Table of contents for 31 July 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Apropos Patrick French’s claim that liberalism underpinned India’s independence, he conveniently glosses over the horrendous surrender to naked communalism by the very people he lauds as liberals (‘Can the Right Be Liberal?’, July 24th, 2017). Having agreed on the division of the Subcontinent on communal lines, Indian leaders were hypocritical, valiantly trying to burnish a liberal image by not enforcing fully the underlying principle behind Partition—nay, independence. India’s liberals have followed that opportunistic approach since August 15th, 1947, as well, paying lip service to secular-Iiberal values and taking communal lines when convenient. Virendra Kapoor HIMALAYAN STANDOFF India, this time round, has given a clear indication that it will not be taken for granted anymore (‘Mind Wars, July 24th, 2017). China has been troubled by many…

THE LONG IMMINENT war between employers and domestic helps in India opened a strategic front in Noida, and, even if which way this battle is swinging is unclear, the final outcome is inevitable—the helps will win resoundingly. This is mainly because of the economic distance that new India has put between the middle-class and its labourers. The number of those who need a help (and a back-up, which is the norm) is vast and supply is reducing. Residents of Mahagun Moderne, the housing complex in Noida that has become the test case of this conflict after a maid accused of theft turned untraceable and her husband laid siege to the complex with other helps, have decided to ban 60 of those who were part of that crowd. But unless they…

SOON AFTER HE was elected Prime Minister in 2014, Narendra Modi made a speech about the need to make it easier to do business in India. He deplored the fact that it took 200 steps to open a store in our country, whereas in the US, he said, it only took six. He delivered the speech with his usual brilliance of articulation and a flair for rhetorical flourish. Then he moved on to the next event. Three years later, it still takes 200 steps to open a store in India. The episode can be used to point to the present Government’s talent for making promises it does not fulfil, or the Prime Minister’s habit of picking up and highlighting different issues but not ensuring that his diagnosis is followed up…

I STOOD ON THE Silk Road surveying the endless Gobi Desert, where sand dunes stand twenty metres tall, surrounding Tanhe Fenquixian, a man-made lake. Dunhuang is situated in an oasis. It is here that the Hans first built a Great Wall in the third century BCE, using local sand and weed, long before the better-known Ming wall of Beijing. In 1904, the explorer Sven Hedin entered the Jade Gate in Dunhuang, a sentry tower named after the jade traded in the region. It was a battlefield where the Hans fought Mongols; where traders ferried their wares on camels to and from the imperial court in Beijing; and where Indian monks brought the Buddha’s teachings. As India and China stand eyeball to eyeball in yet another stand-off, it is hard to…

THE RULER’S GAZE: A STUDY OF BRITISH RULE OVER INDIA FROM A SAIDIAN PERSPECTIVE Arvind Sharma HarperCollins 426 Pages | Rs 699 THAT THE BRITISH in India, once their motivations graduated from commerce to empire, went out of their way to denigrate the country is well known. This, after all, was integral to the construction and projection of their power; to convince themselves (and their subjects) that the prospects of the Subcontinent were hopeless without British intervention. Governor General Hastings thought the Hindu had ‘no higher intellect than a dog, and an elephant, or a monkey’, and so imperial rule was really a godsend. James Mill, who compiled damaging volumes on Indian history without condescending to actually visit the country, thought that ‘the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the…

APART FROM 1969 when Indira Gandhi made it into a proxy battle, elections for India’s President have been remarkably sedate affairs. True, there have been contests, but they have been largely symbolic. Most people would be hard put to recall the names of unsuccessful presidential candidates. Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who lost to Pratibha Patil in 2007, may be an exception because he was a former Vice President and many times Chief Minister of Rajasthan. Presidential contests are mock battles that occasionally, but very occasionally, test the political clout of the ruling formation at the Centre. In the main, however, the political class doesn’t attach too much significance to the contest. Once elected, the President becomes a symbol and is elevated to a completely ceremonial role. The individual’s past political background…

EVER SINCE THE introduction of Aadhaar as a basic identity number for individuals in India, activists have vigorously campaigned against it, claiming that it deprives citizens of their right to privacy. It is another matter that no such right, real or implied, exists under the Constitution. The matter has now reached the highest levels of judicial decision-making. A nine-judge bench will adjudicate on whether the right to privacy is a fundamental right. This subsidiary issue has been referred to it by the earlier one that is hearing the challenge against Aadhaar. Historically, the apex court has not entertained this claim. In two early cases, dating to 1954 and 1962, it expressly ruled out privacy as a fundamental right. This, even as it agreed that privacy was a common-law right. There…

Jokes tend to offend some people. The Santa Banta series, for example, upset some Sikhs enough to go to court asking for a ban on such humour. Liberals are often at the forefront of freedom of expression rallies, except when it pinches their own ideology or icons. And thus the outrage on social networking sites over Karan Johar, Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan making a joke about nepotism and Kangana Ranaut at the recent IIFA awards show in New York. The actors chanted that ‘nepotism rocks’ in response to Kangana publicly accusing Johar of promoting favouritism in the industry on his TV show. Thankfully, she herself responded with wit to the IIFA jibe in a public statement. That is the appropriate way to head off a joke, not angry…

Pioneering a state engrossing movement with the sole intention to bring the administrators and the citizens closer, the statewide Suraj Abhiyaan was conceptualized and launched in the year 2005. Later it was renamed as Gram Suraj which was a village centric campaign, post which it evolved into Nagar Suraj focusing on the Urban Pockets. Finally it developed and took the shape of Lok Suraj as it covered rural as well as urban areas. Delving into the factors that maneuvered the ‘Lok Suraj Abhiyaan’, foremost among them was to mobilize all levels of government and bring them closer to people, establishing a certain level of transparency. For 2 entire months, everyone, from the Chief Minister to the Sarpanch, and from the Chief Secretary to the Panchayat Secretary, interact directly with the…

ON JUNE 23RD, 2017, when the 71-year-old Ram Nath Kovind filed his nomination for the presidential poll, it was perhaps one of the many unexpected turns in his 40-yearold career as a lawyer, politician and, lately, state governor. In the days that followed, two themes dominated stories and commentaries on the man, both in India and abroad. The foreign press displayed an overt interest in his Dalit background and how Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP had shrewdly used him as a symbol for securing a political advantage. Domestically, the emphasis was on his RSS background, with bits and pieces about his being an ‘unknown’ person and some sundry stuff rounding it all off. These polarities illustrated the man and his persona. In contrast to what has been written…

NOT ONLY WAS V Ramesh early for the time, he had been warned by well-wishers that he was early for the time. In the beginning of 2008, the then CEO of the financial services company Prabhudas Lilladher went to Barcelona and saw the use of public bikes in large numbers for commuting. He saw an opportunity to start such a system in India. There was a large commuter population that could be serviced and it was good for the environment, a factor that could interest the Government and corporates to sign up as partners. By the end of the year, he had quit his job and registered his company, and the following January, got Fremo, as he had named the venture, rolling in Thane, a northeast suburb of Mumbai. In…

A WARM WASH of applause on Centre Court. Laughter and tears. Drops of rain. A rainbow over a bed of grass. Hirsute hands holding a trophy of gold. The trophy caught between a glint of sunshine and the elongated reflection of a face. Roger Federer’s kissing face. A fading imprint of lips on gold, like an afterthought. More drops of rain. More applause. More laughter. More tears. Some sunshine. This immaculate Wimbledon moment, perhaps the most immaculate moment in all of tennis, was also an epiphany. It occurred to me that Federer’s greatest achievement this year is not this Wimbledon title, his eighth, one that sets him apart from any other man who walked this earth. Neither was it his improbable run at the Australian Open, where he won his…

ISLANDS IN FLUX Pankaj Sekhsaria HarperCollins 268 Pages | Rs 399 PANKAJ SEKHSARIA HAS been writing about the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the mainstream media for years now and in this book presents a collection of those articles—and a couple of academic papers. Put together, these provide the lay reader with a bird’s eye view of the state of affairs in these exotic and beautiful (and often marginalised) islands: the picture that emerges, alas, is often not pretty at all. The book has been excellently organised with section headings dealing with different issues and aspects. Setting the Context’ does exactly that, giving us a background picture of what had been happening on the islands, followed by the legal cases involving various issues (like logging and the treatment of tribals).…

Blindsided by the Competition Months ago I’d reported in this very column that two filmmakers had been scripting a similar project about prison inmates who start a music band. Nikhil Advani had commissioned his former assistant Ranjit Tiwari to take over the directorial reins of Lucknow Central, loosely based on the true story of a convict serving life imprisonment for murder, who finds his calling in music. Elsewhere—or at Yash Raj Films, to be specific—Ishaqzaade and Daawat-e-Ishq writer-director Habib Faisal was developing the same idea. When Lucknow Central quickly went on the floors with Farhan Akhtar cast as the Bhojpuri convict in its central role, it seemed as if the rival project had been shelved. After all, how many films do we need about hardened criminalsturned- musicians who hatch an…

IT’S LIKE READING Dostoevsky on a bad summer day. There are so many tormented souls out there caught in a morality play. Its emotional intensity is only matched by the inevitability of the questions it raises about country, religion, power, and retribution. It’s big, shapeless, chaotic, and in the end, a rewarding experience of the imagination. But then, you’re not reading the Great Russian. You’re living in, dare I say, a creative phase of politics. Rich in ideas and arguments, intense in its interplay of passions, nuanced in its undertones of morality and ethics, and ambitious in its pursuit of freedom, politics today, as a genre in creativity, is as good as the original works in other realms of the human mind, be it fiction or philosophy. A sign of…

WHEN JANE AUSTEN’S first novel Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, the title page simply read, ‘A Novel. In Three Volumes. By a Lady’. What could be greater justice than the fact that on her 200th death anniversary, that same anonymous lady gets her very own bank note? Austen is only the third writer to grace an English note (following William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens) and the first woman writer to do so. And really, no one can grudge her the honour. (One can hope that Virginia Woolf might similarly be commemorated in the future.) When Austen died at 41, on June 18th, 1817, her profession as a writer did not make it to her epitaph. Her brother Henry chose instead to focus on her ‘charity, devotion, faith and…

WESTERNERS AND SOME Indians remain intrigued by the ‘caste system’, so I will doubtless disappoint many when I say that no such system exists. The category of caste was contested by India’s nationalist leaders in the hope it would fade, and caste discrimination, especially the practice of ‘untouchability’, was outlawed in the Constitution of India (1950). It is now reinforced by the state, which addresses it in order to enact policies of positive discrimination, known as ‘reservations’. India’s BJP Government has nominated a Dalit as its presidential candidate, once again foregrounding issues of caste and politics in the national debate. This reminds me of the virtual absence of caste references in Hindi cinema, or at least mainstream commercial cinema. Perhaps it is viewed as pre-modern, or even anti-national, but it…

• After 11 years of hard work and 13 tenders issues repeatedly, the Shabri River Bridge was finally opened for the public in Sukma District. From Dornapal in Chhattisgarh to Podia in Odisha, the bridge will connect Chhattisgarh and Odisha like never before. This will contribute in bringing people closer and promote culture and trade between the two states. The bridge is significant as it strikingly reduces the distance between Chhattisgarh and Podia in Odisha from 120km to 3km. • With students of DAV Prime Minister Adarsh Vidyalaya, Bijapur District. Such visits to schools followed by interactions with students, teachers and the Principal regarding curriculum, facilities, etc. keeps the morale of the state youth up, and helps in identification of those areas in education that can be worked upon and…

ON THE EVENING OF July 18th, Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu received a call from Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, who was in Kashmir at the time. It had been an emotional day for the 68-year-old parliamentarian. He had wept before his colleagues after formally stepping down from all political positions, including his primary membership of the BJP. For someone who had lost his biological mother at the age of 18 months in an attack by a buffalo, Naidu had been associated with the RSS for the past 49 years and had often said that it was the Sangh that had mothered him since childhood and groomed him into a full-fledged politician. The snapping of the umbilical cord was only a formality expected of a man who would be the Vice-President of…

MONEY CAN BUY a great many things: a BMW, a Manish Malhotra sari and a replica of the Sistine Chapel in your living room—and with these earthly pleasures, a dose of accompanying anxiety. In Diksha Basu’s new novel, The Windfall (Bloomsbury; 304 pages; Rs 499), the characters pad about effulgent in their halo of wealth. But the insulation provides little comfort from the insecurities that the riches bring in their wake. First-world problems that the Delhi elite face include: why isn’t the security guard wearing his hat? How do you casually intimate your neighbours you will be travelling by business class? Should one throw a puja party at home? At the heart of the novel are the Jhas, an east Delhi-based family who suddenly have the luxury of pondering over…

HONIARA, IN THE Solomon Islands, is the armpit of the Pacific, just as Paul Theroux thought it to be. Port Vila has a certain rustic elegance to it, Apia is clean and tidy, and Port Moresby is a bustling megapolis of unemployed youth. Honiara is only a row of shacks peopled by a desperate youth of indescribable poverty. There is poverty in India, in Africa and in Latin America, but there was certain desperation in Honiara that made my companion Kalie think of Haiti. “Dese people, them pore, maan,” he drawled shaking his head slowly in a bowed, defeated way, “Boy, dese people, them pore.” Kalie was still small-island Caribbean at heart despite his newly minted blue American passport. There might come a time, as I have found with immigrants…