Table of contents for May 23, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The issue on leading Indian thinkers (‘Open Special 2016’, 16 May 2016) was extremely motivational and serves as an inspiration for those who want to do something substantial and meaningful with their lives. Your list of 50 brilliant Indian minds indicates how much potential there must still be out there waiting to be realised. Such unparalleled success is a question of mind over matter, and that is just what most of us need to do. We need to be able to allow our thoughts and arguments and analysis to guide our professional and personal lives. If we spend time on petty arguments and fruitless debates, we will always end up missing the forest for the trees; our focus will be on pointless matters and we…

SOON AFTER Sadiq Khan was sworn in as the first ever Muslim mayor of London, an unusual question was posed to Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for the US presidential elections. During his campaign, after last November’s terror strike on Paris, Trump had said that he would not allow Muslims to enter the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”. Trump was now asked whether Khan would be an exception to this rule. Yes, he replied. Khan, in turn, spurned the gesture and said Trump was only making the US and UK more unsafe by his ignorance of Islam, giving fodder to terrorists to woo mainstream members of the community. Racism is not something new to Khan, who was…

THE STRUGGLE OF man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. When Milan Kundera wrote this thirty-five years ago, it was an inevitable aphorism from a novelist trapped in history. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens on a cold, windy day in Prague, and standing in a balcony for a public function are two communist leaders, Klement Gottwald and Vladimir Clementis. The moment is captured in photographs as Clementis puts his hat on Gottwald’s head. When Clementis is purged later, and airbrushed out of photographs, the hat on Gottwald’s head is the only memory of his existence. The struggle of memory, though, was not an East European exceptionalism alone. It is what defines the finest fiction that came out of post-War Europe, novels in which History is…

SINCE INDEPENDENCE, almost every major defence deal initiated by India has run into a controversy. The Jeep deal of 1948 and the HDW submarine and Bofors gun deals of the 1980s are some that are often cited. By 2002, a Defence Acquisition Council had been created, and soon after, the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP), which has been revised many times over. It has clauses to keep out middlemen and to ensure the integrity of the weapons supplier (the Original Equipment Manufacturer or OEM in official parlance). But despite that, we now have the AgustaWestland scandal—which is about VVIP choppers, with the Indian Air Force and Special Protection Group involved in their purchase—which is making headlines with allegations of bribes being taken by some people in India to facilitate the deal.…

INDIA’S BROKEN TRYST Tavleen Singh HarperCollins 415 Pages | Rs 699 ‘THE PERSONAL is political,’ was the famous credo of the New Left in the late 1960s. Tavleen Singh seems to embrace it—but with a twist. While the youthful radicals of that generation sought to link their subjective experiences with wider political structures, Singh reduces all politics to her personal condition. She strikes the leitmotif of her new book upfront: ‘Bad things happened in my life and to people in my life under Sonia Gandhi’s reign.’ The enforcement directorate raided her house; the government put a halt to the Lavasa township being constructed by her partner’s firm; friends in the Congress party were asked to cut her off; her column in The Indian Express was sought to be muzzled: all…

Fireworks in the Making Could the film industry be gearing up for another messy fallout? With the release of Shah Rukh Khan’s Raees now shifted to the Republic Day weekend in 2017, the film is expected to clash with Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil, which had claimed the date earlier. It could be awkward for SRK and his good friend Hrithik Roshan who stars in Gupta’s film. Raees moved into the new year after it was pulled from its intended Eid 2016 release, where it would’ve clashed head on with the Salman Khan-starrer Sultan. Industry sources say Rakesh Roshan, who’s producing Kaabil, is not thrilled with the development. He’s said to be particularly miffed with Raees producer Ritesh Sidhwani who’s a close friend of Hrithik. “Producers and studios seek out holiday windows…

THE SELF-MADE POLITICIAN, especially of the criminal variety, is a clever resourceful person; an entrepreneur who decided early on that success and morals cannot go together and battled his way up with the understanding that so long as he continued to succeed, he would stay out of jail. It is not easy. Millions of criminals aspire to success in their crime careers; millions of politicians aspire to be become MLAs or MPs, but only a handful make it to a higher level. They are survivors with instinctive timing on when to murder someone and when to not. The son of the criminal politician, on the other hand, thinks he is everything that his parent is, but he is not. We know that Manu Sharma pulled out a gun and shot…

IN 2009, ACCORDING to WikiLeaks, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had told the then US Ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, that “the bigger threat [than Islamic terrorism] may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community.” We have no way of knowing on what basis Gandhi made this assessment, nor do we know quite what his fears were. He could perhaps have had in mind communal violence or perhaps even acts of terrorism. Then Home Minister P Chidambaram was more explicit at a gathering of intelligence experts when in 2010 he warned of the danger of “saffron terrorism”. He further pointed to “many bomb blasts of the past”, again without giving any analytical basis for his claim or furnishing data to…

AFEW YEARS AGO, a film journalist at a popular Mumbai tabloid was asked to look up the former Bollywood star Mamta Kulkarni. A popular actress of the early and mid-1990s, Kulkarni’s career had petered out as the decade progressed, until she vanished without a trace. Within film circles, as the journalist Soumaditya Banerjee discovered, there were several rumours. According to some, she had turned ascetic. Another set claimed she had married a druglord. Some said she was living in the US. According to another group, she was holed up in Dubai and running an event management firm. “She was somewhere on the planet,” he says. “That was for sure.” Banerjee pursued the assignment, even after he quit the profession and set up a film blog, Bollywood Journalist. He asked other…

YOU CAN FIND Jawaharlal Nehru on page 91 and 177 of a Class VIII Social Science textbook in Rajasthan. Make what you want to of this statement by a minister but it has further inflamed Congress party leaders in the state and elsewhere. Rajasthan is indulging in what Indian liberals consider a capital crime: re-writing history. The anger is misplaced, for what has happened is pretty normal in India. Of all the countries, it is India where wars of History—as opposed to wars in history—have been waged with almost the same intensity as the real thing. The first memorable one was 100 years after 1857 when historian SN Sen penned an ‘official’ history of the mutiny—sorry, War of Independence— removing all ‘British prejudices’ from the account. Since then, the History…

History tells us that a loophole in any tax law will be found and exploited. That is how a double taxation avoidance treaty—signed by India with Mauritius way back in 1983, much before we grew familiar with abbreviations like FII—has been used extensively to invest in and profit from Indian asset markets without paying any capital gains tax. But now the Government is amending the treaty to plug the loophole. It will end a long tradition of foreign investment through this route which even Indians make use of to duck taxes. It’s infamous for what is known as ‘roundtripping’, which involves black money from India being sent there through illegal means for reinvestment in India under a dummy name. Sceptics fear that shutting the route will turn investors away, but…

IREMEMBER HER SMILE. We had met a few times. She was very quiet, usually with a friend or two. We never talked. She studied in the same college where I pursued a mid-career course in Law. She was two years senior to me. I also have a fading memory of her during an exam. She turned up like any other student trying to revise the entire syllabus at the last minute before entering the examination hall. That’s all my memory tells me about Jishamol, the Dalit girl brutally raped, tortured and murdered at home in Perumbavoor in Kerala. Despite being in the same college for a year together, there were things I didn’t know about her. I didn’t know she was living in a single-room shack that did not even…

KIRAN MAZUMDAR-SHAW chooses candour over politeness, sides with facts, eschews hype and usually clinches the argument. It is little surprise then that the woman who helms Biocon—India’s largest research-driven biotech enterprise— was sporting enough to authorise a no-holds-barred biography by science journalist Seema Singh. Myth Breaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech (Collins Business; 324 pages; Rs 599) uses an individual’s story to tell of an industry. In an interview over the phone, while awaiting her flight back to Bengaluru after the launch in Delhi, Mazumdar-Shaw is in blistering form. She pans the Biodiversity Bill, blames activists for thwarting innovation and says it is ludicrous how scientific people are dubbed anti-national. Excerpts: In the prologue, a line reads ‘…this is the age of biology, just as the twentieth…

THE MAKING OF INDIAN DIPLOMACY: A CRITIQUE OF EUROCENTRISM By Deep K Datta-Ray Oxford University Press 380 Pages | Rs 795 IS THERE A ‘HINDU way of diplomacy’? This is the intriguing premise of Deep K Datta-Ray’s book The Making of Indian Diplomacy, which argues that the roots and wellsprings of India’s diplomatic engagement with the world are fundamentally different from those of the West. Written for a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Sussex, the book is a provocative and original, if highly debatable, contribution to a littletrodden field of academic endeavour. Dr Datta-Ray, an assistant professor at OP Jindal Global University’s School of International Affairs, points out in an early epigraph that Westerners have found it difficult to understand Indian diplomacy. ‘India is a democracy,’ observed…