the BJP, and are busy exulting over their resurgence and comeback.

If this government chooses to carry on as if all is well and makes the mistake of thinking the recent assembly elections will not affect the general election in May 2019, they may be in for a big shock.

(1,255 words)

For: My Nation

December 12^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

Teaching English

Teaching English

I’ve never seen an English teacher manage much creative writing. Those who teach creative writing at universities are already established authors. But the ones who teach an English literature degree course are the ones I am talking about.

You can teach how every great one writes, why they wrote on their subject matter, how they wrote, when they wrote it, what their probable state of mind and circumstances were, who they were influenced by, what pressures they felt, what religion they had. You can compare their work with their peers and rivals.

You can teach it, and teach it most articulately. You can inspire and fire the imaginations of thousands of your students over the years.  You can go to this work for years, from being young lecturers and grow old doing it. But know that it gives you creative impotence as a side-effect.

Sometimes a book or two of poetry comes out, mostly after a decade or two of the daily grind forming the minds and literature appreciating abilities of generations of students - mainly because friends in publishing persuade you to write something.

Then there are forewords to other people’s books, articles for the feature pages in newspapers on Sunday and websites, notes from thousands of lectures, some interviews, play direction, but almost always very slim creative output.

This malady afflicts people in publishing too, and to a lesser extent those in journalism and the sloganeering world of advertising. Creative writing needs obscurity, solitude, the cocooning of a cloister.

Sitting in judgement over thousands of manuscripts, editing the work of aspiring and established writers, kills it for Commissioning Editors, Editors-in-Chief and Advertising doyens alike.

TS Eliot was an exception as Director of Faber & Faber. He published his own path-breaking and most beautiful poetry there that won him a Nobel Prize. But I wonder, did he write his poems before he took on the position with Faber & Faber?

Most English teachers who write poetry do it because it is oblique, open-ended, subject to multiple interpretations, a way to express bitterness, criticism, social comment, longing, beauty, without however being too specific. You can hide yourself behind it, because you who dissect writing for a living, are subconsciously afraid to be judged.

The famous English teacher Eunice de Sousa of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai comes to mind. There were Nisha da Cunha, Nissim Ezekiel and Adil Jussawala too.

But a few poets also live bold lives. Kamala Das, a contemporary of the above, didn’t just write direct poetry. But then, she used two languages, Malayali and English, and did not suffer the constraints of being an English teacher.    

But prose, a novel, a play, or a story, puts you out there in plain sight to a much greater extent. You have to let yourself go, open up to the recesses of your inner self and say something that matters to you. You have to be ready to be criticized, ridiculed or ignored altogether. So it is usually not what an English teacher or a Publisher, or the others in wordsmithing, so much the judge and jury already, can psychologically manage. He or she is trapped by a trained sensibility, and cannot rush in where angels fear to tread.

Some have the mortification of writing and publishing mediocre fiction that goes nowhere despite their stature and considerable promotion. But even this act takes immense courage because a reputation and an aesthetic sensibility is being staked. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours” does not come easily to someone ensconced on the other side of the table.

How many then have fought shy and not written anything at all? Some do translations. Gillon Aitken, born in Kolkata, schooled initially in Darjeeling, translated Pushkin from Russian into English – not his poetry, but Pushkin’s prose work. But the publisher and later literary agent of so many great writers including Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul, never wrote anything in his own write. Not once, throughout his long life as a man of letters.

Being too close to the subject is probably one of the problems. There is perhaps too much knowledge. What it ends up giving you is inhibition and self- consciousness, instead of insight and flow. And, strange as it may sound, the loneliness of a developed inner self that is very difficult to share.

English teachers and commissioning editors are essentially solitary, lonely people. Their marriages tend to be turbulent and often fail. Many never marry at all and don’t even have any special companions as they age. Books, films, travel, a pet, seems to take up the void instead.

These are by and large sensitive people. They nurse their hurts and betrayals. They are opinionated and headstrong. They refuse to suffer fools gladly. Often, they drink and smoke too much, these men and women of books, who don’t write themselves.

Some, amongst them have agonized, humiliating sex lives, that they seem relieved to dispense with as they age. A monkishness seems to go with the territory. A life that is spent reading and analyzing other people’s thoughts leaves little room to live, love, and create for themselves.

All the drama in the lives of English Teachers and Literary Agents tends to be of a tragic nature.  Affairs soured but never explained. Aborted aspirations. Subtle,  nuanced, hesitations.

Gillon Aitken, gentlemanly, elegant, six feet six inches tall, died in 2016, of cancer. But not before losing his estranged former wife to an untimely and accidental death from a nasty fall, and then his only child, a daughter, two days later, to a grief-fuelled drug overdose. When he died himself, a few years after from the cancer, and a cloud of constant cigarette smoke that caused it, it must have come as a blessed relief.  But just because he bore his sorrow with a dignified stoicism does not become a written statement of how he felt and not just about the hammer blows received late in his life.

Unless, one counts the piles of respectful obituaries for him - and all the others like him.

 (1,013 words)

December 10^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

Have The Big Powers Voted Modi Into A Second Term Already?

Have The Big Powers Voted Modi Into A Second Term Already?

There is little ambiguity about the stature of Narendra Modi on the world stage. The foreign gaze tends to be more detached and objective, and not just in his case.

 No doubt aware of this, approaching the end of his first five-year term, Modi  carried himself with the demeanour, deportment, and assurance of a much reelected Angela Merkel, wrong or right, at the recent G20 Summit in Argentina.

And the other heads of government - President Trump, President Putin, President Xi, Prime Minister Abe amongst them, met Modi as a familiar figure, and with the warmth reserved for an ally.

They not only appear to accept Modi in the first rank of world leaders, but take for granted that he is going to be at the helm in India till at least 2024. The two unique trilateral meetings Modi attended at the G20 underlined the strategic importance attached to India in the geopolitical order. One was with Trump and Abe, and the other with Putin and Xi.

Modi has managed, through his signature style of hugs and homespun sincerity, underpinning solid research by his foreign office teams, to befriend many who may be at loggerheads with each other.

Lest he gave the impression of grandstanding, Modi also attended a  series of bilateral meetings, and was careful to plump for a multilateral world order. And he pointed out, yet again, that the scourge of global terrorism spared no country. The new emphasis Modi laid, was on cooperating to nab fugitive economic offenders and their assets. This found its way into the final communiqué too.

All this earned him enough goodwill to shift India’s hosting of the G20 Summit to 2022, India’s 75^th year as an independent nation. This too seemed to assume that Modi would be standing at the ceremonial gate to welcome the world leaders in 2022.

Modi has been making plans and issuing deadlines, such as housing for all by 2022, from the very first year of his government in 2014. Many of his initiatives tacitly assume a decade in power to see it through. Voters too may be well-persuaded of his honesty, sincerity, drive, to give him the time to execute his transformational vision.

This Indian Prime minister has acquired the stature of a man of destiny globally, and is still astonishingly popular at home. His unbounded energy, personal charisma, patriotism, and sense of purpose, has been noted with approval in the capitals of the world. By way of contrast, the amount of domestic abuse from the Opposition that Modi seems to eat for lunch daily is recognized as a virtue, almost a personal trademark of zen-like tolerance. In a related context, Modi has also put World Yoga Day into the calendar with India as its champion.

At the same time, India has strengthened its military and technological reach. Its fledgling nuclear triad capability is a reality. An indigenous aircraft carrier will join its navy in 2020. Naval ships in addition to land batteries and aircraft are armed with Brahmos, Barak, and other of the latest missiles. There are new howitzers and field guns from America and South Korea capable of hitting targets at 30 km. Armed Predator drones are on their way from the US. The Army will soon be equipped with India manufactured AK-47s. There are bullet-proof vests and night vision goggles. A new deep-strike commando force is being readied. Fleets of new attack helicopters are on their way, from both America and Russia. A most advanced missile shield has been ordered. 

ISRO is notching up success after success in the launching of satellites of all kinds. India is preparing for manned space flight. It is making ready to mine the seas for minerals.

The difficult economic changes the Modi government has wrought  in a boisterously democratic country are admired by all. Even totalitarian USSR fell, after all, because it could not be reformed by Gorbachev.

This new Modi style can-doism is in stark contrast to an India long regarded, with wry humour, as no more than a “functioning anarchy”.

India is the fastest growing major economy in the world, and has raced up the ladder in terms of ease of doing business. The World Bank, IMF and other multilateral lending institutions are very pleased, despite opposition bids to denigrate, doubt, and belittle it.

Major economic reforms such as GST, the bankruptcy code, massive digitization, internet connectivity, empowerment of rural hinterlands, strides in alternate energy production, have all scored good marks.

There is electrification of every village. 90% of all households are now converted to cooking gas. Rural roads, micro-finance, banking of the unbanked, health insurance, direct subsidies, and the provision of livelihood, if not the requisite number of jobs, are seen as dynamic innovations. Yes, there is rural distress still, despite  acquisition floor prices for crops and guaranteed off-take, farmer loans, subsidies. But much more needs to be done to modernize rural India in term two.

However, achievements in multiple priority areas has whetted international appetite for even more modernization. Foreign governments are beginning to visualize a developed India, one finally on the road to fulfilling its potential.

India’s massive appetite for oil, technology, nuclear power, armaments, electronics, and millions of other goods and services is both lucrative and most impressive. None of the powers-that-be want to see this political dispensation destabilized. The Indian stock markets, with a significant FII presence, seems to concur. 

And going into the last months before general elections, as luck would have it, oil prices have come down, the rupee has gained strength against the US dollar, even as bilateral currency swap deals have been executed both with Iran and the UAE, both major trading partners.

Inflation and the deficits are under admirable control, and bad debt problems in banks and NBFCs are being tackled. Infrastructure development has hit new highs, connecting business hubs, rural hinterlands and strategic outer reaches. Diplomatic initiatives have avoided sanctions for India’s purchases and dealings with Iran and Russia.

Corruption and criminality are being tackled. Extradition of criminals not only brought in a key Dawood aide Chhota Rajan from Indonesia, but again now, a British middleman, Christian Michel,  from the UAE, wanted in the Augusta Westland helicopter bribery case. Fugitive business baron Vijay Mallya, sheltering in the UK, could well be next.

Even the higher judiciary and the Supreme Court, long perceived to be partial towards the Congress, has started giving decisions that favour the Modi government. It has allowed Income Tax cases against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in the National Herald case to be reopened. The government has also moved at last against Robert Vadra.

Five Exit Polls on December 7^th mostly predict a close contest in the Hindi Heartland. There is however no sweep in favour of the Congress. The BJP has managed to hold fast despite expected anti-incumbency, even though two of their chief ministerial candidates - in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, are seeking reelection for the fourth time. Rajasthan, which tends to alternate winning parties, might yet give the state once again to the incumbent Vijayraje Scindia. Telangana is likely to be retained by KCR, and tiny Mizoram may be the only state to stay with Congress.

Results of these so-called “semi-finals” will be announced on December 11^th, coinciding with the first day of the Winter Session of parliament.

In addition, the Modi government also proposes to present an unprecedented full budget instead of a traditional vote-on-account on 1^st February 2019.

Notwithstanding all this, there is a furious Opposition narrative of Modi on his last legs, about to be swept out on a wave of popular discontent. There are no jobs they cry. Farmers are dying. Statistics are fudged. This is a corrupt, communal and crony government. Institutions are being subverted.

But if  this negative sentiment fails to  deliver wins for the Congress when these assembly election results come, the prospect of even the broader Opposition reviving its fortunes in the general elections of 2019 appear bleak.

The global powers are a step ahead. India’s economy will double to $ 5 trillion before the next election in 2024, putting it ahead of all others, except the US and China.  There is no going back. And an aspirational India realizes as much.  It seems to have found the leader to take it where it wants to go.

(1,385 words)

For: The Sunday Guardian

December 7^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee

BOOK REVIEW THE WOMEN'S COURTYARD BY KHAJIDA MASTUR : TRANSLATED BY DAISY ROCKWELL

BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: THE WOMEN’S COURTYARD

AUTHOR:  KHAJIDA MASTUR-TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL URDU BY DAISY ROCKWELL. THIS TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT DAISY ROCKWELL

PUBLISHER : PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, 2018

FIRST PUBLISHED AS AANGAN IN URDU BY SANG-E-MEEL PUBLICATIONS, 1962

Feminist Cry For Independence & A Dignified Voice Against Patriarchy

This is the latest translation into English of Khajida Mastur’s poignant book on the claustrophobia felt by Islamic women restricted within the house set during the run up to and the aftermath of Partition. For page after page it builds a tension of  living in a very proscribed universe.

The ignominy of receiving word of the world outside second-hand, based on what the men might have said,  the dynamics between the women and servants in the house, their hopes, fears, frustrations and aspirations. There is the radio of course, and newspapers.

There is value in this book in terms of its relentless sociological commentary that is relevant to this day amongst the rank and file Muslim communities certainly, and even in the rigid behavior of most Khap Panchayats and other such organisations amongst the Hindus. A recent stir about Brahminical Patriarchy only underlines the issue.

Partition came after the daily struggle between Congress and the Muslim League in the backdrop of  WWII, till the British, much weakened, finally retreated in 1947. And yes, the ruling dispensations did change on thee subcontinent. This gave power to the men, excited by their emergence into independence, but did little or nothing for the situation of or attitudes towards the women, restricted still to their houses and courtyards.  

Daisy Rockwell’s rendition of the book is, as if it was written originally in English, without the awkwardness of a translation from Urdu, a much more flowery language on average.

An earlier translation by Neelam Hussain titled The Inner Courtyard, published by Kali for Women in 2001, did use a more sonorous tone that Rockwell avers was not the writing style of the original.

This version then, a retranslation, has been undertaken by her to expose Khajida Mastur’s “ spare and elegant” writing style, this time in English. In this endeavour, The Women’s Courtyard certainly succeeds even though the  restrictions of a cloistered existence seem a little dated in this age of the Internet and television.

The only men allowed into the Women’s Courtyard and house were cousins and other elderly relatives.  There is an outside room, off the courtyard, with a service door from the inside for refreshments and the like, and another, leading directly to the outside for the men who came and went.

There is a touch of Anne Frank’s restricted and secret world in this story, with suppressed romances between cousins. Frank and her family were eventually discovered in their hiding place, transported, and eliminated by the Nazis. But, in this story, there is a desolate suicide, that of the protagonist’s elder sister Tehmina, the ending of life seen by the victim, as escape from a kind of prison and a life sentence. Aliya, the heroine of the piece, sees her elder sister’s suicide however, as weakness.

Rockwell, focuses on the feminist leanings of the narrative, remarkable for the milieu and time from which it has come, and likens Mastur, like others before her, to one of the Bronte sisters.

She hastens to add, that though the Brontes too lived circumscribed and extremely short lives, they were certainly free to wander outside in the Yorkshire moors.

But Mastur,  who died at 53, said to be meek and unassuming in person, wrote with conviction on patriarchy, classism, chauvinism and misogyny. She saw them as “systemic poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically”. Additionally, Mastur points out the role of elderly women like her mother and grandmother in “perpetuating the rigid bonds of patriarchy and class hierarchy”.

Here in the Women’s Courtyard, liberation of sorts comes after the partition. Aliya, the protagonist, leaves her Indian amours, unrequited as they are, and part of her extended family behind in India. She gets a job outside, once her lower middle class family moves from somewhere in Uttar Pradesh to Pakistan. She becomes the primary breadwinner there, being educated, and is able to come and go at last.

Aliya teaches children during the day, and volunteers at a refugee camp in the evenings. But her mother waits up for her, and complains that she has become like her dead father, always focused on the outside world.

At the refugee camp, after endless years of sheltered domesticity, a well-to-do doctor proposes to Aliya. Tempted though she is at first, she turns him down. What is the point of selling my soul for secure domesticity she thinks? Her dead sister’s one time suitor Safdar appears, fortyish, after over a decade, this time in Pakistan, and proposes to her. She turns him down too. This is the ironic triumph of feminism in the Women’s Courtyard, a lonely refusal to submit to patriarchy. That it flew in the face of a sensitive woman’s natural hopes and desires was just the price that had to be paid.

 (798 words)

For: The Sunday Pioneer, AGENDA, BOOKS

November 27^th, 2018

Gautam Mukherjee