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The just announced results of the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, and four other states of the Indian union immediately brought to my mind the title of a book of essays written by Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-British author and journalist, after his travels to India and Japan in 1959. The book titled “The Lotus and the Robot” primarily explored Eastern mysticism, through the practices of yoga and Zen. The book was promptly banned in India by the authorities then in power.
Koestler was a political activist, having lived through perhaps the most turbulent period of European history. He was thirteen years old when the First World War ended in 1918 that saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the Tsarist Russian empires. As a German-speaking Jew in Europe, the period between the First and the Second World Wars was perhaps the most stifling time for a writer of his talents. Educated in Austria, he joined the German Communist Party, but was soon disillusioned by the state of terror unleashed by Stalin. He resigned from the Party in 1938, having closely witnessed another facet of totalitarianism in Franco’s Spain, and immigrated to England. In 1940, he published “Darkness at Noon”, a novel that is as strong an indictment of totalitarianism as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four”.
Koestler’s terrific sense of phraseology has resulted in some very catchy titles that adorn his writings. Apart from the two titles mentioned above, he also wrote: “The Yogi and the Commissar”, “The Ghost in the Machine”, “Thieves in the Night”, “Arrival and Departure”, and “The Age of Longing”, besides several other works of fiction and non-fiction.
The end of the Janata Party experiment in 1979 that brought back the Congress party to power under the total control and command of Indira Gandhi also saw the morphing of the old Jana Sangha into the BJP, replacing its symbol of a lighted lamp with a lotus flower in bloom.
Indira Gandhi systematically dismantled the structure of the old party by concentrating absolute power in her hands, and forcing the state legislatures to (s)elect her nominees as their leaders. Each Chief Minister was nominated by her, and the party had no say in the matter. Inner-party democracy disappeared and the space vacated by dedicated Congressmen was quickly filled by sycophants and flatterers. Dissent was promptly suppressed and chosen commissars were unleashed upon those who dared to differ. They were heckled and hounded out of the party by being dubbed as “CIA agents” or as anti-nationals. The “court jester” of a Congress President, Deb Kant Borooah completed the transformation of the once grand old party to a fascist dispensation when he said that “Indira is India, and India is Indira”. With Indira Gandhi at the top of the pyramid, the rest of the structure consisted of automatons that were programmed to utter only such sentiments.
The crumbling of the Janata Party that was brought about by the socialists within it who took objection to the Jana Sangha members retaining their membership of the RSS, resulted in the formation of small, left-leaning, regional, parties, while the Jana Sangha rechristened itself as the BJP. The blooming lotus, so sacred to its Hindu followers, replaced the lighted lamp as its symbol. Other sectarian parties soon appeared on the scene. The political landscape of the country had completely changed from the days of Nehru in the first flush of Independence, when people voted without such considerations as caste or creed. Vote-bank politics, that was largely absent till 1979, raised its head, as political parties vied for power on narrow regional, sectarian, class and caste calculations. Punjab was the first state to burn in this conflagration.
The actions of the two Sikh bodyguards of Indira Gandhi, in 1984, would have very far reaching ramifications. Coincidentally, it was the year that George Orwell had chosen for his ‘futuristic’ depiction of a dystopic state at its peak of power and repression. The resultant retribution that the automatons and their mindless legions visited upon the hapless Sikh community has been recorded in great detail, and it is not my purpose to revisit those terrible times. Within less than a generation after the dismemberment of the Indian subcontinent, India was once again descending into religious fratricide, dividing the nation into smaller constituents like Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs etc., and into even smaller fragments along sect, caste, and class; each constituent ready to spring at the throat of the other at the slightest provocation.
This is the state of affairs that has continued from that fateful year in 1979 when the Lotus and the Robot have been contending for political control of the centre. The automatons of the Congress have systematically hounded out all potential threats to the First Family, and have brought the party down to such farcical levels that the best it could field in the recent UP elections was a robot from Star Wars, known to the people who saw that film, as R2D2. This is nothing but a code name given to the Rahul-Digvijay combination that was fielded by Sonia Gandhi to decimate the vote bank of Mayawati, the elephant queen. That a plebeian medium of transport, represented by a bicycle, would be the runaway winner had not even entered the calculations of the ruling party at the centre. Mulayam was not in good health, and his son Akhilesh did not have the good fortune of being born in the Nehru-Gandhi family. The D part of R2D2 felt bold enough to declare that his party would win at least 100 seats, and was ready to wager a crate of imported Scorch whisky to back his claim. (Of course these Rajas are not expected to know that an Indian Single Malt Whisky, known as Amrut, is considered by some experts as one of the three top single malts in the world),
Indira Gandhi started the emasculation of the Congress party and gradually replaced the human elements with mechanical robots, trained only to genuflect to the ruling Deity, and to open their mouths only to stifle dissent and to sing paeans in praise of the First family. The same policy was followed by her son, and perfected by her daughter-in-law. The selection of Manmohan Singh, as the Chief Robot, in 2004, displays a remarkable understanding of character by the puppet-mistress. Singh has been unique in letting opprobrium upon opprobrium to wash off his duck back, day in and day out, for eight years, and still continues to crawl when asked only to bend. He is the closest to Orwell’s Winston Smith after having been “treated” by O’Brien and his colleagues, and brought round to see the “light”.
Meanwhile, the lotus, after the departure of Vajpayee from the scene, has been unable to raise its head above the mud. L. K. Advani, with his penchant to go on rath yatras on makeshift automobiles, in search of an utopian Ram Rajya, looks more and more like Cervantes’ Knight of the Sour Countenance, while his corpulent sidekick would make for an admirable Sancho Panza. Tilting at imaginary windmills, this Don has made his party a laughing stock, thereby destroying any chances of it becoming a serious contender for power in any state, let alone the centre.
“The people who must never have power are the humourless”. This is what Christopher Hitchens wrote in June 2011, shortly before his untimely death. Can you imagine a more humourless bunch than Sonia Gandhi, her son R2, and the Chief Robot, Manmohan Singh? Add the visages of Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Pranab Mukherji, A. K. Antony, D2, and the entire cabinet, and you will be seeing perhaps the most humourless faces in one group in history. To quote Hitchens once more: these are the kind of people who are “secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe…those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental.”
We must be grateful that the general public is no longer swayed by these interlopers and has learnt to use its vote with deliberate discretion and careful consideration.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
INDIA AND PAKISTAN ON A PRECIPICE
Karamat Ghori, the ex-Diplomat from Pakistan has been writing some really explosive columns that have been carried in India by The New Indian Express. His views are very refreshing when compared with the other columnists from both sides of the great Indian divide. I admire him for the courage of his convictions, and the forthright manner in which he sets out his opinions without bothering about the egos that he would be hurting. His writing makes it obvious that the opinions expressed by him are his own and that he is not representing an individual or group that have another kind of a hidden agenda. Unfortunately, most of our columnists have a personal agenda which they are unable to hide, however hard they may try, and however impartial they may wish to be seen as. The powerful political-industrial bloc has infiltrated the media completely and, in most cases, seems to have acquired ownership of media houses, though not overtly. The havoc this influence has wreaked on governance is now becoming all too apparent to the educated middle class, and that is one reason why a simple villager like Anna Hazare could launch a mass movement with such great success.
The fact that this movement has hardly made any difference to the ground reality, and will eventually fizzle out and die, has a lot to do with the kind of Constitution we were given by our leaders after independence. Under the magnetic spell of the larger-than-life, and undoubtedly patriotic leadership of the Indian National Congress and the leaders of the other political parties, we adopted a Constitution that did not provide for any safeguards against the kind of fractured mandates we have been having, that has perpetrated the tyranny of political parties getting less than half the votes and yet controlling the Parliament and the assemblies, through convenient, opportunistic alliances with splinter groups who have won elections through fraud, intimidation, bribery, and through appeals to base sentiments aroused by caste, creed, and language. Our Constitution did not foresee that within less than a quarter-century, political leadership would pass into the hands of corrupt and criminal elements that would use the same Constitution to subvert each and every institution, including the Parliament and the state assemblies, as also the Armed Forces, the judiciary, the educational infrastructure, and the fifth estate. Anna Hazare's call for satyagraha against corruption was called unconstitutional by these same elements that sat pompously in television studios and poured invective on the poor man and his movement. All manner of dirt was tried to be unearthed, and when that failed, half-truths were dressed up as Holy Scripture and a complicit media was ever-willing to give them the maximum space. By the time the poor man came to Mumbai for his fast in December, the movement had been dissipated by sheer inertia and doubt that anything worthwhile would actually be achieved by these means. One by one the culprits who had been jailed under the first flush of Anna's movement were coming out on bail; and to top them all, Suresh Kalmadi, the chief CWG conspirator and his close associates also managed to get bail this week. The CBI, which is handling the prosecution in all these cases, will ensure that they become as protracted as possible, maybe for decades, and the courts will keep on granting adjournments after adjournments on the flimsiest of grounds. Public memory, being proverbially short, will do the rest. These men will never see the inside of a jail again, and will continue to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth. Our Constitution even allows them to fight elections since they have not been sentenced, and as long as they remain under trial, they are to be treated as equal citizens.
According to Karamat Ghori, Pakistan too finds itself in a similar precarious position, (see “Pakistan at a Precipice” TNIE of January 20th). He finds similar subversive forces are active and in power within that country. Unfortunately, the partition of 1947 did much more damage to the subcontinent than what would have been had it been only a political partition. The two-nation theory, based solely on religion, let loose a Pandora's Box of other divisive theories, and we may not yet have seen the final denouement of that ill-conceived decision. Pakistan, ostensibly was thought to be a home for the Muslims of the subcontinent, but look where it has landed? It is fractured into myriad fragments based on sect, language, culture, wealth or the absence of it. Economic power has been arrogated by the landed robber-barons of the Punjab or Sind, while political power has largely remained with the armed forces who continue to dominate the country whether in their barracks or outside. The common man has remained outside this charmed circle of English-speaking, power-broking elite, largely uneducated and illiterate. He has become easy prey to the ranting of the fundamentalists who have exploited his fear of a retributive Allah and made him a willing tool in their hands. The originally conceived secular state of Pakistan has ended up as the epicentre of global jihadi terrorism that threatens to make this land into another stone-age civilization, much like what the Taliban regime did to Afghanistan. The final paragraph of his column that says that the country remains "perilously poised on a knife's edge, and its people bemused, perplexed and harassed out of their wits" is too simplistic an analysis of the situation obtaining now in Pakistan. The only people who are in this frame of mind are a minuscule minority consisting of a few intellectuals like him; unfortunately too small in number to make any difference. They vent their frustrations through their writings, just like people like me do here.
The problem with Pakistan is that it allowed a religion to dominate its very existence. Its visceral hatred for India, a whole from which it had been wrenched apart, dictated its response to economic and political challenges, and never allowed the state to grow and develop into a healthy nation. Today the same religion has become a hydra-headed monster ready to devour the very entity that it had created. Its obsession with India drove it to spend enormous sums of scarce money on military hardware, nuclear technology, and on other totally wasteful adventures. It sought to make friends with China, who have their eyes on Pakistan like they had on Tibet. The Karakoram Highway is a case in point. Whom does this road benefit? Pakistan must ask itself this question. What kind of tourist and goods traffic does it carry from Pakistan to China? On the other hand, does it not present an all-weather, highly secure road for the Chinese to move men and troops into Pakistan at any time? The perplexed, bemused and harassed people are not making any difference to the way the country is being governed. The large, illiterate mass has no feeling that they are sitting on a precipice. They have been too deeply inoculated by the hate-India virus, and are easily deflected into religious frenzy by their mullahs and madrasas.
The other problem with Pakistan is that it identifies itself not as a part of a geographical entity that the Indian subcontinent is, but as a part of an ummah that is light years away from it in its history, culture, language and ethos. There is, therefore, a deliberate attempt at the obliteration of the historical and cultural heritage of Pakistan, while substituting it with a false, imported culture of the Arab lands. The conflict between these two histories and cultures is tearing the society apart at its seams, leaving behind a totally confused, amorphous mass unable to comprehend its future in the light of an imposed history and culture. The brilliant Japanese writer Murakami, in his magnum opus "IQ84" observes that "our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves". This is exactly what has been happening to the people of Pakistan.
India, on the other hand, in the single-minded pursuit of the American dream of wealth and material possessions, too has forgotten its great cultural and spiritual history. The middle classes have become armchair critics, discussing the rot that has set into our systems over a glass of imported Scotch whiskey, while even unwilling to make the effort of casting their votes. Their apathy has allowed the political parties to get criminal and unsocial elements elected to the legislatures, with the consequences that we are seeing now. We know how much damage the Congress party has done to the country, and we also know that enormous sums of looted wealth are lying in banks abroad, yet we are unable to maintain collective pressure on the politicians and put them where they truly belong. That Rajiv Gandhi's widow continues to hold a nation of over one billion people to ransom, and continues to influence every arm of Indian governance, is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this apathy. She is not even of Indian origin, yet by using the Gandhi surname, she is able to fool the gullible masses. It is a matter of the deepest shame that India's malnutrition figures are perhaps the worst in the world, far higher than sub-Saharan Africa. Daily revelations of one scam after another have become routine. The administration is only engaged in fire-fighting and has no time for governance.
India and Pakistan today are at a crossroads. The Bhutto legacy carried through Benazir and now through her widower is carrying Pakistan to the brink of the precipice. Indira Gandhi's legacy, carried through her son, and now by his widow, continues to erode whatever values that might have survived after the first twenty-five years of independence. The view from the brink is most disheartening. Pakistan and India both have no credible leadership alternatives in sight. Imran Khan lately has been drawing large crowds. But I think he will be like another Benazir, completely disconnected from the common people of the land. He cannot even speak proper Urdu or Punjabi, and is more comfortable speaking in English. The main opposition party in India, the BJP also has no leader who can move the apathetic middle classes. The personal ambitions of people like Advani are not allowing younger and more capable individuals to rise and take up the challenge. The Left has become completely irrelevant and its current leadership can only be described as 'pathetic'. The other political parties are nothing but private militias and gangs with dynastic leadership patterns, and behave more like the dacoits of an earlier era.
The future, I am afraid, does not augur well for both our countries. It is therefore important that voices of people like Karamat Ghori continue to be articulated, and the message disseminated far and wide. In the darkness that will come, these voices will be the only beacons that may show the light to the bewildered masses.
The fact that this movement has hardly made any difference to the ground reality, and will eventually fizzle out and die, has a lot to do with the kind of Constitution we were given by our leaders after independence. Under the magnetic spell of the larger-than-life, and undoubtedly patriotic leadership of the Indian National Congress and the leaders of the other political parties, we adopted a Constitution that did not provide for any safeguards against the kind of fractured mandates we have been having, that has perpetrated the tyranny of political parties getting less than half the votes and yet controlling the Parliament and the assemblies, through convenient, opportunistic alliances with splinter groups who have won elections through fraud, intimidation, bribery, and through appeals to base sentiments aroused by caste, creed, and language. Our Constitution did not foresee that within less than a quarter-century, political leadership would pass into the hands of corrupt and criminal elements that would use the same Constitution to subvert each and every institution, including the Parliament and the state assemblies, as also the Armed Forces, the judiciary, the educational infrastructure, and the fifth estate. Anna Hazare's call for satyagraha against corruption was called unconstitutional by these same elements that sat pompously in television studios and poured invective on the poor man and his movement. All manner of dirt was tried to be unearthed, and when that failed, half-truths were dressed up as Holy Scripture and a complicit media was ever-willing to give them the maximum space. By the time the poor man came to Mumbai for his fast in December, the movement had been dissipated by sheer inertia and doubt that anything worthwhile would actually be achieved by these means. One by one the culprits who had been jailed under the first flush of Anna's movement were coming out on bail; and to top them all, Suresh Kalmadi, the chief CWG conspirator and his close associates also managed to get bail this week. The CBI, which is handling the prosecution in all these cases, will ensure that they become as protracted as possible, maybe for decades, and the courts will keep on granting adjournments after adjournments on the flimsiest of grounds. Public memory, being proverbially short, will do the rest. These men will never see the inside of a jail again, and will continue to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth. Our Constitution even allows them to fight elections since they have not been sentenced, and as long as they remain under trial, they are to be treated as equal citizens.
According to Karamat Ghori, Pakistan too finds itself in a similar precarious position, (see “Pakistan at a Precipice” TNIE of January 20th). He finds similar subversive forces are active and in power within that country. Unfortunately, the partition of 1947 did much more damage to the subcontinent than what would have been had it been only a political partition. The two-nation theory, based solely on religion, let loose a Pandora's Box of other divisive theories, and we may not yet have seen the final denouement of that ill-conceived decision. Pakistan, ostensibly was thought to be a home for the Muslims of the subcontinent, but look where it has landed? It is fractured into myriad fragments based on sect, language, culture, wealth or the absence of it. Economic power has been arrogated by the landed robber-barons of the Punjab or Sind, while political power has largely remained with the armed forces who continue to dominate the country whether in their barracks or outside. The common man has remained outside this charmed circle of English-speaking, power-broking elite, largely uneducated and illiterate. He has become easy prey to the ranting of the fundamentalists who have exploited his fear of a retributive Allah and made him a willing tool in their hands. The originally conceived secular state of Pakistan has ended up as the epicentre of global jihadi terrorism that threatens to make this land into another stone-age civilization, much like what the Taliban regime did to Afghanistan. The final paragraph of his column that says that the country remains "perilously poised on a knife's edge, and its people bemused, perplexed and harassed out of their wits" is too simplistic an analysis of the situation obtaining now in Pakistan. The only people who are in this frame of mind are a minuscule minority consisting of a few intellectuals like him; unfortunately too small in number to make any difference. They vent their frustrations through their writings, just like people like me do here.
The problem with Pakistan is that it allowed a religion to dominate its very existence. Its visceral hatred for India, a whole from which it had been wrenched apart, dictated its response to economic and political challenges, and never allowed the state to grow and develop into a healthy nation. Today the same religion has become a hydra-headed monster ready to devour the very entity that it had created. Its obsession with India drove it to spend enormous sums of scarce money on military hardware, nuclear technology, and on other totally wasteful adventures. It sought to make friends with China, who have their eyes on Pakistan like they had on Tibet. The Karakoram Highway is a case in point. Whom does this road benefit? Pakistan must ask itself this question. What kind of tourist and goods traffic does it carry from Pakistan to China? On the other hand, does it not present an all-weather, highly secure road for the Chinese to move men and troops into Pakistan at any time? The perplexed, bemused and harassed people are not making any difference to the way the country is being governed. The large, illiterate mass has no feeling that they are sitting on a precipice. They have been too deeply inoculated by the hate-India virus, and are easily deflected into religious frenzy by their mullahs and madrasas.
The other problem with Pakistan is that it identifies itself not as a part of a geographical entity that the Indian subcontinent is, but as a part of an ummah that is light years away from it in its history, culture, language and ethos. There is, therefore, a deliberate attempt at the obliteration of the historical and cultural heritage of Pakistan, while substituting it with a false, imported culture of the Arab lands. The conflict between these two histories and cultures is tearing the society apart at its seams, leaving behind a totally confused, amorphous mass unable to comprehend its future in the light of an imposed history and culture. The brilliant Japanese writer Murakami, in his magnum opus "IQ84" observes that "our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves". This is exactly what has been happening to the people of Pakistan.
India, on the other hand, in the single-minded pursuit of the American dream of wealth and material possessions, too has forgotten its great cultural and spiritual history. The middle classes have become armchair critics, discussing the rot that has set into our systems over a glass of imported Scotch whiskey, while even unwilling to make the effort of casting their votes. Their apathy has allowed the political parties to get criminal and unsocial elements elected to the legislatures, with the consequences that we are seeing now. We know how much damage the Congress party has done to the country, and we also know that enormous sums of looted wealth are lying in banks abroad, yet we are unable to maintain collective pressure on the politicians and put them where they truly belong. That Rajiv Gandhi's widow continues to hold a nation of over one billion people to ransom, and continues to influence every arm of Indian governance, is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this apathy. She is not even of Indian origin, yet by using the Gandhi surname, she is able to fool the gullible masses. It is a matter of the deepest shame that India's malnutrition figures are perhaps the worst in the world, far higher than sub-Saharan Africa. Daily revelations of one scam after another have become routine. The administration is only engaged in fire-fighting and has no time for governance.
India and Pakistan today are at a crossroads. The Bhutto legacy carried through Benazir and now through her widower is carrying Pakistan to the brink of the precipice. Indira Gandhi's legacy, carried through her son, and now by his widow, continues to erode whatever values that might have survived after the first twenty-five years of independence. The view from the brink is most disheartening. Pakistan and India both have no credible leadership alternatives in sight. Imran Khan lately has been drawing large crowds. But I think he will be like another Benazir, completely disconnected from the common people of the land. He cannot even speak proper Urdu or Punjabi, and is more comfortable speaking in English. The main opposition party in India, the BJP also has no leader who can move the apathetic middle classes. The personal ambitions of people like Advani are not allowing younger and more capable individuals to rise and take up the challenge. The Left has become completely irrelevant and its current leadership can only be described as 'pathetic'. The other political parties are nothing but private militias and gangs with dynastic leadership patterns, and behave more like the dacoits of an earlier era.
The future, I am afraid, does not augur well for both our countries. It is therefore important that voices of people like Karamat Ghori continue to be articulated, and the message disseminated far and wide. In the darkness that will come, these voices will be the only beacons that may show the light to the bewildered masses.
Monday, September 26, 2011
MY TRIBUTE TO MANSUR ALI KHAN, THE TRUE NAWAB OF CRICKET
If statistics were the true measure of greatness, then Mansur Ali Khan, the late Nawab of Pataudi, would never be counted among the all-time greats of Indian cricket. With a batting average in the mid-30’s he would rank amidst a host of lesser known names, and by now would have been completely forgotten. The likes of Chandu Borde, Pankaj Roy, and Farook Engineer, who ended their careers with similar figures, and who were his contemporaries, are mainly remembered in old black-and-white photographs on the walls of the Madras Cricket Club, and similar cricket stadia in the country. Of course, there are still some people around who can tell you about the heroic batting of Borde in the Delhi Test in Feb. 1959 against a rampaging West Indian fast bowling attack led by Wesley Hall and Roy Gilchrist, two of the most fearsome new ball bowlers the world had ever seen. Those were the days when the only defensive weapon the batsmen had was their cricket bat. Helmets were unknown, protective shin pads and gloves were of a mediocre quality, and there were no arm and chest guards. There were no restrictions on the number of bouncers a bowler could send down in an over, and the front-foot no ball rule had not been introduced. Borde scored 109 and 96 in that match and helped India earn an honourable draw. Earlier, Pankaj Roy had scored 90 in the second innings of the first test in Bombay, to help India begin the series with a draw.
The flamboyant wicket-keeper-batsman Farook Engineer broke into the Indian side in the 1960’s and I will never forget that special innings of his against the West Indies on 13th Jan.1967 when he scored 109 runs while opening the Indian batting. Against a bowling attack consisting of Wesley Hall, Charlie Griffith, Gary Sobers and Lance Gibbs, Engineer had raced to 94 or 96, I am not quite sure, and was just a boundary away from scoring a century before lunch; a feat that had, till then, only been achieved by the great Don! Chandu Borde scored 125 and 49 in the same Test. India drew the match but it had already lost the series before that.
No, I would not need the help of statistics to keep the memory of Tiger Pataudi fresh in my mind. I saw him but just a couple of times. Cricket was not a TV sport then, and most of us followed the game on radio. There were a few good cricket commentators in India like Chakrapani, Pearson Surita, and Berry Sarbadhikari, who would bring the game live to the followers. Roadside pan shops and dhabas would keep their radios tuned to the cricket commentary, and some of them would even maintain a live scorecard on a blackboard outside their establishments. The excitement of the cricket ground was faithfully conveyed to the listening crowd as every stroke and wicket was described in exciting detail by the commentators. I remember Vizzy once describing a late cut executed by the Australian batsman Norman O’Neill, as a stroke that was played “so late, so posthumously, that one wouldn’t mind going to the next world to see such a shot being played!” What a beautiful way of describing a cricketing shot!
Pataudi had begun his career brilliantly for India, scoring a century in the second Test he played for the country. The commentators were in raptures about his batting style. But what had caught their imagination most was his fielding. He prowled the cover region like the striped golden pride of Bengal and was equally effective in the mid-wicket area. His presence was enough to make opposite batsmen think twice before attempting a run. There was something languidly alert about his manner that made batsmen more cautious of stealing a run from him. His stance was easy and loose-limbed. There was no tightness on view. This gave him ample time to change direction and swoop on the ball on either side of his patrolling area. His catching was just as good as his ground fielding. When at the crease he brought the same feline grace to his batting stance and was perhaps the best player of the short-arm pull the game has seen.
When I saw him bat he had already lost one eye and had adapted his stance to compensate for this terrible handicap. He would face the ball square, which made for some difficulty in playing on the off side. But he had lost none of his ability on the on side. In the 1964 India-England series, he made 203 not out in the second innings of the 4th Test played in Delhi. I was one of those fortunate people who witnessed the action live on all five days. First it was Hanumant Singh who notched up a century on debut, but a superb century by Colin Cowdrey had helped England to a handsome lead of 107 runs. Budhi Kunderan and M. L. Jaisimha ensured a good start to the second innings. When Pataudi came in to bat at no. 4, the deficit had still not been wiped out. The Nawab, in the company of Kunderan, put on 65 runs on the 4th day, himself being unbeaten on 31 at the close of play. On the fifth and final day, Pataudi treated the crowd to an amazing display of classic batsmanship. He was 116 at tea, having added 85 runs in two sessions of two hours each. In the final session of one-and-a-half hours only (the duration those days of the last session of each day’s play in a Test match) he added 87 runs to his score and when play was called off he had scored a double-century (at that time the highest individual score by an Indian against England). If my memory serves me right, the contribution of Chandu Borde, the other batsman at the crease, was just 4 runs. The pull shot off John Mortimore, with which he scored his second hundred, was so brilliantly executed that one would not have minded going to the next world to see it.
The second time I saw him was on the Delhi University cricket ground. I am not sure of the date or year but it had to be in 1964 or 1965. Conrad Hunte, the great West Indian opening batsman, had retired from international cricket. A committed Christian, Hunte in 1961, on the West Indies' tour of Australia, saw the film The Crowning Experience, about the life of the black American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune. The film was promoted by Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a multi-faith organization promoting absolute moral and ethical standards of behavior. Hunte committed the remainder of his life to this association. While in India on behalf of MRA, Hunte had assembled a cricket team and a friendly match was organized against a University side. Pataudi turned up for the University and one could see his astonishing fielding abilities from very close. I do not remember seeing him bat in that friendly, but his presence in the field was absolutely electric.
Although I never saw him again in the flesh, the memory of the Delhi Test remained fresh in my mind. I continued to follow his career until he retired from the game in 1976. Vijay Merchant had put a brake in his Test career. As Chairman of Selectors, Merchant had not liked the no-nonsense attitude of the Nawab. When, as the captain, Pataudi lost the toss in a Test match, Merchant apparently said to him that having lost the toss, the team would lose the Test too. Pataudi, it is said, replied that in that case there was no need to actually go through the motions of playing the match, and the visiting team could be declared the winners. The Chairman was not pleased with this effrontery, and when the time came to choose the Captain for the 1971 tour of the West Indies, he used his casting vote against Pataudi and in favour of Ajit Wadekar. Pataudi was not even a part of the touring party. It is a different matter that he made a come-back, but by then he had realized that in the new scheme of things there was no place for a person of his forthright and audacious views.
Later it was an absolute delight to see him, occasionally, in the experts’ panel on TV. His fluency in the English language, coupled with his mastery of the game, would make for a deadly cocktail of incisive depth. You could make out that he had no time for fools or pretenders. His assessment of the game was uncannily accurate. He could spot the weaknesses of a batsman in a jiffy and suggest the line of attack that the opposing captain should have adopted. It is the loss of Indian cricket that its administrators did not make use of his abilities. Perhaps their egos were so large that there was no room left for someone who had a much better grasp on the game! I hope they realize their loss now and make partial amends by naming the Ferozeshah Kotla ground as the Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Stadium.
Indian cricket has seen many superstars after that tour of the West Indies in 1971. The names of Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Kapil Dev, Azharuddin, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Laxman, Sachin Tendulkar and Dhoni have adorned the game with their superb contributions with the bat and the ball. The ubiquitous TV screen has brought their exploits into the drawing rooms of millions of people. I too have experienced the thrill of watching a maestro like Gavaskar notching up milestones after milestones, only to be surpassed by Tendulkar. All the above named have lifted Indian cricket from the basement to unimaginable heights in all forms of the game. They have displayed amazing athletic skills and powers of concentration. Of course, cricket gear has undergone a tremendous change. The batsman today is protected by helmets, and a lot of other padding devices. The bouncing ball is no longer as lethal a missile as it was during the heydays of the West Indian assembly line of superfast bowlers. Cricket has been tilted in favour of the batsmen. The game too has rewarded Indian cricketers monetarily beyond their wildest expectations. I must have seen hundreds of great knocks played by the galaxy of Indian stars. But if one were to ask me the one single knock that has remained etched in my mind, I would immediately recall Tiger Pataudi’s double-hundred at the Ferozeshah Kotla ground. The fact that the Tiger played almost all his cricket with one eye makes statistics completely irrelevant. It is no use speculating how much more he would have contributed to the labour of the score-keepers, had he not met with that terrible accident. Of all the Indian cricketers who followed him, perhaps only Kapil Dev could come close to his unencumbered batting style, though not with the same grace. Azharuddin may have inherited his flair for fielding but his bony frame could not lend that languid alacrity to his stance that Pataudi had. The game of cricket was privileged when Tiger Pataudi chose to make it his means of expression. Perhaps T. S. Eliot had him in mind when he wrote the following lines:
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two;
Advise the prince, no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence,……”
Thank you, Mansur Ali Khan, for the delight you gave us old-fashioned followers of cricket. I am sure the gods must be waiting with bated breath to see you bat and field in the cricket fields of Paradise with your erstwhile teammates like Polly Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar, Jaisimha, Budhi Kunderan, and opponents like Conrad Hunte, Frank Worrell, Collie Smith and Roy Gilchrist, to name just a few. Men like you come rarely, and are even more rarely recognized!
The flamboyant wicket-keeper-batsman Farook Engineer broke into the Indian side in the 1960’s and I will never forget that special innings of his against the West Indies on 13th Jan.1967 when he scored 109 runs while opening the Indian batting. Against a bowling attack consisting of Wesley Hall, Charlie Griffith, Gary Sobers and Lance Gibbs, Engineer had raced to 94 or 96, I am not quite sure, and was just a boundary away from scoring a century before lunch; a feat that had, till then, only been achieved by the great Don! Chandu Borde scored 125 and 49 in the same Test. India drew the match but it had already lost the series before that.
No, I would not need the help of statistics to keep the memory of Tiger Pataudi fresh in my mind. I saw him but just a couple of times. Cricket was not a TV sport then, and most of us followed the game on radio. There were a few good cricket commentators in India like Chakrapani, Pearson Surita, and Berry Sarbadhikari, who would bring the game live to the followers. Roadside pan shops and dhabas would keep their radios tuned to the cricket commentary, and some of them would even maintain a live scorecard on a blackboard outside their establishments. The excitement of the cricket ground was faithfully conveyed to the listening crowd as every stroke and wicket was described in exciting detail by the commentators. I remember Vizzy once describing a late cut executed by the Australian batsman Norman O’Neill, as a stroke that was played “so late, so posthumously, that one wouldn’t mind going to the next world to see such a shot being played!” What a beautiful way of describing a cricketing shot!
Pataudi had begun his career brilliantly for India, scoring a century in the second Test he played for the country. The commentators were in raptures about his batting style. But what had caught their imagination most was his fielding. He prowled the cover region like the striped golden pride of Bengal and was equally effective in the mid-wicket area. His presence was enough to make opposite batsmen think twice before attempting a run. There was something languidly alert about his manner that made batsmen more cautious of stealing a run from him. His stance was easy and loose-limbed. There was no tightness on view. This gave him ample time to change direction and swoop on the ball on either side of his patrolling area. His catching was just as good as his ground fielding. When at the crease he brought the same feline grace to his batting stance and was perhaps the best player of the short-arm pull the game has seen.
When I saw him bat he had already lost one eye and had adapted his stance to compensate for this terrible handicap. He would face the ball square, which made for some difficulty in playing on the off side. But he had lost none of his ability on the on side. In the 1964 India-England series, he made 203 not out in the second innings of the 4th Test played in Delhi. I was one of those fortunate people who witnessed the action live on all five days. First it was Hanumant Singh who notched up a century on debut, but a superb century by Colin Cowdrey had helped England to a handsome lead of 107 runs. Budhi Kunderan and M. L. Jaisimha ensured a good start to the second innings. When Pataudi came in to bat at no. 4, the deficit had still not been wiped out. The Nawab, in the company of Kunderan, put on 65 runs on the 4th day, himself being unbeaten on 31 at the close of play. On the fifth and final day, Pataudi treated the crowd to an amazing display of classic batsmanship. He was 116 at tea, having added 85 runs in two sessions of two hours each. In the final session of one-and-a-half hours only (the duration those days of the last session of each day’s play in a Test match) he added 87 runs to his score and when play was called off he had scored a double-century (at that time the highest individual score by an Indian against England). If my memory serves me right, the contribution of Chandu Borde, the other batsman at the crease, was just 4 runs. The pull shot off John Mortimore, with which he scored his second hundred, was so brilliantly executed that one would not have minded going to the next world to see it.
The second time I saw him was on the Delhi University cricket ground. I am not sure of the date or year but it had to be in 1964 or 1965. Conrad Hunte, the great West Indian opening batsman, had retired from international cricket. A committed Christian, Hunte in 1961, on the West Indies' tour of Australia, saw the film The Crowning Experience, about the life of the black American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune. The film was promoted by Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a multi-faith organization promoting absolute moral and ethical standards of behavior. Hunte committed the remainder of his life to this association. While in India on behalf of MRA, Hunte had assembled a cricket team and a friendly match was organized against a University side. Pataudi turned up for the University and one could see his astonishing fielding abilities from very close. I do not remember seeing him bat in that friendly, but his presence in the field was absolutely electric.
Although I never saw him again in the flesh, the memory of the Delhi Test remained fresh in my mind. I continued to follow his career until he retired from the game in 1976. Vijay Merchant had put a brake in his Test career. As Chairman of Selectors, Merchant had not liked the no-nonsense attitude of the Nawab. When, as the captain, Pataudi lost the toss in a Test match, Merchant apparently said to him that having lost the toss, the team would lose the Test too. Pataudi, it is said, replied that in that case there was no need to actually go through the motions of playing the match, and the visiting team could be declared the winners. The Chairman was not pleased with this effrontery, and when the time came to choose the Captain for the 1971 tour of the West Indies, he used his casting vote against Pataudi and in favour of Ajit Wadekar. Pataudi was not even a part of the touring party. It is a different matter that he made a come-back, but by then he had realized that in the new scheme of things there was no place for a person of his forthright and audacious views.
Later it was an absolute delight to see him, occasionally, in the experts’ panel on TV. His fluency in the English language, coupled with his mastery of the game, would make for a deadly cocktail of incisive depth. You could make out that he had no time for fools or pretenders. His assessment of the game was uncannily accurate. He could spot the weaknesses of a batsman in a jiffy and suggest the line of attack that the opposing captain should have adopted. It is the loss of Indian cricket that its administrators did not make use of his abilities. Perhaps their egos were so large that there was no room left for someone who had a much better grasp on the game! I hope they realize their loss now and make partial amends by naming the Ferozeshah Kotla ground as the Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Stadium.
Indian cricket has seen many superstars after that tour of the West Indies in 1971. The names of Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Kapil Dev, Azharuddin, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Laxman, Sachin Tendulkar and Dhoni have adorned the game with their superb contributions with the bat and the ball. The ubiquitous TV screen has brought their exploits into the drawing rooms of millions of people. I too have experienced the thrill of watching a maestro like Gavaskar notching up milestones after milestones, only to be surpassed by Tendulkar. All the above named have lifted Indian cricket from the basement to unimaginable heights in all forms of the game. They have displayed amazing athletic skills and powers of concentration. Of course, cricket gear has undergone a tremendous change. The batsman today is protected by helmets, and a lot of other padding devices. The bouncing ball is no longer as lethal a missile as it was during the heydays of the West Indian assembly line of superfast bowlers. Cricket has been tilted in favour of the batsmen. The game too has rewarded Indian cricketers monetarily beyond their wildest expectations. I must have seen hundreds of great knocks played by the galaxy of Indian stars. But if one were to ask me the one single knock that has remained etched in my mind, I would immediately recall Tiger Pataudi’s double-hundred at the Ferozeshah Kotla ground. The fact that the Tiger played almost all his cricket with one eye makes statistics completely irrelevant. It is no use speculating how much more he would have contributed to the labour of the score-keepers, had he not met with that terrible accident. Of all the Indian cricketers who followed him, perhaps only Kapil Dev could come close to his unencumbered batting style, though not with the same grace. Azharuddin may have inherited his flair for fielding but his bony frame could not lend that languid alacrity to his stance that Pataudi had. The game of cricket was privileged when Tiger Pataudi chose to make it his means of expression. Perhaps T. S. Eliot had him in mind when he wrote the following lines:
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two;
Advise the prince, no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence,……”
Thank you, Mansur Ali Khan, for the delight you gave us old-fashioned followers of cricket. I am sure the gods must be waiting with bated breath to see you bat and field in the cricket fields of Paradise with your erstwhile teammates like Polly Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar, Jaisimha, Budhi Kunderan, and opponents like Conrad Hunte, Frank Worrell, Collie Smith and Roy Gilchrist, to name just a few. Men like you come rarely, and are even more rarely recognized!
Friday, September 23, 2011
THE STATE OF THE NATION
If one wanted to have a bulletin on the health of our nation, he could do no worse than look at the front page headlines of The New Indian Express of 23rd September 2011. For those who do not subscribe to this paper, let me list them below:
The pride of place goes to “Worried PM Tries to Limit Damage, Save PC”.
On the sidelines you will read “Sensex plunges 704 points”, Delhi Blast Accused Remanded till Oct 5”, “Four Roads Still Blocked in Sikkim”, and “Fresh Flood Alert in Orissa”. Other main stories carry the headings, “DMK MLA Made Rs. 238 crore from Illegal Land Mining”, and “Mines, Factories Razed 2 Lakh Hectares of Forest in 4 Yrs” under “Government Approved Deforestation”.
After reading such a catalogue of the drastic diseases that have paralysed the body of the nation into a deep coma, the news about the death of a great cricketing son of India on the same front page comes as a shock that makes one wake up to the fact that there are real flesh-and-blood people still inhabiting this land. The picture of the Home Minister “taking stock” of the damage done by the Sikkim earthquake, and apparently visiting some victims in a Gangtok hospital, accompanied by a single white-coated doctor, while flanked by a whole lot of security personnel, says it most eloquently. Of course, there is no mention of what the Home Minister said or did to alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate victims of this “natural” disaster. But with regard to his involvement in the 2G scam, all he had to say was, “I have assured the Prime Minister that I shall not make any public statement on the subject until he returns to India”. Great words from an eloquent Harvard alumnus!
How the government must be wishing they could impose a similar kind of the code of omerta as has been observed/enforced in the case of the health bulletin of the Congress Party’s President! In 1975 it was tried with reasonable success when the earlier Mrs. Gandhi imposed her emergency on the country. While protesting against press censorship, when a national daily published a blank editorial page, its editor was called to the office of the I&B Minister, Mr. V. C. Shukla, who threatened him with dire consequences, as that kind of effrontery was not “permittible” (sic).
After glancing through the headlines of the front page one really needs a lot of courage to open the other pages, as more of the same damaging information comes across. The nation is so far gone that not one organ of its body seems to be functioning. The almost unbeatable combination of two Sardar economists, after great intellectual effort, have come to the conclusion that with Rs. 25 a day a rural citizen can lead a comfortable life, and would not need any support from the government. Earlier one of these two had commented that the recent rise in petrol prices was “good”, as it would demonstrate to the West how serious we were about economic reforms. The only people I know who can subsist on Rs 25 a day are the Members of Parliament. This fact can be verified by having a look at the price list on the menu of the Lok Sabha Canteen. With such Doctors leading the team, no wonder the newspapers continue to read like obituary columns!
The Hindu recently carried a column written by P. Sainath analyzing the increase in the wealth of our legislators. The figures he quoted were taken from the actual declarations made by the legislators themselves. The figures show that in the past four years a majority of these individuals’ wealth has grown exponentially. Their daily increment in wealth ranges from Rs 5 lakhs to a staggering Rs. 50 lakhs.
This kind of unabashed loot has happened under the continuous rule of the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and the UPA Chairperson, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Dr. Singh may not have added significantly to his own material possessions, but there are some people who find it headier to remain at the apex, and for that they will make any amount of compromises. Position, by itself, becomes their reward. If he lasts this term, he will be the only person after Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi to complete ten years at the helm. The manner in which he has outsmarted the other aspirants without having to undergo the rough-and-tumble of elections shows what a shrewd mind is hiding behind that bland expressionless look. He has successfully neutered the chances of his rival Pranab Mukherji and kept Rahul Gandhi busy with meaningless photo-ops. By a deliberate willingness to look the other way while his colleagues loot the country, and by keeping his hands firmly in his own pocket, he has created an impression among the intelligentsia that he is the only honest man in the party and thereby he has made himself irreplaceable. The media has bought this spiel and almost all columnists are willing to give him the longest possible rope. Almost all his acts of omission are forgiven with a statement that “the personal integrity of the Prime Minister remains unquestionable”. His handling of the Anna Hazare phenomenon further reinforces this theory when he kept himself in the background and allowed Pranab Mukherji, P. Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid, and others to tie themselves up in knots and stand totally exposed and discredited in the harsh glare of the media light. Even Rahul Gandhi played into his hands when he made his intervention in the Lok Sabha and committed himself to a stand against the popular Jan Lokpal Draft Bill.
Tomorrow’s newspaper is unlikely to carry headlines that would cheer the common man in this unfortunate country. With the rupee having plunged steeply to almost fifty per US Dollar, and the stock market reeling under global recessionary fears, you can bet your bottom paisa that the prices of petroleum products, including domestic gas, will again be increased; inflation will cross into double-digits, and that the RBI will further revise the interest rates upwards. The Planning Commission will also, in the fitness of things, present a revised figure of Rs. 40 per day as the threshold income for BPL classification, and feel proud of its magnanimity. The depredation of our natural resources will continue unabated, while floods and earthquakes will strike some other part causing havoc, but providing our politicians with plenty of opportunities to conduct aerial surveys and get themselves photographed with their panoply of grandeur.
The pride of place goes to “Worried PM Tries to Limit Damage, Save PC”.
On the sidelines you will read “Sensex plunges 704 points”, Delhi Blast Accused Remanded till Oct 5”, “Four Roads Still Blocked in Sikkim”, and “Fresh Flood Alert in Orissa”. Other main stories carry the headings, “DMK MLA Made Rs. 238 crore from Illegal Land Mining”, and “Mines, Factories Razed 2 Lakh Hectares of Forest in 4 Yrs” under “Government Approved Deforestation”.
After reading such a catalogue of the drastic diseases that have paralysed the body of the nation into a deep coma, the news about the death of a great cricketing son of India on the same front page comes as a shock that makes one wake up to the fact that there are real flesh-and-blood people still inhabiting this land. The picture of the Home Minister “taking stock” of the damage done by the Sikkim earthquake, and apparently visiting some victims in a Gangtok hospital, accompanied by a single white-coated doctor, while flanked by a whole lot of security personnel, says it most eloquently. Of course, there is no mention of what the Home Minister said or did to alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate victims of this “natural” disaster. But with regard to his involvement in the 2G scam, all he had to say was, “I have assured the Prime Minister that I shall not make any public statement on the subject until he returns to India”. Great words from an eloquent Harvard alumnus!
How the government must be wishing they could impose a similar kind of the code of omerta as has been observed/enforced in the case of the health bulletin of the Congress Party’s President! In 1975 it was tried with reasonable success when the earlier Mrs. Gandhi imposed her emergency on the country. While protesting against press censorship, when a national daily published a blank editorial page, its editor was called to the office of the I&B Minister, Mr. V. C. Shukla, who threatened him with dire consequences, as that kind of effrontery was not “permittible” (sic).
After glancing through the headlines of the front page one really needs a lot of courage to open the other pages, as more of the same damaging information comes across. The nation is so far gone that not one organ of its body seems to be functioning. The almost unbeatable combination of two Sardar economists, after great intellectual effort, have come to the conclusion that with Rs. 25 a day a rural citizen can lead a comfortable life, and would not need any support from the government. Earlier one of these two had commented that the recent rise in petrol prices was “good”, as it would demonstrate to the West how serious we were about economic reforms. The only people I know who can subsist on Rs 25 a day are the Members of Parliament. This fact can be verified by having a look at the price list on the menu of the Lok Sabha Canteen. With such Doctors leading the team, no wonder the newspapers continue to read like obituary columns!
The Hindu recently carried a column written by P. Sainath analyzing the increase in the wealth of our legislators. The figures he quoted were taken from the actual declarations made by the legislators themselves. The figures show that in the past four years a majority of these individuals’ wealth has grown exponentially. Their daily increment in wealth ranges from Rs 5 lakhs to a staggering Rs. 50 lakhs.
This kind of unabashed loot has happened under the continuous rule of the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and the UPA Chairperson, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Dr. Singh may not have added significantly to his own material possessions, but there are some people who find it headier to remain at the apex, and for that they will make any amount of compromises. Position, by itself, becomes their reward. If he lasts this term, he will be the only person after Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi to complete ten years at the helm. The manner in which he has outsmarted the other aspirants without having to undergo the rough-and-tumble of elections shows what a shrewd mind is hiding behind that bland expressionless look. He has successfully neutered the chances of his rival Pranab Mukherji and kept Rahul Gandhi busy with meaningless photo-ops. By a deliberate willingness to look the other way while his colleagues loot the country, and by keeping his hands firmly in his own pocket, he has created an impression among the intelligentsia that he is the only honest man in the party and thereby he has made himself irreplaceable. The media has bought this spiel and almost all columnists are willing to give him the longest possible rope. Almost all his acts of omission are forgiven with a statement that “the personal integrity of the Prime Minister remains unquestionable”. His handling of the Anna Hazare phenomenon further reinforces this theory when he kept himself in the background and allowed Pranab Mukherji, P. Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid, and others to tie themselves up in knots and stand totally exposed and discredited in the harsh glare of the media light. Even Rahul Gandhi played into his hands when he made his intervention in the Lok Sabha and committed himself to a stand against the popular Jan Lokpal Draft Bill.
Tomorrow’s newspaper is unlikely to carry headlines that would cheer the common man in this unfortunate country. With the rupee having plunged steeply to almost fifty per US Dollar, and the stock market reeling under global recessionary fears, you can bet your bottom paisa that the prices of petroleum products, including domestic gas, will again be increased; inflation will cross into double-digits, and that the RBI will further revise the interest rates upwards. The Planning Commission will also, in the fitness of things, present a revised figure of Rs. 40 per day as the threshold income for BPL classification, and feel proud of its magnanimity. The depredation of our natural resources will continue unabated, while floods and earthquakes will strike some other part causing havoc, but providing our politicians with plenty of opportunities to conduct aerial surveys and get themselves photographed with their panoply of grandeur.
THE MAN WITHOUT PROPERTIES
THE MAN WITHOUT PROPERTIES
(A Play in Three Acts)
Cast of Characters:
President of India: An unkempt man of 70 with a mop of hair brushed so it falls on the sides. He is wearing a Nehru jacket and trousers.
Lady Maindhi: A severe looking woman in her 60’s wearing a white saree.
Mumble Singh: A wispy old man with a blue turban, scraggly beard, and large spectacles. Owlish looking. Wearing a Nehru jacket and trousers
Plumberji: A short, balding, blunt looking man in his late 70’s. Wearing a closed Nehru jacket and trousers. Thick glasses.
Lady President of India: An unpleasant looking woman in her 70’s. Wears a coloured saree with palloo on her head.
Monty Spudseller: A strong looking man in his late 60’s wearing a blue turban, a suit with a tie.
ACT I
SCENE I
(Sometime in the year 2004)
A hall in the President’s office
Enter Lady Maindhi accompanied by Mumble Singh and Plumberji.
President greets the three and invites them to sit.
President: Ah, welcome, Lady Maindhi. I see you have Mumble Singh and Plumberji with you. How is the mood of the party now that you have won a majority in the Parliament?
Lady Maindhi: Thank you Mr. President. With the blessings of the Holy Virgin, our forces today have vanquished the armies of Satan with the help of our brethren who believe in the Holy Book. People have been falling over one another in their attempts to cajole me to lead them in this hour of triumph, and to make this nation as great as The Holy Roman Empire. I have come, Mr. President, with the list of the members who have expressed complete faith in my leadership and who are urging me to form the next government at the centre.
President: That is very good Lady Maindhi. I am sure the list must be authentic and I really do not have to look at it. So who is going to be the Prime Minister?
Lady Maindhi: (looking a bit surprised): But Mr. President, I thought you understood that the people want me to take up this post.
(Aside: “what a duffer this Bhajan Party has selected”)
Mumble Singh and Plumberji together: Yes, yes, Mr. President, Madam is the only choice of the country and we have come to seek your blessings before we make a formal announcement to the people.
President: Ah, yes! But before you came, this busybody Submarine Sammy had come here. He was sure that you would soon be coming to me with such a demand, and he told me that I should not accede to it as it would be illegal and liable to be challenged and struck down by the Supreme Court.
Lady Maindhi (looking very cross): Why, that good-for-nothing dark, Tamil rascal has the temerity to suggest that my appointment would be illegal? How dare he?
Plumberji (ingratiatingly and then angrily): Yes, yes madam, the first thing we have to do is to throw that man into the darkest cell of Tihar and lose the key. What brazenness, what blasphemy! The man is a horrible conspirator and should be quickly taught a lesson.
Mumble Singh (wringing his hands and looking sheepish): He thinks that just because he is a Harvard professor he can claim to know everything. He has forgotten what a long list of degrees I have acquired and how much more scholarly I am.
Lady Maindhi: (rather authoritatively): Well Mr. President, please let me have your letter immediately. Cannot keep the people waiting any longer!
President: Madam, I would be very happy to give you the letter, but I am afraid this Sammy has shown me the clause of reciprocity under which our citizens cannot hold the office of Prime Minister in the country of your birth, and accordingly you, not having been born in this country cannot become the Prime Minister here. Now if you have someone else in your party, I would be glad to issue the letter to him or her. And, by the way, there is no bar to your becoming a minister, but the objection is only to the office of the Prime Minister.
Lady Maindhi: (turning to Plumber): Hey, Plumber, you are a lawyer, aren’t you? Come on and read the law to the President.
Plumberji (looking downcast): Madam I have been so busy running the party affairs, first with your mother-in-law, and then with your husband that I have not practised law for a long time. I do not know if Sammy has got his onions right?
Lady Maindhi: Never mind his onions, or garlic. Call that stupid Weesingh immediately and ask him where we stand.
Plumberji: Yes, yes, ma’am. (Goes aside and makes a call from his cell phone).
(Loud) Madam, Weesingh says that daft Sammy is right. Madam what shall we do now???
Lady Maindhi (getting up): Well Mr. President, we have to go and discuss this development with my family and other pets. We will be back soon.
President: Any time Lady, any time.
All exit.
***********************
SCENE 2
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10, Lokpath
Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh and Plumberji. Lady Maindhi looking visibly agitated mumbling threats and imprecations against everybody. Plumberji in most ingratiating manner trying to suggest to Lady Maindhi:
Plumberji: If I may say so madam, why don’t we recommend the name of your Binacaji? After all she is born here and cannot be disbarred.
Mumble Singh: But Plumberji, Binacaji has said she doesn’t want to enter politics. She and her husband Bobbyji are busy raising funds for the party to fight the future electoral battles. After all we have to think of the nation and its poor people. We must not take Binacaji away from her national duty.
Plumberji: Madam, in that case why not make our Baabaa the Prime Minister? So what if he is not very qualified or experienced. Mumble Singh and I will stand shoulder to shoulder with him and make sure he does not falter.
Mumble Singh (aside): Your shoulder will reach Baabaa’s knees, you rogue. You think you can wheedle your way in and lick the cream.
Lady Maindhi: Enough! I have heard the two of you talking rubbish. Neither Binaca nor Baabaa is going to sit on that chair while I am alive.
Aside: (You think I married that fool in England just to be a dumb housewife listening to that tyrannical mother of his. Thank God she is no longer around to torment us all. For that we have to thank the guards who rose to the occasion and rid us of that monster.)
(Loud): Now we have to think of someone else since I am sure that foolish man with the stupid haircut will be difficult to persuade. Oh I can’t understand why those idiots of the Bhajan Party made him the President? Anyway, his term will soon end and then we will show him his proper place.
Aside: (Just to think how much I have waited for this opportunity, only to be scuttled by that interfering Sammy and this kalam-pusher. Fortunately that Gorbachev finished the USSR and the KGB; otherwise today they would have been at my throat demanding all that money back. Good for them. Their money is now safe in my Swiss bank account where nobody can touch it. Even my dear Lotus, who had a share in it, is mercifully gone, and I alone can operate that account and enjoy its fruits. But how much more delicious it would have been had I become the Prime Minister today. Oh what shall I do now?
Mumble Singh (approaching timidly): Madam I have an idea. Plumberji is the most senior member of our party. He has worked with your mother-in-law, and he served her most faithfully. After her tragic assassination he thought he should have been asked to form the government, but that President Jhadoo Singh, in his infinite wisdom, chose instead to call your dear husband. I beg you, madam, let Plumberji have the post that he surely deserves. His skills in plugging leaks and stemming runaway floods of allies and partymen are well known. He will serve you as faithfully as your family and I will support him at all times.
Lady Maindhi: Thank you Mumble for reminding me of those terrible times. The earth really shook when that mighty tree was felled. By the way, how many of your faith committed suicide to show their anguish at the bodyguard’s foul deed, and atoned for that terrible crime?
Mumble Singh: I believe, madam, there were more than 3500 of them who lit instant pyres using anything inflammable they could lay their hands upon, like tyres etc., and committed sati like the Rajput ladies of yore. Our able members Durjan Kumarji, Tattlersahib, Bagulabhagatji really worked hard to help these martyrs in their cause. It was not easy but within three days they showed what metal they were made of and lit the greatest homage to our fallen leader.
Lady Maindhi: And where were you at that time? Why didn’t you show the same respect?
Mumble Singh: Oh Madam, I had gone to my native place for some urgent domestic work. Also you may recall, I was not a politician then, just a bureaucrat. By the time I came back, your dear husband had said that enough homage had been paid and that the stalwarts of the party had worked tirelessly for too long and they needed some rest. More such occasions could be sought when homage would be paid to the departed leader.
Plumberji: (Interjecting): So madam, should we draft a new letter asking the President to approve my name?
Lady Maindhi: Wait! How impatient you look?
Aside (I can see you are already dreaming about the loaves and fishes of office. I know how you love to eat fish, especially that loathsome Maachher jhol that stinks to high heavens. But how can I forget that you had told that family retainer Jhadoo to swear you in even before my darling Lotus had boarded the plane that was to bring him to Delhi. No, you cannot be trusted)
Turning to Mumble Singh
(Loud) Well Mumble what do you say if we go back with your name instead of mine?
Mumble Singh, overcome with emotion falls at Lady Maindhi’s feet and while trying to look down, cannot but help letting a sly smile creep up to the corners of his mouth.
Mumble Singh: Oh madam, I am so unworthy of this august office that had been held first by that giant among us, your mother-in-law’s father, then by her and after her by that shining star of the country, your late husband. Madam, please reconsider. I am totally unworthy to sit in the chair from which such godlike people, divinely ordained, dispensed justice and largesse among the people of this country.
Lady Maindhi: Oh stop talking nonsense. Didn’t that nincompoop Barasingarao occupy it for full five years? Weren’t you his Finance Minister? So if he can sit on that chair, why can’t you? After all you are also not from the dynasty.
Mumble Singh: But Madam, while I was serving him, I was always looking towards you for guidance, and my eyes were constantly turned towards 10, Lokpath. You might have also noticed that when this imposter died and his followers tried to bring his body into the Party’s Headquarters, how stoutly the party members resisted that move. Did I even utter one word in his favour? No madam, because I knew he was just an interloper, even like the last Prime Minister we had from the Bhajan Party who was prone to writing and reciting poetry at every possible opportunity, instead of trying to do some real honest work. Please madam, do refrain from suggesting my unworthy name.
Aside: (Plumberji, now your goose is truly cooked. Just see how this putli will dance to my tune).
All exit.
******************************
SCENE 3
Back in the President’s office. Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh and Plumberji.
President: Well, well, Lady Maindhi, have you consulted your family and pets? What is the decision?
Lady Maindhi: Oh, Mr. President, how I wish you were there? You would have heard the most heart-rending cries from the faithful, who just could not understand how that unworthy Submarine Sammy had wrecked all their hopes to see me anointed as the undisputed queen of this land. How they cried and beseeched me to reconsider? Oh what disappointments on their faces when I refused like Julius Caesar who had refused the crown three times? But eventually they understood and reconciled to their fate.
Well, Mr. President, we have decided to make this Mumble Singh here the leader of the house and he shall rule in my place till our Baabaa is ready to take over the command as is his rightful duty. Meanwhile, Mumble Singh will keep the seat warm by placing a sheepskin over the cushions in order not to pollute it with his rather too frequent gassy disseminations. By the way, Mumble, why do you eat so much dal? Why can’t you eat pasta like normal people?
President: A very good decision, Lady Maindhi, I daresay. Mumble Singh has all the qualifications for this office and although he is not an elected Member of Parliament, I am sure you would have thought of a safe constituency for him to fight a bye-election.
Lady Maindhi: No Mr. President, Mumble Singh cannot win an election even from the safest seat in Andhera Pradesh., where my loyal pet would be ready to ensure his success. We will have to think of a Rajya Sabha seat for him. I think Assam would be the right place, what with more than half the population consisting of illegal immigrants. We will smuggle in our Mumble Singh as one more and no one will notice. Anyway, he is hardly audible or noticeable. We will make Google search for a place for him and Google can be trusted to create a residence record for him.
President: Well, in that case Lady Maindhi, you may declare Mumble Singh as the leader and form the next government at the centre.
Signs the letter in front of him.
Here you are.
Shaking Mumble Singh’s hand,” Congratulations Mumble Singhji!. Today you have become the Prime Minister of this great nation. I hope you will prove to be its worthy son! Good luck, and may God Bless you!”
Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh, and Plumberji exit.
President: Oh my countrymen, today I truly fear for you. The quirks of our electoral system have thrown up this unholy combination like the pot of poison that the churning of the oceans had thrown up. But then there was a God to swallow the poison and hold it in his throat. Today there are no gods and no devatas. Only puny, ambitious people, who will spread this poison among the multitudes, the hapless and the poor. Mark my words; this Mumble Singh is not as innocent as he looks. He nurtures within his bosom the grossest ambition and like Dr Faustus will not be loath to make a pact with the Devil if it gives him the power to rule. His ingratiating smile is the smile of the fox before it pounces upon his prey. Make no mistake; he will ruin this country for sure.
Fade.
*******************************
ACT II
SCENE 1
Five years later. Year 2009. The Hall in the President’s Office.
New President, a lady in a saree is seated in her chair.
Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh.
Lady Maindhi: Greetings Madam President. As you must know, our coalition has again swept the elections. We have come to you for the formality of your permission to form the next government at the centre.
President: Yes, my dear Lady Maindhi. I was quite sure of these results. After all didn’t we have our own man as the Election Commissioner? How we stuck to our guns and appointed him in spite of the combined assaults of the opposition? I am glad you didn’t give that silly kalam-pusher another term in the office. One never knew what was happening under that mop of his. If that Nevla had not become the Election Commissioner, you may not have been able to get enough seats. You saw how at the last minute your candidates were declared victors even though they were trailing in the beginning. Even that cocky Chewing Gum had to be rescued by Nevlaji. Now you see how important money becomes and its control? Why do you think we have such an interest in cooperative banks?
By the way, I have heard that you have decided to continue with Mumble Singhji as the Prime Minister till our Baabaa is fully ready to take on this onerous responsibility from his aging shoulders. What a day that will be? Once anointed, he will rule till the people completely forget the names of opposition parties and their leaders.
And oh, Lady Maindhi, I hope you have considered my name for the next term. Unfortunately our constitution does not permit more than two terms for the President. Else I would have requested you to keep me here in perpetuity to guide and help Baabaa. Maybe, Mumble Singhji you should think of the possibility of amending the constitution in this respect.
Mumble Singh: Sure Madam President. I will instruct the next law minister to seriously look into it.
President: (signing the letter): Here you are Lady Maindhi. Please go ahead and announce your new cabinet. I shall be pleased to swear them in at an auspicious hour of your choice.
Lady Maindhi: Thank you madam President.
(Aside): You really believe I will nominate you once more? Let your term finish and then you go back to the village from where we plucked you. We need this office for Mumble Singh and Plumberji when my Baabaa becomes the Prime Minister.
(Loud): All right Mumble, let us go. We have a lot of work to do.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam.
All exit.
*************************************
SCENE 2
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10 Lokpath
Enter Lady Maindhi with Mumble Singh in tow.
Lady Maindhi: Mumble Singhji please sit down. Now let us finalize the cabinet. You, of course, will continue to warm the seat for Baabaa. By the way, have that sheepskin replaced. By now it must be stinking to high heavens. I don’t know when Baabaa will be ready and it may happen anytime; so I suggest you change the covering every week.
Mumble Singh: As you please Lady Maindhi. I will give an order for a new sheepskin to be put on the chair every week.
Lady Maindhi: Good. Now let me see. During the last term of five years we have not served the nation too well. You know, we allowed that Sugar Daddy and his sidekick Playful Petal to skim the cream and now see where they have reached. The first one is controlling the richest sport in the country and the second one has brought our Maharaja to utter ruin while enriching toddy tappers and elfin upstarts.
Mumble Singh: True madam. I am also learning that Sugar Daddy has become the richest man in the world, owning, I believe huge amounts of land in America and God knows where else.
Lady Maindhi: Even I have heard that. Can’t understand what he needs all that money for. After all he has only one daughter and she too is well settled. Now look at me, two children. My girl had to select that scrap merchant without any means, and how hard I have to work to make him respectable. Why, I had to literally twist the arms of that land-baron of Gurgaon to give my son-in-law a small share in his business. And look at Baabaa. He has found this floozy from some drugland and he won’t let go of her. Here I am working my bones off to make both ends meet, and he is gallivanting with her from an American lock-up to god knows where.
Mumble, this time we must not allow these interlopers to do all the service. We must replace them and show the nation who their true well wishers are.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam. May I suggest we keep Sugar Daddy in his ministry of Food & Agriculture? I will make such policies that will send inflation almost vertically up. That will cook his goose for sure. After all I have been with the World Bank for so many years. That is all we do in the Bank anyway. Our policies are designed to make nation’s bankrupt and whole populations destitute. We have a special expertise in this area. By the way I will advise Monty Spudseller to immediately implement the plan to ensure double-digit inflation in fifteen days’ time.
Lady Maindhi: Good. Let Plumberji continue to hold Finance. He cannot read one Balance Sheet from another and his budgets are as confusing as his pronunciation. But he is useful as the oldest member of our party and can be trusted to keep stray sheep in the pen. Also keep Chewing Gum in his Home portfolio. He is a meddlesome fellow and thinks he knows everything. Even as a lawyer he has nothing much to show. I would rather trust his wife more at any time. But he is verbose and uses long, dramatic sentences to say nothing. His put-on accent also helps in keeping news editors amused. Besides, he was too cunning in his previous job where he allowed his son to manipulate the stock market and we have heard that the rogue has made a tidy pile of a few thousand crores through his father’s P Note and other leaks. We will sort that little brat when the time comes, but let us ensure that Chewing Gum does no further damage in this area.
Mumble Singh: Right madam.
(Aside) Fortunately our friendly neighbours from across the border came in with their timely help and sent that Kasai and his team to clean up a bit of our Big City. How I used that opportunity to get rid of that paramour of yours? As Home minister he was a complete mess, though I believe he would spend hours in front of the mirror to try new clothes and hair gels. I don’t know what you saw in him, neither brains nor personality? But then who can understand the mind of a frustrated woman?
(Loud) And madam, may I suggest we give the education portfolio to Kapti Sybil. You know how many split personalities he carries! Every time he raises his eyebrow, like that screen-villain K. N. Singh, he looks so different. Madam he also has a great ability with numbers. He can make any number disappear and make it look like a round figure. He will raise our standards so high that in no time we will have zero illiteracy and zero absenteeism from schools and colleges.
Lady Maindhi: All right. I don’t much like him myself, but he is dangerous and should be kept in good humour.
Mumble Singh: Madam there is a lot of pressure from our ally in the south. His party is our largest partner and he is demanding a number of cabinet posts. Especially he wants cabinet ranks for his son, nephew, and one more that I am not sure if he is his son from a wife we know nothing about.
Lady Maindhi: What is his name?
Mumble Singh: He is called a raja but I am not sure if that is also his name. Maybe he is a prince of some little estate in the hills.
Lady Maindhi: Oh that raja. Don’t worry. He is not the old man’s son. My sources tell me that he is actually his son-in-law on the sly. I believe there is something between this raja and the old man’s daughter who has taken to writing poetry. Anyway, give him the Telecom portfolio. I am sure he will make a very useful contribution in that post.
And tell the old man we cannot accommodate his son, that good-for-nothing Hara-kiri. In fact he should suggest that course for him. The fool cannot speak one word of English or Hindi. What will he do here in Delhi? Even the south Indian stenographers have become extinct in this computer age.
Mumble Singh: But madam we cannot afford to displease the blind, old man. Why don’t we give Hara-kiri Chemicals & Fertilizers? As it is these industries are frowned upon by the green activists and we may soon have to shut them down and outsource our requirements from the poor countries of Africa. If he resists shutting these industries the public will be angry with him, thereby saving us any embarrassment. His lack of communication will also annoy the people and I am sure he will ask us to relieve him of this burden.
Lady Maindhi: Good thinking, Mumble Singh. I didn’t know you had this ability.
Mumble Singh: (Aside) there is a lot you don’t know about me. Just wait and see how I twist you around my little finger. Changing the sheepskin every week! Wait and see how I will keep that yuppie puppy of yours cooling his dandy heels in the party office.
Loud: (ingratiatingly) Madam is too kind. Otherwise what is my worth?
And madam, to keep the old man happy we will give his nephew the Textile ministry. I have heard from my sources that the young man used to run a small garment unit before his father cemented his place in the government. So, he has first-hand experience of the industry. Further, there is not much money to be made here. Recession in the west and Chinese domination of the market will ensure the industry remains in the doldrums. We will upgrade him to cabinet rank so he will be able to flaunt his suits and ties. Quite a dandy isn’t he!
Lady Maindhi: Fine. So I think all the problem people have been taken care of.
Mumble Singh: Yes, almost madam. There remains the matter of that cantankerous woman from Banga. She buys new sarees and then deliberately crumples them up in order to look woeful and poor. I understand she never repeats a saree. Have you seen how her hair is also deliberately unkempt to go with the image? Actually she is an ambitious little witch and will do anything to be able to rule the state. However, we will have assembly elections there soon. Till then let us give her the Railways. This department has been doing without a minister for some time now, and the babus there are actually running it well. The last minister, that mumbling, bumpkin of a fodder-thief found himself completely off his tracks in this ministry and allowed it to run on its own, as he understood nothing of the technology or the logistics. The babus have found the arrangement very useful and have not troubled the minister at all. They would do the same with this Ditty from Banga and we will reap the benefit of trains actually running on time. She will spend all her time and energy in Banga trying to destabilize the incumbent party who have anyway done enough and more to destroy that state. Anybody can win an election against them this time. So, the chances are that Ditty will win and form the next govt. there. We should keep her in good humour and latch on to her sari palloo for some seats in the elections. Once she goes there, she is out of our hair for good.
Lady Maindhi: Smart thinking Mumbleji. Now we must hurry and finish the formation of the cabinet. Swearing-in has to happen tomorrow as it is the most auspicious day in the calendar. The Cardinal himself called me from the Vatican and told me the day and the time that would be most suitable for such a great event to take place.
They start poring over the list of names and filling the posts.
Fade out.
******************************
SCENE 3
Prime Minister’s Office at 7, Ratrace Road
Enter Mumble Singh, addressing the audience
Mumble Singh: Oh! What a relief! Swearing-in is over and all the lip-smacking vultures have got their pounds of flesh. How easily I have manoeuvred the whole lot to my advantage! Another five years! Could anyone have imagined that I would be the Prime Minister of this country for ten years? TEN YEARS. And that too without having to win an election! Yes. Can you imagine me getting my feet dirty in the hustle-bustle of election rallies, running from one dirty village to another, picking up snotty little brats and wiping their bottoms? No, thank Wahi Guru for these mercies. Nobody can remove me from here now. Not that Plumberji, nor that chhokra who would like to be king. Change the sheepskins every week, my foot! What does she think? I am just a windbag farting around all the time? No, I am not a fool. Not for nothing have I been plotting ever since that Submarine Sammy told me about the reciprocity clause. It was destined that I should be in this chair today. Otherwise why would Plumberji have contrived to fall out of favour? No sir, your man of destiny is standing before you today. Be sure you watch his rise and continuous rise!!!
Enter Monty Spudseller
Monty Spudseller: Congratulations Boss! What a brilliant performance! Now what are my orders?
Mumble Singh: Monty, we have known each other for a long time now, even though you are so many years junior to me. After all we have worked for the same great organization that is the foremost expert in making healthy nations sick and completely ruining the sick ones. Now, we have retained Sugar Daddy in the Food & Agriculture ministry. He thinks he is the kingmaker because he has amassed all this enormous wealth. We want to put him in his place so that he never ever dares to glance at the Prime Minister’s chair, which, we know, he covets so much. Let your planning department create a situation where the country has galloping inflation in food products. As a matter of fact, I have promised Lady Maindhi that you will have a double digit rate of inflation within two weeks. So get along with the job.
Monty Spudseller: But sir, the agricultural production figures are very good and it will be difficult to raise the prices when supplies are profuse.
Mumble Singh: What nonsense! It is so easy. Just ask Food Corporation to buy all the food produced by raising minimum procurement prices. FCI doesn’t have enough storage space for all that grain and they will leave it in the open only to be destroyed by the elements and rodents. Simultaneously allow private buyers to buy as much as they can and let them hoard it, by selectively leaking this policy to them. You can depend upon the covetousness of your merchant classes to help you to the maximum in this noble endeavour. Soon your surplus will turn into a shortage. And then see the graph rising! That will put paid to any ambitions Sugar Daddy might have harboured.
Monty Spudseller: Brilliant sir. But what about Baabaa? How do you keep him in check?
Mumble Singh: You are still too young to understand the workings of a Faustian mind. Only when you have mastered all the arts and sciences do you look towards those teachers who can give you the knowledge of total control. I was lucky to have been apprenticed by that artful master Barasingarao who taught me so much. But what I learnt most from him was the art of total “inaction”. You do remember his famous statement; “taking no decision is also a decision”. How do you manipulate people and situations without appearing to be doing anything and yet things happen exactly as you wish and desire? I learnt this from Barasingarao, till then the only person who had completed a full five years as Prime Minister without belonging to the first family. How he managed to destroy the credibility of the Bhajan party by allowing them to demolish a disused mosque would have done credit even to Senor Machiavelli? And the manner in which he fixed those junglees from Jharkhand was just amazing. Have you ever heard of large sums of cash given as bribe for votes being deposited in Bank accounts? Just look at the deep divisions he has left as his legacy. Not even that Mandal-vandal could achieve so much with his cock-eyed policies. It was his ego that got the better of him and his edifice came tumbling down like a house of cards. Now look at me. Do you see any ego? Similarly did Barasingha have an ego? No. That, my dear Monty, is the secret. All these Chewing Gums, Baabaas, Kapti Sybils have huge ego problems. They can never reach the heights that men like me can. The only person who could really be a threat is Plumberji, but his indiscretion in 1984 has sealed his fate. Now just keep doing what I tell you and we both will reap the benefits.
Monty Spudseller: What benefits sir? In our last term what have we made?
Mumble Singh: You are too immature. Is money everything for you? Haven’t you read your Faust? What did he ask for when the devil gave him his powers? Did he ask for diamonds and palaces or any such things? No. All he asked for were some fruit that was out of season and some exotic delicacies. Played some harmless tricks on the Pope. Yes, what he really hankered for most was the kiss of Helen, the queen of Sparta. You see, I do not even desire that. What would you get from the fleeting kiss of a dead queen? After all how much money do you need? Hasn’t the state taken care of all our needs? Is there anything we want that has not been provided? It is only the shallow minds that want to hoard and collect filthy lucre. Look at Sugar Daddy. He may be the richest man in the world, but what good is his money? Cannot even keep his lips straight. And all the time worried about his connections with the resident of Clifton Karachi. What has that connection got him? Maybe a few thousand crores. But is he going to take them with him to the next world? No, all that will remain here. But one word of indiscretion and he is finished. I am sure he must not even be sleeping well. Or look at our patron Lady Maindhi herself. What has she got from all that money she keeps in Swiss banks? She has opened herself to blackmail by Cockroachies and such unsavoury characters. What for? Just a few billion dollars in foreign banks? Now look at me. Could you seriously have thought that I would be requested, yes REQUESTED, to occupy this office by a descendent of the Imperial family? Me, a man without any properties! No money or assets worth the name! But here I am, dear Monty. Listen to me and keep following my instructions. You and I will still make history in this land.
Now go, and put the wheels in motion.
Both exit.
******************************
ACT 3
SCENE 1
Sometime in March 2011
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10 Lokpath
Enter Plumberji
Plumberji: Good Morning Lady Maindhi. Did you wish to see me madam?
Lady Maindhi: (irritatingly) Yes Plumberji. What is this nonsense going on about corruption in the country? I am being told that the Supreme Court has started asking silly questions about spectrum allocation, commonwealth games, and some foreign accounts. Since when have the courts bothered about such trivial things? Don’t they have anything better to do?
Plumberji: I beg your pardon madam but our chosen people for some jobs seem to have gone overboard and now the media and the opposition parties have got some whiff of the situation.
Lady Maindhi: What nonsense? We had placed very trusted people in charge. Mumble Singh suggested the name of that raja for telecom and Golmali has been the chief of the Olympic Association for as long as I can remember. They have done no corruption. All the money they raised through spectrum sale and contracts for stadia has been fully accounted for and every rupee deposited in our accounts. And, of course, in the process if they have skimmed a few rupees off the top, should it really worry the courts? Ask Bahuji and she will confirm that what I am saying about Golmali is true. After all she is one great book-keeper. You remember when her father-in-law was the chief Minister of UP. It was she who managed all the books. Tell the media to speak to her. As for the telecom guy, he is too daft to even understand what skimming-off-the top means.
Plumberji: Yes madam. But the problem is that the CAG has done some calculations according to which the loss in spectrum sale is a huge number that I cannot even write down on one piece of paper. Similarly the loss in Commonwealth Games has been estimated to run to tens of thousands of crores. It seems our Income Tax department has been snooping upon some Nadia dame whose telephone conversations have been taped. I hear she has been promising heaven and earth to all and sundry. The opposition is asking for answers and won’t permit the Parliament to function.
Lady Maindhi: Oh Plumberji, you are so tiresome. Anyway, isn’t the IT department under you? How did they do such a stupid thing without your knowledge? And as for the Parliament, what difference does it make if it works or not? When has the Parliament done anything even when it functions? These opposition wallahs are just a bunch of buffoons. Throw a few crumbs to them and see how they will crawl. Go and do it at once. You know whom to use for this purpose. Speak to Dumbersing who will arrange everything. Also talk to that Dotty Bukbuk and tell her to shed some crocodile tears on TV. That should soothe some hearts.
Plumberji: Madam, it is not just the opposition. It seems a new beast called civil society has suddenly taken birth. It is a very strange animal. At its head is an old demonetized Anna coin in a dhoti-kurta, while the rest of its body is made of thousands of clones wearing Gandhi caps and claiming to be Anna coins too. This animal is threatening to launch a country-wide agitation if all the skimmers-off-the-top are not put in jail.
Lady Maindhi: But I thought the Anna coins had been taken out of circulation more than fifty years ago. How come they are still around? Why don’t you just put this beast in Tihar jail and be done with it? What is so difficult about it?
Plumberji: But madam, this animal cannot be put in jail. It is the size of a behemoth and no jail is large enough to contain it. We have to do something about it before it gets out of our control.
Lady Maindhi: Ok. If you are so disturbed then throw that raja and his rani into jail. Even dump Golmali there. Anyway he suffers from dementia and cannot remember his own name. If you need to round up a few more people you can throw a few of the IAS officers and some businessmen in there too. Only make sure that the really important ones are not touched.
Plumberji: Like, madam?
Lady Maindhi: Look, I don’t want you to bring any harm to my Aamdani brothers. Especially the older one! I have so much reliance on his expertise in creating wealth from nowhere. He was very well trained by his father. Do you know how close he had become to my mother-in-law? She did nothing without his permission. Unfortunately, the younger one has gone astray. He has made some very silly friends and his wife is no good. That is why he has been throwing rocks at some Miss Universe bimbo. But still, in his father’s memory, I’d like to protect him. You can haul up some of his executives and give them the treatment but do not harm him.
Plumberji: As you say madam. But the head of this civil society beast has threatened to go on indefinite fast if we do not bring in a piece of legislation and appoint an ombudsman that will oversee corruption in the whole country. They want to call him a LOKPAL.
Lady Maindhi: LOKPAL! Why would they like to have a caretaker for my road?
Plumberji: Not your road madam. The Lokpal will be a central authority that will have powers of investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner. Kind of a multi-headed, multi-limbed being, as we have in our Hindu mythology.
Lady Maindhi: Oh you and your Hinduism! Such a stupid religion! Three hundred crore gods, and yet they cannot find an Indian to rule them. See how within only fifty years after independence from the British they have fallen on my feet to rule them? I tell you, you cannot govern by yourselves. You need a foreigner to whip you into shape. Now here is what I want you to do:
Throw that raja and his rani into jail
Give his job to Kapti Sybil. He will make all the figures that you cannot write on a piece of paper vanish into thin air and show that the loss is one big zero. Next, unleash that Doggy from my kennel and let him loose upon this new beast. He will tear it to shreds in no time.
Tell our pet columnists and editors to start a campaign discrediting the move by the head of this beast. Call upon people like the overbloated editor of Outrageousview and his supercilious, smirking namesake of Waqt Hindustani to write scathing articles and editorials on the proposed fast. Start a blitz on our pet 24x7 TV channels and let our spokespersons Phoney Itwari, Jonty Nattery, with some guidance from Dotty Bukbuk, the screaming Naggarica Behosh and her blinking husband throw every kind of accusation on this beast and discredit it completely. You see it will self-destruct in no time.
Now go and put this whole operation into active mode.
Exit.
********************************
SCENE 2
Sometime in April 2011
No. 10, Lokpath
Meeting going on between Mumble Singh, Plumberji and Lady Maindhi
Lady Maindhi: Mumble Singh, I am told the crowds are getting bigger and bigger at the site of the fast.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam. The old geezer is proving quite a draw, and attracting a lot of young people to his cause. We have tried to dissuade them gently not to be swayed by what he says, but so far it does not seem to have worked.
Lady Maindhi: What do you think we should do? Maybe you should offer to resign. Our Baabaa can take over. He is young like these crowds. I am sure he will be able to strike a chord with them.
Mumble Singh: If you think so madam, I’m most willing to step aside and let Baabaa handle the situation. After all he will have to do it one day. But are you sure this is the right time? Young people are most unpredictable. Also the image of our government is not very bright. You have put the Telecom minister in jail as well as the MP from Pune. A number of senior bureaucrats and noted business barons are breaking bread in Tihar. The CAG and PAC are dead against us. Many more scandals are waiting to be exposed. Do you think we should let these burdens fall on the young, delicate shoulders of Baabaa?
Lady Maindhi: Maybe you are right. So what do you suggest?
Mumble Singh: Madam let us send Kapti Sybil to talk to this village fool. Sybil will twist him with honeyed words and promise him everything. Oh he can be no match for that wily fox. Let him promise that we will make a joint drafting committee with five of their members and five from our side. Plumberji here will chair this committee. Sybil, Chewing Gum, Oily Moily and Halfman will be the other members. Let them nominate any five from their side. I am sure that with Sybil and Chewing Gum they will make no progress at all and after the tempers have cooled and all the agitators have gone back to their homes, Plumberji will announce a breakdown in talks and produce a draft bill that has already been prepared by me. Under this bill we will prosecute everyone who reports any corrupt act while ensuring that nobody of consequence from the government is harmed by it. Even the opposition will go along with us. After all they too have the deepest desire to serve the nation.
Lady Maindhi: Do you think it will work? What if that country bumpkin goes on another indefinite fast?
Mumble Singh: Madam you have forgotten how short people’s memories and interests are? I am sure civil society will see that it has been bested and in order not to look foolish again will desist from repeating its mistake.
Lady Maindhi: Well if you think so, then please put Sybil on the job right away.
Suddenly Lady Maindhi looks ill and collapses on a chair nearby.
Plumberji: (Alarmed) Madam, madam, what happened? Orre koi hai? Jol lao, doctor ke bulao.
Lady Maindhi: Oh I feel unwell. Suddenly my legs seemed to collapse under me. There is a sharp pain in my neck, and my head seems to be reeling. Please leave me now. I need some fresh air and rest.
All exit.
************************
SCENE 3
29th August 2011
No. 7 Ratrace Road, Prime Minister’s Office
Mumble Singh is sitting behind his desk. He is looking quite exhausted. The strain is visible and his face is chalk-white.
Enter Monty Spudseller.
Monty Spudseller: Phew boss! That was a close one. For a moment I thought you had blown it and nothing would save us. Seeing those crowds surging all over Ramlila Maidan, and the support this one Anna was getting across the land, I thought our time was up. I truly thought so. In fact I had told my wife to start packing as we would have to head straight for Washington where there is always a value for my services.
Mumble Singh: Look at me. I have never been so taxed. These last 13 days have been the longest in my life. I had to resort to all kinds of subterfuge, chicanery and plain silence to thwart the members of this civil society. But they seem to have anticipated all our moves and cut through us like a swarm of locusts. Even I thought that I had overplayed my hand and I may have to quit and retire into the moonlight. You at least can still go back to Washington. Where will I go? Even that humble apartment in Assam is a bogus address and I have never paid any rent. The landlord will not let me even enter. Eventually, I may also have to take asylum in America. I hope that Bush remembers how much I flattered him and told him that all Indians love him madly. But, then I recall how mentally deficient he is. By now I am sure he has forgotten all about me or India or even about Iraq.
Monty Spudseller: Quite so. But now don’t you think the situation is under control?
Mumble Singh: For the time being, yes. You see, it was I who suggested that we form a committee and appoint five of our ministers on it. The idea was to string the civil society members along and then ditch the whole process. That part of the script has worked beautifully. Plumberji and his committee stand completely exposed as a bunch of cheats. These five were the closest threats to my continuance as the Prime Minister. Now they are neutralized. Baabaa will always remain a threat, but I had to plan my move with him with utmost caution.
Monty Spudseller: I don’t quite follow how you have removed his threat.
Mumble Singh: You are still a kid. Fortunately Wahe Guru came to my aid. He struck Lady Maindhi with a dreadful ailment which has forced her to go abroad for immediate treatment. Naturally Binaca with her husband accompanied her. Baabaa too had to go and keep an eye on his brother-in-law. You never know when he might make Lady Maindhi sign some papers that would give him control over the Swiss accounts. These scrap merchants can never be trusted.
With the Maindhi clan out of my hair, I could plan my course without hindrance. First I let Sybil and Chewing Gum detain and send the Anna to Tihar jail. That I knew would create immense anger against them. Then I ordered his unconditional release the same evening. I let him have his Maidan where he could stage his fast. For the next eight days I let him stew in his own juice. You see, I know he has a lot of resilience, having been in the army for some years. When I felt the time had come I allowed some middlemen like a model-turned-godman to intervene. This was all eyewash. These middlemen were made to talk to Plumberji, Kapti Sybil and Halfman. I made it seem as if the government was willing to negotiate. Every time a breakthrough appeared to happen, I’d scuttle it. The masterstroke was my intervention in the two houses of parliament. All were expecting that I’d make a big announcement. But I kept them guessing and ultimately made it clear that the demands of the civil society would not be met. The fast was now entering a crucial phase. There was desperation on both sides. Again luck helped me. Baabaa’s first cousin, the estranged son of his uncle, put the civil society draft before the speaker as a private member’s bill. This was a godsend. I immediately informed Baabaa about this and he went berserk. “How dare that fat buffoon try to steal a march over me? I’ll show him his place. Tomorrow I’ll make an intervention in Parliament that will make history. Then we will see who becomes the true heir of the family throne!” he said.
Well, then you know what happened next. Baabaa made his intervention. I had already got it drafted for him and all he had to do was to read it from his ipad. And what a performance he gave? Clenching his fists and speaking as if he was declaring war on an enemy, he played the role of the pugnacious brat to the hilt.
That speech of his, my dear Monty, has finally removed any remaining aura he may have had. You should have seen the outrage in the public. People were marching from all over Delhi to his house to express their anger. Cleverly, I arranged to shut down the Metro stations near his residence. That caused more inconvenience to the public and built more resentment against him. Today I can say with confidence that Baabaa will not be any threat to me for the rest of the term of my government. His mother, if she returns from wherever she is getting treated, will not be able to tell me to keep the seat warm for her darling son. Changing the sheepskins every week! Let us see now who has the last laugh!! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Fade Out
THE END
(A Play in Three Acts)
Cast of Characters:
President of India: An unkempt man of 70 with a mop of hair brushed so it falls on the sides. He is wearing a Nehru jacket and trousers.
Lady Maindhi: A severe looking woman in her 60’s wearing a white saree.
Mumble Singh: A wispy old man with a blue turban, scraggly beard, and large spectacles. Owlish looking. Wearing a Nehru jacket and trousers
Plumberji: A short, balding, blunt looking man in his late 70’s. Wearing a closed Nehru jacket and trousers. Thick glasses.
Lady President of India: An unpleasant looking woman in her 70’s. Wears a coloured saree with palloo on her head.
Monty Spudseller: A strong looking man in his late 60’s wearing a blue turban, a suit with a tie.
ACT I
SCENE I
(Sometime in the year 2004)
A hall in the President’s office
Enter Lady Maindhi accompanied by Mumble Singh and Plumberji.
President greets the three and invites them to sit.
President: Ah, welcome, Lady Maindhi. I see you have Mumble Singh and Plumberji with you. How is the mood of the party now that you have won a majority in the Parliament?
Lady Maindhi: Thank you Mr. President. With the blessings of the Holy Virgin, our forces today have vanquished the armies of Satan with the help of our brethren who believe in the Holy Book. People have been falling over one another in their attempts to cajole me to lead them in this hour of triumph, and to make this nation as great as The Holy Roman Empire. I have come, Mr. President, with the list of the members who have expressed complete faith in my leadership and who are urging me to form the next government at the centre.
President: That is very good Lady Maindhi. I am sure the list must be authentic and I really do not have to look at it. So who is going to be the Prime Minister?
Lady Maindhi: (looking a bit surprised): But Mr. President, I thought you understood that the people want me to take up this post.
(Aside: “what a duffer this Bhajan Party has selected”)
Mumble Singh and Plumberji together: Yes, yes, Mr. President, Madam is the only choice of the country and we have come to seek your blessings before we make a formal announcement to the people.
President: Ah, yes! But before you came, this busybody Submarine Sammy had come here. He was sure that you would soon be coming to me with such a demand, and he told me that I should not accede to it as it would be illegal and liable to be challenged and struck down by the Supreme Court.
Lady Maindhi (looking very cross): Why, that good-for-nothing dark, Tamil rascal has the temerity to suggest that my appointment would be illegal? How dare he?
Plumberji (ingratiatingly and then angrily): Yes, yes madam, the first thing we have to do is to throw that man into the darkest cell of Tihar and lose the key. What brazenness, what blasphemy! The man is a horrible conspirator and should be quickly taught a lesson.
Mumble Singh (wringing his hands and looking sheepish): He thinks that just because he is a Harvard professor he can claim to know everything. He has forgotten what a long list of degrees I have acquired and how much more scholarly I am.
Lady Maindhi: (rather authoritatively): Well Mr. President, please let me have your letter immediately. Cannot keep the people waiting any longer!
President: Madam, I would be very happy to give you the letter, but I am afraid this Sammy has shown me the clause of reciprocity under which our citizens cannot hold the office of Prime Minister in the country of your birth, and accordingly you, not having been born in this country cannot become the Prime Minister here. Now if you have someone else in your party, I would be glad to issue the letter to him or her. And, by the way, there is no bar to your becoming a minister, but the objection is only to the office of the Prime Minister.
Lady Maindhi: (turning to Plumber): Hey, Plumber, you are a lawyer, aren’t you? Come on and read the law to the President.
Plumberji (looking downcast): Madam I have been so busy running the party affairs, first with your mother-in-law, and then with your husband that I have not practised law for a long time. I do not know if Sammy has got his onions right?
Lady Maindhi: Never mind his onions, or garlic. Call that stupid Weesingh immediately and ask him where we stand.
Plumberji: Yes, yes, ma’am. (Goes aside and makes a call from his cell phone).
(Loud) Madam, Weesingh says that daft Sammy is right. Madam what shall we do now???
Lady Maindhi (getting up): Well Mr. President, we have to go and discuss this development with my family and other pets. We will be back soon.
President: Any time Lady, any time.
All exit.
***********************
SCENE 2
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10, Lokpath
Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh and Plumberji. Lady Maindhi looking visibly agitated mumbling threats and imprecations against everybody. Plumberji in most ingratiating manner trying to suggest to Lady Maindhi:
Plumberji: If I may say so madam, why don’t we recommend the name of your Binacaji? After all she is born here and cannot be disbarred.
Mumble Singh: But Plumberji, Binacaji has said she doesn’t want to enter politics. She and her husband Bobbyji are busy raising funds for the party to fight the future electoral battles. After all we have to think of the nation and its poor people. We must not take Binacaji away from her national duty.
Plumberji: Madam, in that case why not make our Baabaa the Prime Minister? So what if he is not very qualified or experienced. Mumble Singh and I will stand shoulder to shoulder with him and make sure he does not falter.
Mumble Singh (aside): Your shoulder will reach Baabaa’s knees, you rogue. You think you can wheedle your way in and lick the cream.
Lady Maindhi: Enough! I have heard the two of you talking rubbish. Neither Binaca nor Baabaa is going to sit on that chair while I am alive.
Aside: (You think I married that fool in England just to be a dumb housewife listening to that tyrannical mother of his. Thank God she is no longer around to torment us all. For that we have to thank the guards who rose to the occasion and rid us of that monster.)
(Loud): Now we have to think of someone else since I am sure that foolish man with the stupid haircut will be difficult to persuade. Oh I can’t understand why those idiots of the Bhajan Party made him the President? Anyway, his term will soon end and then we will show him his proper place.
Aside: (Just to think how much I have waited for this opportunity, only to be scuttled by that interfering Sammy and this kalam-pusher. Fortunately that Gorbachev finished the USSR and the KGB; otherwise today they would have been at my throat demanding all that money back. Good for them. Their money is now safe in my Swiss bank account where nobody can touch it. Even my dear Lotus, who had a share in it, is mercifully gone, and I alone can operate that account and enjoy its fruits. But how much more delicious it would have been had I become the Prime Minister today. Oh what shall I do now?
Mumble Singh (approaching timidly): Madam I have an idea. Plumberji is the most senior member of our party. He has worked with your mother-in-law, and he served her most faithfully. After her tragic assassination he thought he should have been asked to form the government, but that President Jhadoo Singh, in his infinite wisdom, chose instead to call your dear husband. I beg you, madam, let Plumberji have the post that he surely deserves. His skills in plugging leaks and stemming runaway floods of allies and partymen are well known. He will serve you as faithfully as your family and I will support him at all times.
Lady Maindhi: Thank you Mumble for reminding me of those terrible times. The earth really shook when that mighty tree was felled. By the way, how many of your faith committed suicide to show their anguish at the bodyguard’s foul deed, and atoned for that terrible crime?
Mumble Singh: I believe, madam, there were more than 3500 of them who lit instant pyres using anything inflammable they could lay their hands upon, like tyres etc., and committed sati like the Rajput ladies of yore. Our able members Durjan Kumarji, Tattlersahib, Bagulabhagatji really worked hard to help these martyrs in their cause. It was not easy but within three days they showed what metal they were made of and lit the greatest homage to our fallen leader.
Lady Maindhi: And where were you at that time? Why didn’t you show the same respect?
Mumble Singh: Oh Madam, I had gone to my native place for some urgent domestic work. Also you may recall, I was not a politician then, just a bureaucrat. By the time I came back, your dear husband had said that enough homage had been paid and that the stalwarts of the party had worked tirelessly for too long and they needed some rest. More such occasions could be sought when homage would be paid to the departed leader.
Plumberji: (Interjecting): So madam, should we draft a new letter asking the President to approve my name?
Lady Maindhi: Wait! How impatient you look?
Aside (I can see you are already dreaming about the loaves and fishes of office. I know how you love to eat fish, especially that loathsome Maachher jhol that stinks to high heavens. But how can I forget that you had told that family retainer Jhadoo to swear you in even before my darling Lotus had boarded the plane that was to bring him to Delhi. No, you cannot be trusted)
Turning to Mumble Singh
(Loud) Well Mumble what do you say if we go back with your name instead of mine?
Mumble Singh, overcome with emotion falls at Lady Maindhi’s feet and while trying to look down, cannot but help letting a sly smile creep up to the corners of his mouth.
Mumble Singh: Oh madam, I am so unworthy of this august office that had been held first by that giant among us, your mother-in-law’s father, then by her and after her by that shining star of the country, your late husband. Madam, please reconsider. I am totally unworthy to sit in the chair from which such godlike people, divinely ordained, dispensed justice and largesse among the people of this country.
Lady Maindhi: Oh stop talking nonsense. Didn’t that nincompoop Barasingarao occupy it for full five years? Weren’t you his Finance Minister? So if he can sit on that chair, why can’t you? After all you are also not from the dynasty.
Mumble Singh: But Madam, while I was serving him, I was always looking towards you for guidance, and my eyes were constantly turned towards 10, Lokpath. You might have also noticed that when this imposter died and his followers tried to bring his body into the Party’s Headquarters, how stoutly the party members resisted that move. Did I even utter one word in his favour? No madam, because I knew he was just an interloper, even like the last Prime Minister we had from the Bhajan Party who was prone to writing and reciting poetry at every possible opportunity, instead of trying to do some real honest work. Please madam, do refrain from suggesting my unworthy name.
Aside: (Plumberji, now your goose is truly cooked. Just see how this putli will dance to my tune).
All exit.
******************************
SCENE 3
Back in the President’s office. Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh and Plumberji.
President: Well, well, Lady Maindhi, have you consulted your family and pets? What is the decision?
Lady Maindhi: Oh, Mr. President, how I wish you were there? You would have heard the most heart-rending cries from the faithful, who just could not understand how that unworthy Submarine Sammy had wrecked all their hopes to see me anointed as the undisputed queen of this land. How they cried and beseeched me to reconsider? Oh what disappointments on their faces when I refused like Julius Caesar who had refused the crown three times? But eventually they understood and reconciled to their fate.
Well, Mr. President, we have decided to make this Mumble Singh here the leader of the house and he shall rule in my place till our Baabaa is ready to take over the command as is his rightful duty. Meanwhile, Mumble Singh will keep the seat warm by placing a sheepskin over the cushions in order not to pollute it with his rather too frequent gassy disseminations. By the way, Mumble, why do you eat so much dal? Why can’t you eat pasta like normal people?
President: A very good decision, Lady Maindhi, I daresay. Mumble Singh has all the qualifications for this office and although he is not an elected Member of Parliament, I am sure you would have thought of a safe constituency for him to fight a bye-election.
Lady Maindhi: No Mr. President, Mumble Singh cannot win an election even from the safest seat in Andhera Pradesh., where my loyal pet would be ready to ensure his success. We will have to think of a Rajya Sabha seat for him. I think Assam would be the right place, what with more than half the population consisting of illegal immigrants. We will smuggle in our Mumble Singh as one more and no one will notice. Anyway, he is hardly audible or noticeable. We will make Google search for a place for him and Google can be trusted to create a residence record for him.
President: Well, in that case Lady Maindhi, you may declare Mumble Singh as the leader and form the next government at the centre.
Signs the letter in front of him.
Here you are.
Shaking Mumble Singh’s hand,” Congratulations Mumble Singhji!. Today you have become the Prime Minister of this great nation. I hope you will prove to be its worthy son! Good luck, and may God Bless you!”
Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh, and Plumberji exit.
President: Oh my countrymen, today I truly fear for you. The quirks of our electoral system have thrown up this unholy combination like the pot of poison that the churning of the oceans had thrown up. But then there was a God to swallow the poison and hold it in his throat. Today there are no gods and no devatas. Only puny, ambitious people, who will spread this poison among the multitudes, the hapless and the poor. Mark my words; this Mumble Singh is not as innocent as he looks. He nurtures within his bosom the grossest ambition and like Dr Faustus will not be loath to make a pact with the Devil if it gives him the power to rule. His ingratiating smile is the smile of the fox before it pounces upon his prey. Make no mistake; he will ruin this country for sure.
Fade.
*******************************
ACT II
SCENE 1
Five years later. Year 2009. The Hall in the President’s Office.
New President, a lady in a saree is seated in her chair.
Enter Lady Maindhi, Mumble Singh.
Lady Maindhi: Greetings Madam President. As you must know, our coalition has again swept the elections. We have come to you for the formality of your permission to form the next government at the centre.
President: Yes, my dear Lady Maindhi. I was quite sure of these results. After all didn’t we have our own man as the Election Commissioner? How we stuck to our guns and appointed him in spite of the combined assaults of the opposition? I am glad you didn’t give that silly kalam-pusher another term in the office. One never knew what was happening under that mop of his. If that Nevla had not become the Election Commissioner, you may not have been able to get enough seats. You saw how at the last minute your candidates were declared victors even though they were trailing in the beginning. Even that cocky Chewing Gum had to be rescued by Nevlaji. Now you see how important money becomes and its control? Why do you think we have such an interest in cooperative banks?
By the way, I have heard that you have decided to continue with Mumble Singhji as the Prime Minister till our Baabaa is fully ready to take on this onerous responsibility from his aging shoulders. What a day that will be? Once anointed, he will rule till the people completely forget the names of opposition parties and their leaders.
And oh, Lady Maindhi, I hope you have considered my name for the next term. Unfortunately our constitution does not permit more than two terms for the President. Else I would have requested you to keep me here in perpetuity to guide and help Baabaa. Maybe, Mumble Singhji you should think of the possibility of amending the constitution in this respect.
Mumble Singh: Sure Madam President. I will instruct the next law minister to seriously look into it.
President: (signing the letter): Here you are Lady Maindhi. Please go ahead and announce your new cabinet. I shall be pleased to swear them in at an auspicious hour of your choice.
Lady Maindhi: Thank you madam President.
(Aside): You really believe I will nominate you once more? Let your term finish and then you go back to the village from where we plucked you. We need this office for Mumble Singh and Plumberji when my Baabaa becomes the Prime Minister.
(Loud): All right Mumble, let us go. We have a lot of work to do.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam.
All exit.
*************************************
SCENE 2
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10 Lokpath
Enter Lady Maindhi with Mumble Singh in tow.
Lady Maindhi: Mumble Singhji please sit down. Now let us finalize the cabinet. You, of course, will continue to warm the seat for Baabaa. By the way, have that sheepskin replaced. By now it must be stinking to high heavens. I don’t know when Baabaa will be ready and it may happen anytime; so I suggest you change the covering every week.
Mumble Singh: As you please Lady Maindhi. I will give an order for a new sheepskin to be put on the chair every week.
Lady Maindhi: Good. Now let me see. During the last term of five years we have not served the nation too well. You know, we allowed that Sugar Daddy and his sidekick Playful Petal to skim the cream and now see where they have reached. The first one is controlling the richest sport in the country and the second one has brought our Maharaja to utter ruin while enriching toddy tappers and elfin upstarts.
Mumble Singh: True madam. I am also learning that Sugar Daddy has become the richest man in the world, owning, I believe huge amounts of land in America and God knows where else.
Lady Maindhi: Even I have heard that. Can’t understand what he needs all that money for. After all he has only one daughter and she too is well settled. Now look at me, two children. My girl had to select that scrap merchant without any means, and how hard I have to work to make him respectable. Why, I had to literally twist the arms of that land-baron of Gurgaon to give my son-in-law a small share in his business. And look at Baabaa. He has found this floozy from some drugland and he won’t let go of her. Here I am working my bones off to make both ends meet, and he is gallivanting with her from an American lock-up to god knows where.
Mumble, this time we must not allow these interlopers to do all the service. We must replace them and show the nation who their true well wishers are.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam. May I suggest we keep Sugar Daddy in his ministry of Food & Agriculture? I will make such policies that will send inflation almost vertically up. That will cook his goose for sure. After all I have been with the World Bank for so many years. That is all we do in the Bank anyway. Our policies are designed to make nation’s bankrupt and whole populations destitute. We have a special expertise in this area. By the way I will advise Monty Spudseller to immediately implement the plan to ensure double-digit inflation in fifteen days’ time.
Lady Maindhi: Good. Let Plumberji continue to hold Finance. He cannot read one Balance Sheet from another and his budgets are as confusing as his pronunciation. But he is useful as the oldest member of our party and can be trusted to keep stray sheep in the pen. Also keep Chewing Gum in his Home portfolio. He is a meddlesome fellow and thinks he knows everything. Even as a lawyer he has nothing much to show. I would rather trust his wife more at any time. But he is verbose and uses long, dramatic sentences to say nothing. His put-on accent also helps in keeping news editors amused. Besides, he was too cunning in his previous job where he allowed his son to manipulate the stock market and we have heard that the rogue has made a tidy pile of a few thousand crores through his father’s P Note and other leaks. We will sort that little brat when the time comes, but let us ensure that Chewing Gum does no further damage in this area.
Mumble Singh: Right madam.
(Aside) Fortunately our friendly neighbours from across the border came in with their timely help and sent that Kasai and his team to clean up a bit of our Big City. How I used that opportunity to get rid of that paramour of yours? As Home minister he was a complete mess, though I believe he would spend hours in front of the mirror to try new clothes and hair gels. I don’t know what you saw in him, neither brains nor personality? But then who can understand the mind of a frustrated woman?
(Loud) And madam, may I suggest we give the education portfolio to Kapti Sybil. You know how many split personalities he carries! Every time he raises his eyebrow, like that screen-villain K. N. Singh, he looks so different. Madam he also has a great ability with numbers. He can make any number disappear and make it look like a round figure. He will raise our standards so high that in no time we will have zero illiteracy and zero absenteeism from schools and colleges.
Lady Maindhi: All right. I don’t much like him myself, but he is dangerous and should be kept in good humour.
Mumble Singh: Madam there is a lot of pressure from our ally in the south. His party is our largest partner and he is demanding a number of cabinet posts. Especially he wants cabinet ranks for his son, nephew, and one more that I am not sure if he is his son from a wife we know nothing about.
Lady Maindhi: What is his name?
Mumble Singh: He is called a raja but I am not sure if that is also his name. Maybe he is a prince of some little estate in the hills.
Lady Maindhi: Oh that raja. Don’t worry. He is not the old man’s son. My sources tell me that he is actually his son-in-law on the sly. I believe there is something between this raja and the old man’s daughter who has taken to writing poetry. Anyway, give him the Telecom portfolio. I am sure he will make a very useful contribution in that post.
And tell the old man we cannot accommodate his son, that good-for-nothing Hara-kiri. In fact he should suggest that course for him. The fool cannot speak one word of English or Hindi. What will he do here in Delhi? Even the south Indian stenographers have become extinct in this computer age.
Mumble Singh: But madam we cannot afford to displease the blind, old man. Why don’t we give Hara-kiri Chemicals & Fertilizers? As it is these industries are frowned upon by the green activists and we may soon have to shut them down and outsource our requirements from the poor countries of Africa. If he resists shutting these industries the public will be angry with him, thereby saving us any embarrassment. His lack of communication will also annoy the people and I am sure he will ask us to relieve him of this burden.
Lady Maindhi: Good thinking, Mumble Singh. I didn’t know you had this ability.
Mumble Singh: (Aside) there is a lot you don’t know about me. Just wait and see how I twist you around my little finger. Changing the sheepskin every week! Wait and see how I will keep that yuppie puppy of yours cooling his dandy heels in the party office.
Loud: (ingratiatingly) Madam is too kind. Otherwise what is my worth?
And madam, to keep the old man happy we will give his nephew the Textile ministry. I have heard from my sources that the young man used to run a small garment unit before his father cemented his place in the government. So, he has first-hand experience of the industry. Further, there is not much money to be made here. Recession in the west and Chinese domination of the market will ensure the industry remains in the doldrums. We will upgrade him to cabinet rank so he will be able to flaunt his suits and ties. Quite a dandy isn’t he!
Lady Maindhi: Fine. So I think all the problem people have been taken care of.
Mumble Singh: Yes, almost madam. There remains the matter of that cantankerous woman from Banga. She buys new sarees and then deliberately crumples them up in order to look woeful and poor. I understand she never repeats a saree. Have you seen how her hair is also deliberately unkempt to go with the image? Actually she is an ambitious little witch and will do anything to be able to rule the state. However, we will have assembly elections there soon. Till then let us give her the Railways. This department has been doing without a minister for some time now, and the babus there are actually running it well. The last minister, that mumbling, bumpkin of a fodder-thief found himself completely off his tracks in this ministry and allowed it to run on its own, as he understood nothing of the technology or the logistics. The babus have found the arrangement very useful and have not troubled the minister at all. They would do the same with this Ditty from Banga and we will reap the benefit of trains actually running on time. She will spend all her time and energy in Banga trying to destabilize the incumbent party who have anyway done enough and more to destroy that state. Anybody can win an election against them this time. So, the chances are that Ditty will win and form the next govt. there. We should keep her in good humour and latch on to her sari palloo for some seats in the elections. Once she goes there, she is out of our hair for good.
Lady Maindhi: Smart thinking Mumbleji. Now we must hurry and finish the formation of the cabinet. Swearing-in has to happen tomorrow as it is the most auspicious day in the calendar. The Cardinal himself called me from the Vatican and told me the day and the time that would be most suitable for such a great event to take place.
They start poring over the list of names and filling the posts.
Fade out.
******************************
SCENE 3
Prime Minister’s Office at 7, Ratrace Road
Enter Mumble Singh, addressing the audience
Mumble Singh: Oh! What a relief! Swearing-in is over and all the lip-smacking vultures have got their pounds of flesh. How easily I have manoeuvred the whole lot to my advantage! Another five years! Could anyone have imagined that I would be the Prime Minister of this country for ten years? TEN YEARS. And that too without having to win an election! Yes. Can you imagine me getting my feet dirty in the hustle-bustle of election rallies, running from one dirty village to another, picking up snotty little brats and wiping their bottoms? No, thank Wahi Guru for these mercies. Nobody can remove me from here now. Not that Plumberji, nor that chhokra who would like to be king. Change the sheepskins every week, my foot! What does she think? I am just a windbag farting around all the time? No, I am not a fool. Not for nothing have I been plotting ever since that Submarine Sammy told me about the reciprocity clause. It was destined that I should be in this chair today. Otherwise why would Plumberji have contrived to fall out of favour? No sir, your man of destiny is standing before you today. Be sure you watch his rise and continuous rise!!!
Enter Monty Spudseller
Monty Spudseller: Congratulations Boss! What a brilliant performance! Now what are my orders?
Mumble Singh: Monty, we have known each other for a long time now, even though you are so many years junior to me. After all we have worked for the same great organization that is the foremost expert in making healthy nations sick and completely ruining the sick ones. Now, we have retained Sugar Daddy in the Food & Agriculture ministry. He thinks he is the kingmaker because he has amassed all this enormous wealth. We want to put him in his place so that he never ever dares to glance at the Prime Minister’s chair, which, we know, he covets so much. Let your planning department create a situation where the country has galloping inflation in food products. As a matter of fact, I have promised Lady Maindhi that you will have a double digit rate of inflation within two weeks. So get along with the job.
Monty Spudseller: But sir, the agricultural production figures are very good and it will be difficult to raise the prices when supplies are profuse.
Mumble Singh: What nonsense! It is so easy. Just ask Food Corporation to buy all the food produced by raising minimum procurement prices. FCI doesn’t have enough storage space for all that grain and they will leave it in the open only to be destroyed by the elements and rodents. Simultaneously allow private buyers to buy as much as they can and let them hoard it, by selectively leaking this policy to them. You can depend upon the covetousness of your merchant classes to help you to the maximum in this noble endeavour. Soon your surplus will turn into a shortage. And then see the graph rising! That will put paid to any ambitions Sugar Daddy might have harboured.
Monty Spudseller: Brilliant sir. But what about Baabaa? How do you keep him in check?
Mumble Singh: You are still too young to understand the workings of a Faustian mind. Only when you have mastered all the arts and sciences do you look towards those teachers who can give you the knowledge of total control. I was lucky to have been apprenticed by that artful master Barasingarao who taught me so much. But what I learnt most from him was the art of total “inaction”. You do remember his famous statement; “taking no decision is also a decision”. How do you manipulate people and situations without appearing to be doing anything and yet things happen exactly as you wish and desire? I learnt this from Barasingarao, till then the only person who had completed a full five years as Prime Minister without belonging to the first family. How he managed to destroy the credibility of the Bhajan party by allowing them to demolish a disused mosque would have done credit even to Senor Machiavelli? And the manner in which he fixed those junglees from Jharkhand was just amazing. Have you ever heard of large sums of cash given as bribe for votes being deposited in Bank accounts? Just look at the deep divisions he has left as his legacy. Not even that Mandal-vandal could achieve so much with his cock-eyed policies. It was his ego that got the better of him and his edifice came tumbling down like a house of cards. Now look at me. Do you see any ego? Similarly did Barasingha have an ego? No. That, my dear Monty, is the secret. All these Chewing Gums, Baabaas, Kapti Sybils have huge ego problems. They can never reach the heights that men like me can. The only person who could really be a threat is Plumberji, but his indiscretion in 1984 has sealed his fate. Now just keep doing what I tell you and we both will reap the benefits.
Monty Spudseller: What benefits sir? In our last term what have we made?
Mumble Singh: You are too immature. Is money everything for you? Haven’t you read your Faust? What did he ask for when the devil gave him his powers? Did he ask for diamonds and palaces or any such things? No. All he asked for were some fruit that was out of season and some exotic delicacies. Played some harmless tricks on the Pope. Yes, what he really hankered for most was the kiss of Helen, the queen of Sparta. You see, I do not even desire that. What would you get from the fleeting kiss of a dead queen? After all how much money do you need? Hasn’t the state taken care of all our needs? Is there anything we want that has not been provided? It is only the shallow minds that want to hoard and collect filthy lucre. Look at Sugar Daddy. He may be the richest man in the world, but what good is his money? Cannot even keep his lips straight. And all the time worried about his connections with the resident of Clifton Karachi. What has that connection got him? Maybe a few thousand crores. But is he going to take them with him to the next world? No, all that will remain here. But one word of indiscretion and he is finished. I am sure he must not even be sleeping well. Or look at our patron Lady Maindhi herself. What has she got from all that money she keeps in Swiss banks? She has opened herself to blackmail by Cockroachies and such unsavoury characters. What for? Just a few billion dollars in foreign banks? Now look at me. Could you seriously have thought that I would be requested, yes REQUESTED, to occupy this office by a descendent of the Imperial family? Me, a man without any properties! No money or assets worth the name! But here I am, dear Monty. Listen to me and keep following my instructions. You and I will still make history in this land.
Now go, and put the wheels in motion.
Both exit.
******************************
ACT 3
SCENE 1
Sometime in March 2011
Lady Maindhi’s residence at 10 Lokpath
Enter Plumberji
Plumberji: Good Morning Lady Maindhi. Did you wish to see me madam?
Lady Maindhi: (irritatingly) Yes Plumberji. What is this nonsense going on about corruption in the country? I am being told that the Supreme Court has started asking silly questions about spectrum allocation, commonwealth games, and some foreign accounts. Since when have the courts bothered about such trivial things? Don’t they have anything better to do?
Plumberji: I beg your pardon madam but our chosen people for some jobs seem to have gone overboard and now the media and the opposition parties have got some whiff of the situation.
Lady Maindhi: What nonsense? We had placed very trusted people in charge. Mumble Singh suggested the name of that raja for telecom and Golmali has been the chief of the Olympic Association for as long as I can remember. They have done no corruption. All the money they raised through spectrum sale and contracts for stadia has been fully accounted for and every rupee deposited in our accounts. And, of course, in the process if they have skimmed a few rupees off the top, should it really worry the courts? Ask Bahuji and she will confirm that what I am saying about Golmali is true. After all she is one great book-keeper. You remember when her father-in-law was the chief Minister of UP. It was she who managed all the books. Tell the media to speak to her. As for the telecom guy, he is too daft to even understand what skimming-off-the top means.
Plumberji: Yes madam. But the problem is that the CAG has done some calculations according to which the loss in spectrum sale is a huge number that I cannot even write down on one piece of paper. Similarly the loss in Commonwealth Games has been estimated to run to tens of thousands of crores. It seems our Income Tax department has been snooping upon some Nadia dame whose telephone conversations have been taped. I hear she has been promising heaven and earth to all and sundry. The opposition is asking for answers and won’t permit the Parliament to function.
Lady Maindhi: Oh Plumberji, you are so tiresome. Anyway, isn’t the IT department under you? How did they do such a stupid thing without your knowledge? And as for the Parliament, what difference does it make if it works or not? When has the Parliament done anything even when it functions? These opposition wallahs are just a bunch of buffoons. Throw a few crumbs to them and see how they will crawl. Go and do it at once. You know whom to use for this purpose. Speak to Dumbersing who will arrange everything. Also talk to that Dotty Bukbuk and tell her to shed some crocodile tears on TV. That should soothe some hearts.
Plumberji: Madam, it is not just the opposition. It seems a new beast called civil society has suddenly taken birth. It is a very strange animal. At its head is an old demonetized Anna coin in a dhoti-kurta, while the rest of its body is made of thousands of clones wearing Gandhi caps and claiming to be Anna coins too. This animal is threatening to launch a country-wide agitation if all the skimmers-off-the-top are not put in jail.
Lady Maindhi: But I thought the Anna coins had been taken out of circulation more than fifty years ago. How come they are still around? Why don’t you just put this beast in Tihar jail and be done with it? What is so difficult about it?
Plumberji: But madam, this animal cannot be put in jail. It is the size of a behemoth and no jail is large enough to contain it. We have to do something about it before it gets out of our control.
Lady Maindhi: Ok. If you are so disturbed then throw that raja and his rani into jail. Even dump Golmali there. Anyway he suffers from dementia and cannot remember his own name. If you need to round up a few more people you can throw a few of the IAS officers and some businessmen in there too. Only make sure that the really important ones are not touched.
Plumberji: Like, madam?
Lady Maindhi: Look, I don’t want you to bring any harm to my Aamdani brothers. Especially the older one! I have so much reliance on his expertise in creating wealth from nowhere. He was very well trained by his father. Do you know how close he had become to my mother-in-law? She did nothing without his permission. Unfortunately, the younger one has gone astray. He has made some very silly friends and his wife is no good. That is why he has been throwing rocks at some Miss Universe bimbo. But still, in his father’s memory, I’d like to protect him. You can haul up some of his executives and give them the treatment but do not harm him.
Plumberji: As you say madam. But the head of this civil society beast has threatened to go on indefinite fast if we do not bring in a piece of legislation and appoint an ombudsman that will oversee corruption in the whole country. They want to call him a LOKPAL.
Lady Maindhi: LOKPAL! Why would they like to have a caretaker for my road?
Plumberji: Not your road madam. The Lokpal will be a central authority that will have powers of investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner. Kind of a multi-headed, multi-limbed being, as we have in our Hindu mythology.
Lady Maindhi: Oh you and your Hinduism! Such a stupid religion! Three hundred crore gods, and yet they cannot find an Indian to rule them. See how within only fifty years after independence from the British they have fallen on my feet to rule them? I tell you, you cannot govern by yourselves. You need a foreigner to whip you into shape. Now here is what I want you to do:
Throw that raja and his rani into jail
Give his job to Kapti Sybil. He will make all the figures that you cannot write on a piece of paper vanish into thin air and show that the loss is one big zero. Next, unleash that Doggy from my kennel and let him loose upon this new beast. He will tear it to shreds in no time.
Tell our pet columnists and editors to start a campaign discrediting the move by the head of this beast. Call upon people like the overbloated editor of Outrageousview and his supercilious, smirking namesake of Waqt Hindustani to write scathing articles and editorials on the proposed fast. Start a blitz on our pet 24x7 TV channels and let our spokespersons Phoney Itwari, Jonty Nattery, with some guidance from Dotty Bukbuk, the screaming Naggarica Behosh and her blinking husband throw every kind of accusation on this beast and discredit it completely. You see it will self-destruct in no time.
Now go and put this whole operation into active mode.
Exit.
********************************
SCENE 2
Sometime in April 2011
No. 10, Lokpath
Meeting going on between Mumble Singh, Plumberji and Lady Maindhi
Lady Maindhi: Mumble Singh, I am told the crowds are getting bigger and bigger at the site of the fast.
Mumble Singh: Yes madam. The old geezer is proving quite a draw, and attracting a lot of young people to his cause. We have tried to dissuade them gently not to be swayed by what he says, but so far it does not seem to have worked.
Lady Maindhi: What do you think we should do? Maybe you should offer to resign. Our Baabaa can take over. He is young like these crowds. I am sure he will be able to strike a chord with them.
Mumble Singh: If you think so madam, I’m most willing to step aside and let Baabaa handle the situation. After all he will have to do it one day. But are you sure this is the right time? Young people are most unpredictable. Also the image of our government is not very bright. You have put the Telecom minister in jail as well as the MP from Pune. A number of senior bureaucrats and noted business barons are breaking bread in Tihar. The CAG and PAC are dead against us. Many more scandals are waiting to be exposed. Do you think we should let these burdens fall on the young, delicate shoulders of Baabaa?
Lady Maindhi: Maybe you are right. So what do you suggest?
Mumble Singh: Madam let us send Kapti Sybil to talk to this village fool. Sybil will twist him with honeyed words and promise him everything. Oh he can be no match for that wily fox. Let him promise that we will make a joint drafting committee with five of their members and five from our side. Plumberji here will chair this committee. Sybil, Chewing Gum, Oily Moily and Halfman will be the other members. Let them nominate any five from their side. I am sure that with Sybil and Chewing Gum they will make no progress at all and after the tempers have cooled and all the agitators have gone back to their homes, Plumberji will announce a breakdown in talks and produce a draft bill that has already been prepared by me. Under this bill we will prosecute everyone who reports any corrupt act while ensuring that nobody of consequence from the government is harmed by it. Even the opposition will go along with us. After all they too have the deepest desire to serve the nation.
Lady Maindhi: Do you think it will work? What if that country bumpkin goes on another indefinite fast?
Mumble Singh: Madam you have forgotten how short people’s memories and interests are? I am sure civil society will see that it has been bested and in order not to look foolish again will desist from repeating its mistake.
Lady Maindhi: Well if you think so, then please put Sybil on the job right away.
Suddenly Lady Maindhi looks ill and collapses on a chair nearby.
Plumberji: (Alarmed) Madam, madam, what happened? Orre koi hai? Jol lao, doctor ke bulao.
Lady Maindhi: Oh I feel unwell. Suddenly my legs seemed to collapse under me. There is a sharp pain in my neck, and my head seems to be reeling. Please leave me now. I need some fresh air and rest.
All exit.
************************
SCENE 3
29th August 2011
No. 7 Ratrace Road, Prime Minister’s Office
Mumble Singh is sitting behind his desk. He is looking quite exhausted. The strain is visible and his face is chalk-white.
Enter Monty Spudseller.
Monty Spudseller: Phew boss! That was a close one. For a moment I thought you had blown it and nothing would save us. Seeing those crowds surging all over Ramlila Maidan, and the support this one Anna was getting across the land, I thought our time was up. I truly thought so. In fact I had told my wife to start packing as we would have to head straight for Washington where there is always a value for my services.
Mumble Singh: Look at me. I have never been so taxed. These last 13 days have been the longest in my life. I had to resort to all kinds of subterfuge, chicanery and plain silence to thwart the members of this civil society. But they seem to have anticipated all our moves and cut through us like a swarm of locusts. Even I thought that I had overplayed my hand and I may have to quit and retire into the moonlight. You at least can still go back to Washington. Where will I go? Even that humble apartment in Assam is a bogus address and I have never paid any rent. The landlord will not let me even enter. Eventually, I may also have to take asylum in America. I hope that Bush remembers how much I flattered him and told him that all Indians love him madly. But, then I recall how mentally deficient he is. By now I am sure he has forgotten all about me or India or even about Iraq.
Monty Spudseller: Quite so. But now don’t you think the situation is under control?
Mumble Singh: For the time being, yes. You see, it was I who suggested that we form a committee and appoint five of our ministers on it. The idea was to string the civil society members along and then ditch the whole process. That part of the script has worked beautifully. Plumberji and his committee stand completely exposed as a bunch of cheats. These five were the closest threats to my continuance as the Prime Minister. Now they are neutralized. Baabaa will always remain a threat, but I had to plan my move with him with utmost caution.
Monty Spudseller: I don’t quite follow how you have removed his threat.
Mumble Singh: You are still a kid. Fortunately Wahe Guru came to my aid. He struck Lady Maindhi with a dreadful ailment which has forced her to go abroad for immediate treatment. Naturally Binaca with her husband accompanied her. Baabaa too had to go and keep an eye on his brother-in-law. You never know when he might make Lady Maindhi sign some papers that would give him control over the Swiss accounts. These scrap merchants can never be trusted.
With the Maindhi clan out of my hair, I could plan my course without hindrance. First I let Sybil and Chewing Gum detain and send the Anna to Tihar jail. That I knew would create immense anger against them. Then I ordered his unconditional release the same evening. I let him have his Maidan where he could stage his fast. For the next eight days I let him stew in his own juice. You see, I know he has a lot of resilience, having been in the army for some years. When I felt the time had come I allowed some middlemen like a model-turned-godman to intervene. This was all eyewash. These middlemen were made to talk to Plumberji, Kapti Sybil and Halfman. I made it seem as if the government was willing to negotiate. Every time a breakthrough appeared to happen, I’d scuttle it. The masterstroke was my intervention in the two houses of parliament. All were expecting that I’d make a big announcement. But I kept them guessing and ultimately made it clear that the demands of the civil society would not be met. The fast was now entering a crucial phase. There was desperation on both sides. Again luck helped me. Baabaa’s first cousin, the estranged son of his uncle, put the civil society draft before the speaker as a private member’s bill. This was a godsend. I immediately informed Baabaa about this and he went berserk. “How dare that fat buffoon try to steal a march over me? I’ll show him his place. Tomorrow I’ll make an intervention in Parliament that will make history. Then we will see who becomes the true heir of the family throne!” he said.
Well, then you know what happened next. Baabaa made his intervention. I had already got it drafted for him and all he had to do was to read it from his ipad. And what a performance he gave? Clenching his fists and speaking as if he was declaring war on an enemy, he played the role of the pugnacious brat to the hilt.
That speech of his, my dear Monty, has finally removed any remaining aura he may have had. You should have seen the outrage in the public. People were marching from all over Delhi to his house to express their anger. Cleverly, I arranged to shut down the Metro stations near his residence. That caused more inconvenience to the public and built more resentment against him. Today I can say with confidence that Baabaa will not be any threat to me for the rest of the term of my government. His mother, if she returns from wherever she is getting treated, will not be able to tell me to keep the seat warm for her darling son. Changing the sheepskins every week! Let us see now who has the last laugh!! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Fade Out
THE END
Thursday, September 22, 2011
No, Arundhati Roy is not Anna!
I know Anna Hazare is not Arundhati Roy. He does not possess her facility with words, especially of the English language. He is just a semi-literate villager, from a nondescript village in Maharashtra; an ex-Havildar of the Indian Army, honourably discharged after service with a minor medal. He cannot claim to have won the Booker or any other glittering award, nor has he written such scathing attacks on the establishments worldwide as Ms Roy has in “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire”, books for which she must have received hefty sums from publishers. Such is her influence in the literary world that a publisher had paid a royal sum even before the novel “The God of Small Things” was written. I am not asking whose money owns these publishing firms, but you can bet that some “Captains of the Corporate” world would have had something to do with them. Of course, what she did with all that money is not my concern. The lady from Ayemenem is certainly entitled to use it in whichever way she likes.
But I know what Anna Hazare did with the meagre retirement fund that he received after being discharged from the army. He spent it all on his village Ralegan Siddhi in an attempt to better the lives of his fellow villagers. Today Ralegan Siddhi is a model village from where alcohol has been banished, where primary healthcare centres function, where schools have teachers and students. Anna lives amidst his people, in an 8 x 10 feet room in the village temple, and his possessions would probably be less than what a sadhu in the upper Himalayas would have. Some people have complained that he is a dictator and has forced the villagers to abjure alcohol and other evils. I cannot understand how an unarmed man, without a gang of enforcers, can make a whole village to follow his diktats. Unless it is some moral pressure that only those who have led a moral life can command. I don’t know how Ayemenem is doing, because its most famous resident has not lived there for a very long time, and has not enlightened us about its condition. Maybe Ms Roy should pay a visit to both Anna’s village and her own.
There was a time when I used to admire Ms Roy for her bold and forthright views on the dehumanisation of societies at large and the manner in which she used to take on the establishments on matters of human rights, land reforms, and other political and social issues. Almost three years ago when she made her bold statement that “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India” I had come out in support of her and an article written by me was published by The New Indian Express on 1st September 2008 on its Op-Ed page. I believed that she had understood the Kashmir problem well and had come to the same conclusion that an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, had written in 1952, that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in “India After Gandhi” writes, “Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.”
Subsequent events proved that her Kashmir slogan was nothing but a call for the vivisection of this nation; her call for Azadi but a hollow statement when she said “Indian government is a hollow superpower, and I dissociate from it.” Comparing the protests in Kashmir to the protests of the naxals operating in central India and elsewhere, she made the statement that “bows and arrows in adivasis hands and stones in the hands of the Kashmiri youngsters are essential, but we need more.” Of course this harangue made from the capital of India won her a lot of admirers, especially in Kashmir, who wasted no time in presenting her with a box of the choicest, and now the rarest of the rare, Amri apples from Shopiyan.
Having dissociated her self from the Indian state, it sounds a bit ironic when she says that Anna Hazare’s means may be Gandhian, but his demands are certainly not. When in October 2010 she came on a platform in New Delhi with the Kashmiri separatists represented by S. A. Geelani, the Maoist like Vara Vara Rao, and even representatives of the erstwhile Khalistan movement, she forfeited her right to speak on Gandhi or his methods. Now to invoke Gandhiji while heaping abuse on Anna Hazare and his supporters is nothing but hypocrisy of the meanest kind. Anna’s demand for a credible machinery to check institutional corruption in public life, through peaceful, democratic means, becomes unacceptable while bows and arrows and stones are the correct means to achieve one’s end. Further, Ms Roy tries to insinuate that because the NGO’s associated with Anna Hazare’s supporters have received funds from American corporates and the Ford Foundation, their motives should automatically become suspect. For Ms Roy’s information, The Indian Institution of Management Calcutta (IIMC), an institution where the PM was seen awarding the diplomas, was also funded by the Ford Foundation, while a sizeable number of its early faculty members were drawn from the Sloane School of Management, MIT. By Ms Roy’s logic, the IIMC should also be “suspect” as it has been founded with “tainted” money.
To suggest that Anna’s demand for a Jan Lokpal is a Corporate stunt created by its captive media for control of infrastructure and the natural resources of the nation, through the foreign-funded NGO’s is as preposterous as her statement that “we’re watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle waged by the warlords of Afghanistan…” and deserves to be dismissed with equal contempt. Her command over the English language may continue to stir, but no amount of perfect English can take away the charm of the childish smile of the new Gandhi, Anna Hazare!
But I know what Anna Hazare did with the meagre retirement fund that he received after being discharged from the army. He spent it all on his village Ralegan Siddhi in an attempt to better the lives of his fellow villagers. Today Ralegan Siddhi is a model village from where alcohol has been banished, where primary healthcare centres function, where schools have teachers and students. Anna lives amidst his people, in an 8 x 10 feet room in the village temple, and his possessions would probably be less than what a sadhu in the upper Himalayas would have. Some people have complained that he is a dictator and has forced the villagers to abjure alcohol and other evils. I cannot understand how an unarmed man, without a gang of enforcers, can make a whole village to follow his diktats. Unless it is some moral pressure that only those who have led a moral life can command. I don’t know how Ayemenem is doing, because its most famous resident has not lived there for a very long time, and has not enlightened us about its condition. Maybe Ms Roy should pay a visit to both Anna’s village and her own.
There was a time when I used to admire Ms Roy for her bold and forthright views on the dehumanisation of societies at large and the manner in which she used to take on the establishments on matters of human rights, land reforms, and other political and social issues. Almost three years ago when she made her bold statement that “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India” I had come out in support of her and an article written by me was published by The New Indian Express on 1st September 2008 on its Op-Ed page. I believed that she had understood the Kashmir problem well and had come to the same conclusion that an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, had written in 1952, that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in “India After Gandhi” writes, “Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.”
Subsequent events proved that her Kashmir slogan was nothing but a call for the vivisection of this nation; her call for Azadi but a hollow statement when she said “Indian government is a hollow superpower, and I dissociate from it.” Comparing the protests in Kashmir to the protests of the naxals operating in central India and elsewhere, she made the statement that “bows and arrows in adivasis hands and stones in the hands of the Kashmiri youngsters are essential, but we need more.” Of course this harangue made from the capital of India won her a lot of admirers, especially in Kashmir, who wasted no time in presenting her with a box of the choicest, and now the rarest of the rare, Amri apples from Shopiyan.
Having dissociated her self from the Indian state, it sounds a bit ironic when she says that Anna Hazare’s means may be Gandhian, but his demands are certainly not. When in October 2010 she came on a platform in New Delhi with the Kashmiri separatists represented by S. A. Geelani, the Maoist like Vara Vara Rao, and even representatives of the erstwhile Khalistan movement, she forfeited her right to speak on Gandhi or his methods. Now to invoke Gandhiji while heaping abuse on Anna Hazare and his supporters is nothing but hypocrisy of the meanest kind. Anna’s demand for a credible machinery to check institutional corruption in public life, through peaceful, democratic means, becomes unacceptable while bows and arrows and stones are the correct means to achieve one’s end. Further, Ms Roy tries to insinuate that because the NGO’s associated with Anna Hazare’s supporters have received funds from American corporates and the Ford Foundation, their motives should automatically become suspect. For Ms Roy’s information, The Indian Institution of Management Calcutta (IIMC), an institution where the PM was seen awarding the diplomas, was also funded by the Ford Foundation, while a sizeable number of its early faculty members were drawn from the Sloane School of Management, MIT. By Ms Roy’s logic, the IIMC should also be “suspect” as it has been founded with “tainted” money.
To suggest that Anna’s demand for a Jan Lokpal is a Corporate stunt created by its captive media for control of infrastructure and the natural resources of the nation, through the foreign-funded NGO’s is as preposterous as her statement that “we’re watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle waged by the warlords of Afghanistan…” and deserves to be dismissed with equal contempt. Her command over the English language may continue to stir, but no amount of perfect English can take away the charm of the childish smile of the new Gandhi, Anna Hazare!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Disinformation on Kashmir and the Manipulation of Media
Ever since the latest round of violence began in the valley of Kashmir, there has been a sustained effort in the Indian media, both print and electronic, to spread disinformation about the origin of this violence, despite the fact that the instigators are out in the streets defying curfew and government orders, and openly exhorting others to join them. In the process when some of the protestors become victims of their own participation in the violence, the media is ready to pounce upon the security forces for doing their job, while completely ignoring the role of the instigators. Lately I have been reading column after column by well established political commentators like Vir Sanghvi, Jyoti Punwani, Firdous Syed, Neerja Chowdhury, Seema Mustafa and others who all have only one common theme. In their considered opinion India has failed the people of Kashmir, and if the “poor” Kashmiris have had to resort to violence to make them heard, it is only because we the Indians have been completely indifferent to their suffering. Hira Fotedar, co-founder and past President of the Indo-American Kashmir Forum, had made a forceful presentation in October 2008 in Chicago as a case study in the manipulation of Indian media. But that has largely been ignored and forgotten by the American and Indian authorities and the media. The purpose of this article is to revisit the subject and examine the so-called suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims closely and put it in a proper perspective.
When Kashmir, with the rest of India, became independent from British rule it was, without doubt one of the poorest parts of the country. The valley had almost no industry apart from a primitive silk factory that produced a very inferior quality of silk cloth, and a match factory near Baramulla. Agricultural production was not enough to feed the population; items like sugar, salt and other commodities had to be brought in from the plains. The only link with Jammu was an unreliable road over the Pir Panjal range that would frequently close due to landslides and heavy snowfall. Air connections were also unpredictable as the Dakotas in use then could not fly if the Banihal Pass (at about 10000 feet the only available corridor for flying across the mountains) was hidden by clouds. In the winter of 1951-52 I have gone to the Srinagar Airport every day for 21 days for catching a flight to Pathankot, before a plane could come across and leave the same afternoon.
Kashmir’s tourist season was also relatively short in duration. People from the plains would mainly come during the summer holidays, usually for 2 months. There would be some traffic during the annual Amarnath Yatra, but that consisted mainly of pilgrims who provided some employment for pony drivers and a few porters. Shawls, which had been the mainstay of the economy of Kashmir, had only contributed to the enrichment of a few merchant families, while keeping the actual artisans and weavers perpetually poor. Kashmiri Pandits had realized long before that in order to improve their lives they would have to invest in education. This they proceeded to do in right earnest. Educating the young, whether male or female, had become the sole objective of the Pandit families. Consequently, a number of them were sent to Universities in Punjab, Delhi, Benares, etc., from where they obtained degrees in Humanities, Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The only employer for their services was the Government who had no alternative but to fill available vacancies from this pool.
Understanding that poverty could not be eradicated by platitudes, the first democratic Government of Kashmir, headed by Sheikh Abdullah, instituted a number of progressive reforms. The land reform of Kashmir that took the land away from landlords and gave it to the tillers is still unimplemented in the rest of India in totality. Equally important was the making of education almost free up to University level for the residents of Jammu & Kashmir. I have studied in the state and remember paying Rs 5.00 for my fees for one year of college education. The standard of education was no less than any other institution in India, although the state did not yet have many professional training institutions for engineers and doctors.
The people of Kashmir, though not wealthy, were quite content within their limitations. There was respect for the state leaders, among whom Sheikh Abdullah was indeed the tallest, as also for national leaders. As school children we have enthusiastically welcomed Prime Minister Nehru, Home Minister G. B. Pant, and the other visiting dignitaries from India and abroad. People moved freely across the land and the only visible uniform on the roads would be worn by the men of Jammu & Kashmir Police. The CRPF were in barracks far from the towns and cities, while the Indian Army was stationed at the outposts along the Line of Control that came into existence after Pakistan’s first attempt to wrest the province by military force. The Army Cantonment was at the entrance to the city of Srinagar at a place called Badami Bagh, and its inmates hardly interacted with the local population. My brother was a Sub-Inspector in the state Police and I have travelled to some very remote and beautiful parts of the valley with him during my school vacations. On one such trip we followed a criminal right up to the no-man’s land before the LOC; a chase that lasted for two days across steep mountains and deep valleys, and apart from two pill boxes manned by a single soldier each, we did not see any other person in uniform except the members of our police party. Even at the last village before the LOC we found no men in uniform. The village was small and its headman welcomed us and bade us stay in his house. We were treated with utmost respect and affection. The criminal was caught, and brought back to the original village for further proceedings.
That Kashmir had forgotten its earlier periods of violence during several invasions dating from 1320 A.D., and had evolved a truly syncretic way of life for its people was amply illustrated by the events of 1947 when Pakistan tried to annex the province through force and sent in a tribal militia to hide its own face. The rulers of Pakistan had assumed that the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir would welcome the raiders with open arms and that their way to Srinagar would be strewn with rose petals by the locals. They were to be in for a rude shock when, first Maqbool Sherwani sent them in the wrong direction (for which he later paid with his life at Baramulla), and secondly when the locals resisted them with everything they had at their disposal. Though the communal carnage had reached levels of insane frenzy in the Punjab and Bengal, Kashmir had remained peaceful and the Pandit and other minorities were protected by their Muslim neighbours from these predators from Pakistan.
The twin initiatives of giving land to the tillers and providing free education to all was grabbed with both hands by the peasantry who found that they could now spare the young from their fields and send them to school to get a proper education. They were no longer living a marginal existence where every hand had to be productively employed in the fields or in the sweat shops run by wealthy merchants knitting shawls or knotting carpets.
During the sixties, within a span of ten to fifteen years, Kashmir had a significant population of educated, lower-middle class youth, with normal aspirations of gainful employment. However, during this period the moral climate had been completely vitiated by a succession of self-serving and venal class of politicians, who came to power after the thoughtless dismissal and incarceration of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. This blunder of truly Himalayan proportions by Nehru was second only to his call for cease fire when still a large part of Kashmir was in hostile possession. Kashmir was handed over first to the most corrupt family then in existence, known as the BBC (Bakshi Brothers Corporation), who amongst them bled the valley while building enormous fortunes for themselves. The Kamraj plan was, mercifully, used to get rid of this son of the soil, but his successors were even worse. In between came people like Shamsuddin (I am sure nobody even remembers that he was the Chief Minister for a few months), followed by the leftist G. M. Sadiq, and Syed Mir Qasim, in whose times began the alienation of the newly educated youth of Kashmir. By the time the Sheikh had been let out of jail and reinstated by Indira Gandhi in 1974, under the Indira-Sheikh accord as the C.M., much damage had been done to the secular fabric of Kashmir.
Pakistan too had not forgotten its humiliation of 1947, and had never accepted Kashmir as a part of India. It continued to harp on the promise of plebiscite that Nehru had made while ordering the cease fire and approaching the UN. However, it conveniently forgot that plebiscite applied to the entire province of Jammu & Kashmir, and not just to the valley. The territories occupied by it illegally and from which it had ceded some parts to China did not figure in its arguments. Nehru had said that a plebiscite could be held if the Pakistanis withdrew to the positions that existed before the tribal raid, and allowed the displaced populations to return to their homes. This was not possible because the Pakistanis, in their misplaced zeal and haste, had surrendered some portions of Northern Kashmir to China. Further they had no intentions of withdrawing from their occupied portion of Kashmir and creating a situation of status quo ante.
Having failed to get their agenda enforced by the UN, even with blatant American support, the Pakistanis embarked on a deliberate policy of creating dissent and disaffection among the people of Kashmir. The first phase of this operation was code named “Gibralter”. This operation was put into effect by the Martial Law President of Pakistan Gen. Ayub Khan in 1965. The operation involved heavy infiltration of Pakistani nationals among who would be disguised military personnel who would provide military training to Kashmiri youth. The recruitment of the youth was done through Jamaat-i-Islami which had deep connections with the Rabita-ul-Islam, the international headquarters of the Islamic fundamentalist movement based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan’s Jamat-i-Islami was the organization through which the funding and operational guidance would be channelled. An elaborate infrastructure for propagating Wahabi style of Islam was organized in mosques, schools, and Islamic study groups throughout the valley. In the early seventies this movement gained strength due to the fact that the Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi bent every rule in the book to consolidate her hold on the Congress party and through that on the nation. Mrs. Gandhi encouraged personal loyalty to her at the expense of integrity. This led to the rise of a whole breed of politicians and bureaucrats who were ready to bend and crawl to fulfil her every whim. This was the time when governance suffered extremely and Pakistan was able to take advantage of this weakness and further its agenda in Kashmir.
The Jammat in Kashmir imported Moulvis from Bihar, UP, and Assam, who were soon installed in new mosques built according to Arab tradition and architecture all over the valley. The earlier Kashmiri mosques were a synthesis of various architectural styles incorporating elements from Hindu and Buddhist temples. The imported clergy were instructed to preach the harsh version of Wahabi faith and to discourage the Kashmiris from Saint Worship. The centuries old Sufi tradition of Kashmiri Islam was publicly ridiculed. Kashmiri Muslims were exhorted to repudiate their tradition of tolerance and were taught to despise the liberal Hindus and Muslims among them. Women were also enrolled in this operation and an organization known as Dukhtaran-e-Millat was installed. The women of Kashmir had always been liberal in their outlook and the veil was never a part of their culture. The militant members of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat started threatening ordinary women with dire consequences if they appeared in public without a burqa. Some women had acid thrown on them, thereby making them an example. The members of this organization provided support to the militant groups by indulging in subversive acts like gathering information, distributing arms and ammunition, providing shelter for militants, keeping kidnapped persons in their custody, and above all, by raking up false stories of human rights abuse mainly to involve and discredit the security forces in the valley. The media, always ready to grab any bit of juicy gossip, was a willing victim of their manipulation.
The defeat in 1965 followed by the humiliation inflicted upon Pakistan in1971 when it lost the eastern wing that became the independent nation of Bangladesh had brought home to the rulers that they could never win a conventional war against India. The wily Bhutto who had fooled Indira Gandhi into surrendering all the gains India had made in the 1971 war without conceding anything on Kashmir, was soon overthrown by the Army and political control once again came into the hands of the Generals. Zia-ul-Haq, in order to retain and legitimise his control on the country, introduced Islamic law in accordance with the Wahabi school of thought and thus converted the country from a quasi-secular nation to a completely fundamentalist state. After hanging Bhutto on charges upheld by a Kangaroo court, he put the second phase of operation “Gibralter” into action. In the late seventies he launched a proxy war against India to wrest control of Kashmir. The battle for the minds and hearts of young Kashmiris was joined in real earnest. The Jamaat had already established a fundamentalist structure in the valley’s schools, colleges, and had enlisted a large number of young recruits in the police and men in government offices. The objective was to launch an offensive against India by these home-grown elements which could be euphemistically called a struggle for Azadi. Pakistan would be able to deny its active involvement in arming and training these subversive elements while publicly clamouring in international forums about the repressive role of the Indian security forces that were seen to be suppressing a struggle for independence by the “oppressed” people of Kashmir.
Part of the action plan involved sudden and violent attacks on Army and other security establishments, thereby keeping them fully engaged. On the other hand the militants began to attack soft targets among the Hindu minority, beginning with the murder of a number of Kashmiri Pandit intellectuals that included teachers, lawyers, poets and bureaucrats. The mosques were used to spread panic among the minorities when their loudspeakers spewed propaganda and exhorted the Kashmiri Pandits to leave the valley or face the bullets. Mosques became training grounds and hiding places for these terrorists, and the young unemployed youth of the valley fell easy prey to this propaganda. Wahabi Islamic code was being enforced; cinema halls and video parlours were shut down, beauty parlours were closed, and consumption of alcohol was strictly forbidden. There were attempts to ban Indian currency and to introduce Pakistani currency as the legal tender. By 1989, the valley of Kashmir had virtually begun to look like a part of Pakistan. The Pandits were intimidated, terrorized and urged to leave the valley. On January 4, 1990 Aftab an Urdu daily of Srinagar published a press release from Hizbul Mujahdeen asking Kashmiri Hindus to leave Kashmir or face annihilation. Pandits were told in no uncertain terms that if they wished to live in Kashmir they would have to convert to Islam. Nearly 4 lakh Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley, leaving behind hardly a few thousands, who probably had nowhere to go, to their fate. Kashmir had been completely Islamized without an open war with India.
The deliberate policy of intimidating and murdering the minorities was part of the strategy to cleanse the valley of non-Muslims and force the Indian government to bring the security forces out from their barracks and spread them in the towns and cities. This made them easy targets and almost every day there were attacks on their posts. Retaliatory action was condemned as brutality against civilians, and if one or two of the protesters were killed in the operation, their funerals were conducted with the pomp and ceremony deserved by heroes. Lakhs of mourners would march in the streets chanting anti-India slogans, burning the Indian flag while openly asking for merger with Pakistan. The Indian and international media had already been co-opted by the propaganda machinery of Pakistan, and these so-called liberals began berating the Indian Armed Forces as part of a planned strategy for their demoralization. The deaths of hundreds of officers and jawans in militant actions were never mourned by the media, as if they were not human beings. Terrorists caught by the security forces were soon released by the administrators calling them “misguided youth”, thereby signalling to them that they were safe and could continue with their activities.
The liberalization of the Indian economy ushered in by Rajiv Gandhi and further implemented by Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister, the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had changed the Indian society from a “socialistic pattern” to a capitalist one. Businesses were unshackled from government control and profit was no longer a dirty word. The newspaper industry, which till then had largely been seen as an ethical business enterprise, soon changed gears as profits became the sole motive for existence. Television channels mushroomed all over, vying for TRPs and eyeballs. The Indian public, starved of entertainment for so long, enthusiastically lapped up whatever was dished out by these channels. Realising the potential of the media to inflict damage on the country, newspapers and TV channels were funded by shady organizations through the FDI route. The editors of most of these media enterprises have been compromised to mouth the sentiments and policies of these hidden owners. It is rumoured that a large sum of money has been paid by Saudi Arabia to the editors of two prominent Indian TV news channels, with the mandate that they highlight atrocities against Muslims in India and blame the Indian security forces for all that has gone wrong in Kashmir. The Central Government is a willing partner in this manipulation, as it suits its political ends to keep the agitation in Kashmir going. The Indian state is pumping colossal amounts of money into the valley to placate the hardliners, and to maintain the security forces. A large portion of this money is going towards lining the pockets of both the givers and the recipients who are but politicians and bureaucrats. The longer the turmoil lasts, the more is the money that they can make.
The Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to flee and took refuge in Jammu and elsewhere in India were cleverly dubbed as migrants and not as refugees. Their properties were either occupied by the local Muslims or burnt down. The Central Government connived in this fraud by denying the fact that nearly 4 lakh of the citizens of this country had been rendered homeless not due to any natural calamity like flood, earthquake, or tsunami, but by the wilful and carefully planned strategy of terror by another section of the citizenry. The ethnic cleansing of the Pandits was glossed over by the news media and there was never a serious attempt by them to highlight the plight of these unfortunate people. The subhuman conditions in which these Pandits were living in Jammu camps infested with snakes and other reptiles were never exposed to the people at large, but the death or injury of a single protester or stone-pelter on the streets in Kashmir was highlighted and the security forces roundly blamed for thoughtlessness and insensitivity.
In Kashmir many political parties and organizations claim to be secular, but their membership consists of hard-core Islamists. Outside India, World Kashmir Movement (WKM) in London and Kashmir American Council (KAC) in Washington DC serve as mouthpieces of Islamists and pro-Pakistani elements. These organizations have hired Western lobbyists, paid by Arab and Pakistani money, to project Islamic terrorists as freedom fighters fighting for liberation of Jammu & Kashmir from India. At the same time they have recruited known bleeding-heart leftist academics, politicians, and journalists in India to advance their agenda and created a pressure group to favour Kashmir’s secession. These mouthpieces are regularly invited to voice their opinions in the visual media where they keep on harping on the theme that India has failed the youth of Kashmir. Without actually saying that we should hand over the state on a platter to Pakistan, they keep repeating stories of imagined atrocities committed by the security forces that they would like to see withdrawn from Kashmir.
The present generation of the young Kashmiris is totally disconnected from the earlier generation, be it Hindu or Muslim. The Pandits have moved on and settled down to making a new beginning in Jammu and elsewhere in India and abroad. Not being entrepreneurial by nature, they have depended upon executive and administrative employment in either business houses or the government. Both are absent from the valley. There are no employment opportunities for the young in today’s Kashmir and the Pandits are better off outside the valley. Even if the communal climate in the valley stabilizes, the lack of job opportunities will prevent the Pandits to return to their ancestral homes. Pakistan has surely succeeded in completely Islamizing the valley. The Muslim leaders in Kashmir know that the Pandits will not return and their assertion that they are safe once they return is nothing but eyewash. Even if it is safe, the Pandits will go to the valley like other tourists, somewhat like the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards who have settled for generations in America, to visit the mohallas and localities where their ancestors used to live, and to savour the vegetables, fruits and other local products that some of them nostalgically yearn for.
The Muslims on the other hand have boxed themselves into a valley 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, and have lost the ability to look beyond their narrow piece of sky. They have begun to disown their unique heritage and have wholeheartedly adopted the Arabian Wahabi system of their faith. While beating their breasts at the destruction of the holy shrine of the great Sufi saint Shaikh Nur-ud-din (1337-1442 A.D) at Chrar-e-sharif (revered also by the Hindus as Nund Reshi), they had no qualms in letting dreaded terrorists occupy it who eventually set it on fire. The people have forgotten the message of the Shaikh about how Islam should be followed in the following verses from his great body of work:
Should you not shun inner anger?
How can you, your external wrath?
Unless you cleanse you inner mind
You'll lead an ostriched life
"Why are you bent upon to create hatred amongst them?
They are the descendants of one and the same mother,
Serve to the best of your capacity Mussalmans and Hindus.
If you follow this path God will bestow his grace on thee."
And he had foretold how events would unfold if his advice was not followed:
"They will cut the throat of that very cock.
Who calls them to prayers.
They will simply weigh him for their own ends.
I beseech I may not be born among such people Oh! God."
"You have crammed the books only for worldly ends.
Your learning never prevents you from your bad deeds.
You always think in terms of trapping each-other
Your contention is wrong, for you consider.
Yourselves to be amongst the chosen.
I foretell with authority that you will not reach the goal.”
The young Kashmiri Muslims have been inoculated with this poisonous vaccine of a militant Islam at conflict with the rest of the world over religious identity. It is a lament for the lost glories of Islamic Empires that flourished for centuries over large parts of the globe, and have now shrunk to a few sheikhdoms in oil-rich Arabia. The Sheikhs are a powerless elite, dependent upon the West who exploit them for their oil and in return permit them to indulge in their fantasies. But as with Saddam Hussain, these dictators know that they will be tolerated only till they keep on toeing the line of the Western powers. The frustration at this knowledge of helplessness builds anger in the minds of young Muslims who are ready to avenge their lost glory on the first hapless victim they come across. This is what Pakistan has recognized as the weakness of the Kashmiri Muslim youth and has been exploiting through its agents in the mosques, educational institutions, and the media.
As said earlier money has never been in short supply in the valley from the time Mrs. Indira Gandhi took complete control of the Congress party and the country. To keep herself in power she indulged every corrupt politician and hundreds of millions were diverted from public schemes to the private coffers of the powerful and the power-brokers. To keep control on the valley she installed Sheikh Abdullah as CM in 1974, who was no longer the lion that he had been in his earlier phase. A long time in jail and out of power had dulled his fire and he was happy to be back in office. Under his stewardship corruption rose to new heights and all the money that the centre was providing for infrastructure development and employment-generating schemes just went into private hands. Kashmiris were becoming rich without doing anything and the centre was happy to go along turning a blind eye. Indira Gandhi believed that she had brought the state firmly into the Indian Union and that there would be no more talk of a plebiscite or merger with Pakistan. Little did she realize that the funds she was providing were being utilized by the enemies of India to train and mobilize a deadly column of young jihadis who would be completely indoctrinated with the philosophy of militant Islam. After her assassination in 1984 she was succeeded by her son Rajiv who was inexperienced and naïve and thus became a pawn in the hands of his mother’s wily adherents. These parasites had been encouraged by his mother to help her stay in power and they now switched over to his body. Rajiv was completely isolated by this coterie around him and kept in an ‘ivory tower’ that made him lose touch with reality. In 1989, not only did he lose the Lok Sabha elections that he had won five years ago with the greatest majority ever, but the country was almost at the threshold of balkanization as sectarian and fissiparous pressures were tearing the national fabric into shreds. There were, in the famous phrase of Sir Vidya Naipaul, a “million mutinies everywhere”. However, India did ride that crisis except in the valley of Kashmir. The ethnic cleansing of the minorities began in the same year and the valley has been openly rebellious against India from that time onwards.
Going by the comments on Facebook by Kashmiri youth, who seem to have taken to it with great relish, one can see how completely alienated and indoctrinated these young men have been. Instead of Maqbool Sherwani it is Maqbool Bhatt who is their current hero. I have gone through hundreds of profiles and thousands of statements made by them openly on this website and am appalled at the kind of language they are using to denounce India. These are all educated, English speaking, T-shirt and jeans clad youth, and not some bearded, Salwar-Kameez-wearing fanatics. The hatred for India and the Indian security forces in their hearts is running deep and fast. There are a large number of women on Facebook who echo these sentiments, perhaps with even more vehemence. Facebook is a public domain and anyone can access it and read the innermost thoughts of most people who like to post their comments on it. The Kashmiri youth is not in the streets pelting stones at the security forces because they have mundane demands like employment, education or, as we have a tendency to say in India, “bijli, sadak, aur pani”. The youth have no such demands. The writers and intellectuals, who are continuously harping upon the theme that India has not done justice to Kashmir, have never actually put down the nature of the demands of the agitators. They want to gloss over the fact that the young Kashmiri Muslims have only one demand - to be given independence from Indian rule and to establish a complete Islamic state in the valley. The demand for independence is just a pretext as they do not openly want to admit that their ultimate goal is a complete merger with Pakistan. Everybody knows that a landlocked independent Kashmir cannot survive and the moment Indian troops move out, the Pakistani Army will move in and bring the state under its rule. Ask any young Kashmiri in the street and he will confirm that he does not want anything else but Azadi from India.
The pseudo-secular media has conveniently ignored to report on this aspect of the movement in Kashmir. They have not even once asked the question that why the people of Jammu and Ladakh have not resorted to the same tactics as the people of the valley. It is because the truth is inconvenient to their agenda and the real people who control them. The Jyoti Punwanis, Vir Sanghvis and others have compromised themselves to a position on Kashmir for reasons best known to them. Unfortunately, they are in a position to influence public opinion by projecting a wrong image of the Indian Security forces in Kashmir while sympathizing with the openly anti-nationalist and anti-Indian people of the valley of Kashmir. The Government of India is led by a weak Prime Minister and an arrogant-ignorant Home Minister. It is doubly unfortunate that the Congress President, who by virtue of a surname, is in a position to influence policy and decision-making, is instead totally occupied by the mission to have her son anointed as the next Prime Minister. It is he who is dictating policy at this time and there is no one in the Government or the party who dare say a word contrary to his. Much like his father he is too inexperienced and naïve to understand what the enemies of India are planning. The state’s energies are diverted towards holding such wasteful extravaganzas as the Commonwealth Games. Making money has become the mantra of the urban masses with Western lifestyles as the ultimate achievement. The media is actively encouraging this tendency and conspicuous consumption has become the norm. In this pursuit for more and more consumerism, we have forgotten the purpose for which we had fought for our independence in the last century. That independence is under serious threat from an extremely hostile neighbour on our Western flank and our own citizens from the North. Our present indifference to these threats will cost us very dear in the future and may eventually end up with a complete break-up of the entity we know today as India.
When Kashmir, with the rest of India, became independent from British rule it was, without doubt one of the poorest parts of the country. The valley had almost no industry apart from a primitive silk factory that produced a very inferior quality of silk cloth, and a match factory near Baramulla. Agricultural production was not enough to feed the population; items like sugar, salt and other commodities had to be brought in from the plains. The only link with Jammu was an unreliable road over the Pir Panjal range that would frequently close due to landslides and heavy snowfall. Air connections were also unpredictable as the Dakotas in use then could not fly if the Banihal Pass (at about 10000 feet the only available corridor for flying across the mountains) was hidden by clouds. In the winter of 1951-52 I have gone to the Srinagar Airport every day for 21 days for catching a flight to Pathankot, before a plane could come across and leave the same afternoon.
Kashmir’s tourist season was also relatively short in duration. People from the plains would mainly come during the summer holidays, usually for 2 months. There would be some traffic during the annual Amarnath Yatra, but that consisted mainly of pilgrims who provided some employment for pony drivers and a few porters. Shawls, which had been the mainstay of the economy of Kashmir, had only contributed to the enrichment of a few merchant families, while keeping the actual artisans and weavers perpetually poor. Kashmiri Pandits had realized long before that in order to improve their lives they would have to invest in education. This they proceeded to do in right earnest. Educating the young, whether male or female, had become the sole objective of the Pandit families. Consequently, a number of them were sent to Universities in Punjab, Delhi, Benares, etc., from where they obtained degrees in Humanities, Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The only employer for their services was the Government who had no alternative but to fill available vacancies from this pool.
Understanding that poverty could not be eradicated by platitudes, the first democratic Government of Kashmir, headed by Sheikh Abdullah, instituted a number of progressive reforms. The land reform of Kashmir that took the land away from landlords and gave it to the tillers is still unimplemented in the rest of India in totality. Equally important was the making of education almost free up to University level for the residents of Jammu & Kashmir. I have studied in the state and remember paying Rs 5.00 for my fees for one year of college education. The standard of education was no less than any other institution in India, although the state did not yet have many professional training institutions for engineers and doctors.
The people of Kashmir, though not wealthy, were quite content within their limitations. There was respect for the state leaders, among whom Sheikh Abdullah was indeed the tallest, as also for national leaders. As school children we have enthusiastically welcomed Prime Minister Nehru, Home Minister G. B. Pant, and the other visiting dignitaries from India and abroad. People moved freely across the land and the only visible uniform on the roads would be worn by the men of Jammu & Kashmir Police. The CRPF were in barracks far from the towns and cities, while the Indian Army was stationed at the outposts along the Line of Control that came into existence after Pakistan’s first attempt to wrest the province by military force. The Army Cantonment was at the entrance to the city of Srinagar at a place called Badami Bagh, and its inmates hardly interacted with the local population. My brother was a Sub-Inspector in the state Police and I have travelled to some very remote and beautiful parts of the valley with him during my school vacations. On one such trip we followed a criminal right up to the no-man’s land before the LOC; a chase that lasted for two days across steep mountains and deep valleys, and apart from two pill boxes manned by a single soldier each, we did not see any other person in uniform except the members of our police party. Even at the last village before the LOC we found no men in uniform. The village was small and its headman welcomed us and bade us stay in his house. We were treated with utmost respect and affection. The criminal was caught, and brought back to the original village for further proceedings.
That Kashmir had forgotten its earlier periods of violence during several invasions dating from 1320 A.D., and had evolved a truly syncretic way of life for its people was amply illustrated by the events of 1947 when Pakistan tried to annex the province through force and sent in a tribal militia to hide its own face. The rulers of Pakistan had assumed that the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir would welcome the raiders with open arms and that their way to Srinagar would be strewn with rose petals by the locals. They were to be in for a rude shock when, first Maqbool Sherwani sent them in the wrong direction (for which he later paid with his life at Baramulla), and secondly when the locals resisted them with everything they had at their disposal. Though the communal carnage had reached levels of insane frenzy in the Punjab and Bengal, Kashmir had remained peaceful and the Pandit and other minorities were protected by their Muslim neighbours from these predators from Pakistan.
The twin initiatives of giving land to the tillers and providing free education to all was grabbed with both hands by the peasantry who found that they could now spare the young from their fields and send them to school to get a proper education. They were no longer living a marginal existence where every hand had to be productively employed in the fields or in the sweat shops run by wealthy merchants knitting shawls or knotting carpets.
During the sixties, within a span of ten to fifteen years, Kashmir had a significant population of educated, lower-middle class youth, with normal aspirations of gainful employment. However, during this period the moral climate had been completely vitiated by a succession of self-serving and venal class of politicians, who came to power after the thoughtless dismissal and incarceration of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. This blunder of truly Himalayan proportions by Nehru was second only to his call for cease fire when still a large part of Kashmir was in hostile possession. Kashmir was handed over first to the most corrupt family then in existence, known as the BBC (Bakshi Brothers Corporation), who amongst them bled the valley while building enormous fortunes for themselves. The Kamraj plan was, mercifully, used to get rid of this son of the soil, but his successors were even worse. In between came people like Shamsuddin (I am sure nobody even remembers that he was the Chief Minister for a few months), followed by the leftist G. M. Sadiq, and Syed Mir Qasim, in whose times began the alienation of the newly educated youth of Kashmir. By the time the Sheikh had been let out of jail and reinstated by Indira Gandhi in 1974, under the Indira-Sheikh accord as the C.M., much damage had been done to the secular fabric of Kashmir.
Pakistan too had not forgotten its humiliation of 1947, and had never accepted Kashmir as a part of India. It continued to harp on the promise of plebiscite that Nehru had made while ordering the cease fire and approaching the UN. However, it conveniently forgot that plebiscite applied to the entire province of Jammu & Kashmir, and not just to the valley. The territories occupied by it illegally and from which it had ceded some parts to China did not figure in its arguments. Nehru had said that a plebiscite could be held if the Pakistanis withdrew to the positions that existed before the tribal raid, and allowed the displaced populations to return to their homes. This was not possible because the Pakistanis, in their misplaced zeal and haste, had surrendered some portions of Northern Kashmir to China. Further they had no intentions of withdrawing from their occupied portion of Kashmir and creating a situation of status quo ante.
Having failed to get their agenda enforced by the UN, even with blatant American support, the Pakistanis embarked on a deliberate policy of creating dissent and disaffection among the people of Kashmir. The first phase of this operation was code named “Gibralter”. This operation was put into effect by the Martial Law President of Pakistan Gen. Ayub Khan in 1965. The operation involved heavy infiltration of Pakistani nationals among who would be disguised military personnel who would provide military training to Kashmiri youth. The recruitment of the youth was done through Jamaat-i-Islami which had deep connections with the Rabita-ul-Islam, the international headquarters of the Islamic fundamentalist movement based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan’s Jamat-i-Islami was the organization through which the funding and operational guidance would be channelled. An elaborate infrastructure for propagating Wahabi style of Islam was organized in mosques, schools, and Islamic study groups throughout the valley. In the early seventies this movement gained strength due to the fact that the Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi bent every rule in the book to consolidate her hold on the Congress party and through that on the nation. Mrs. Gandhi encouraged personal loyalty to her at the expense of integrity. This led to the rise of a whole breed of politicians and bureaucrats who were ready to bend and crawl to fulfil her every whim. This was the time when governance suffered extremely and Pakistan was able to take advantage of this weakness and further its agenda in Kashmir.
The Jammat in Kashmir imported Moulvis from Bihar, UP, and Assam, who were soon installed in new mosques built according to Arab tradition and architecture all over the valley. The earlier Kashmiri mosques were a synthesis of various architectural styles incorporating elements from Hindu and Buddhist temples. The imported clergy were instructed to preach the harsh version of Wahabi faith and to discourage the Kashmiris from Saint Worship. The centuries old Sufi tradition of Kashmiri Islam was publicly ridiculed. Kashmiri Muslims were exhorted to repudiate their tradition of tolerance and were taught to despise the liberal Hindus and Muslims among them. Women were also enrolled in this operation and an organization known as Dukhtaran-e-Millat was installed. The women of Kashmir had always been liberal in their outlook and the veil was never a part of their culture. The militant members of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat started threatening ordinary women with dire consequences if they appeared in public without a burqa. Some women had acid thrown on them, thereby making them an example. The members of this organization provided support to the militant groups by indulging in subversive acts like gathering information, distributing arms and ammunition, providing shelter for militants, keeping kidnapped persons in their custody, and above all, by raking up false stories of human rights abuse mainly to involve and discredit the security forces in the valley. The media, always ready to grab any bit of juicy gossip, was a willing victim of their manipulation.
The defeat in 1965 followed by the humiliation inflicted upon Pakistan in1971 when it lost the eastern wing that became the independent nation of Bangladesh had brought home to the rulers that they could never win a conventional war against India. The wily Bhutto who had fooled Indira Gandhi into surrendering all the gains India had made in the 1971 war without conceding anything on Kashmir, was soon overthrown by the Army and political control once again came into the hands of the Generals. Zia-ul-Haq, in order to retain and legitimise his control on the country, introduced Islamic law in accordance with the Wahabi school of thought and thus converted the country from a quasi-secular nation to a completely fundamentalist state. After hanging Bhutto on charges upheld by a Kangaroo court, he put the second phase of operation “Gibralter” into action. In the late seventies he launched a proxy war against India to wrest control of Kashmir. The battle for the minds and hearts of young Kashmiris was joined in real earnest. The Jamaat had already established a fundamentalist structure in the valley’s schools, colleges, and had enlisted a large number of young recruits in the police and men in government offices. The objective was to launch an offensive against India by these home-grown elements which could be euphemistically called a struggle for Azadi. Pakistan would be able to deny its active involvement in arming and training these subversive elements while publicly clamouring in international forums about the repressive role of the Indian security forces that were seen to be suppressing a struggle for independence by the “oppressed” people of Kashmir.
Part of the action plan involved sudden and violent attacks on Army and other security establishments, thereby keeping them fully engaged. On the other hand the militants began to attack soft targets among the Hindu minority, beginning with the murder of a number of Kashmiri Pandit intellectuals that included teachers, lawyers, poets and bureaucrats. The mosques were used to spread panic among the minorities when their loudspeakers spewed propaganda and exhorted the Kashmiri Pandits to leave the valley or face the bullets. Mosques became training grounds and hiding places for these terrorists, and the young unemployed youth of the valley fell easy prey to this propaganda. Wahabi Islamic code was being enforced; cinema halls and video parlours were shut down, beauty parlours were closed, and consumption of alcohol was strictly forbidden. There were attempts to ban Indian currency and to introduce Pakistani currency as the legal tender. By 1989, the valley of Kashmir had virtually begun to look like a part of Pakistan. The Pandits were intimidated, terrorized and urged to leave the valley. On January 4, 1990 Aftab an Urdu daily of Srinagar published a press release from Hizbul Mujahdeen asking Kashmiri Hindus to leave Kashmir or face annihilation. Pandits were told in no uncertain terms that if they wished to live in Kashmir they would have to convert to Islam. Nearly 4 lakh Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley, leaving behind hardly a few thousands, who probably had nowhere to go, to their fate. Kashmir had been completely Islamized without an open war with India.
The deliberate policy of intimidating and murdering the minorities was part of the strategy to cleanse the valley of non-Muslims and force the Indian government to bring the security forces out from their barracks and spread them in the towns and cities. This made them easy targets and almost every day there were attacks on their posts. Retaliatory action was condemned as brutality against civilians, and if one or two of the protesters were killed in the operation, their funerals were conducted with the pomp and ceremony deserved by heroes. Lakhs of mourners would march in the streets chanting anti-India slogans, burning the Indian flag while openly asking for merger with Pakistan. The Indian and international media had already been co-opted by the propaganda machinery of Pakistan, and these so-called liberals began berating the Indian Armed Forces as part of a planned strategy for their demoralization. The deaths of hundreds of officers and jawans in militant actions were never mourned by the media, as if they were not human beings. Terrorists caught by the security forces were soon released by the administrators calling them “misguided youth”, thereby signalling to them that they were safe and could continue with their activities.
The liberalization of the Indian economy ushered in by Rajiv Gandhi and further implemented by Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister, the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had changed the Indian society from a “socialistic pattern” to a capitalist one. Businesses were unshackled from government control and profit was no longer a dirty word. The newspaper industry, which till then had largely been seen as an ethical business enterprise, soon changed gears as profits became the sole motive for existence. Television channels mushroomed all over, vying for TRPs and eyeballs. The Indian public, starved of entertainment for so long, enthusiastically lapped up whatever was dished out by these channels. Realising the potential of the media to inflict damage on the country, newspapers and TV channels were funded by shady organizations through the FDI route. The editors of most of these media enterprises have been compromised to mouth the sentiments and policies of these hidden owners. It is rumoured that a large sum of money has been paid by Saudi Arabia to the editors of two prominent Indian TV news channels, with the mandate that they highlight atrocities against Muslims in India and blame the Indian security forces for all that has gone wrong in Kashmir. The Central Government is a willing partner in this manipulation, as it suits its political ends to keep the agitation in Kashmir going. The Indian state is pumping colossal amounts of money into the valley to placate the hardliners, and to maintain the security forces. A large portion of this money is going towards lining the pockets of both the givers and the recipients who are but politicians and bureaucrats. The longer the turmoil lasts, the more is the money that they can make.
The Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to flee and took refuge in Jammu and elsewhere in India were cleverly dubbed as migrants and not as refugees. Their properties were either occupied by the local Muslims or burnt down. The Central Government connived in this fraud by denying the fact that nearly 4 lakh of the citizens of this country had been rendered homeless not due to any natural calamity like flood, earthquake, or tsunami, but by the wilful and carefully planned strategy of terror by another section of the citizenry. The ethnic cleansing of the Pandits was glossed over by the news media and there was never a serious attempt by them to highlight the plight of these unfortunate people. The subhuman conditions in which these Pandits were living in Jammu camps infested with snakes and other reptiles were never exposed to the people at large, but the death or injury of a single protester or stone-pelter on the streets in Kashmir was highlighted and the security forces roundly blamed for thoughtlessness and insensitivity.
In Kashmir many political parties and organizations claim to be secular, but their membership consists of hard-core Islamists. Outside India, World Kashmir Movement (WKM) in London and Kashmir American Council (KAC) in Washington DC serve as mouthpieces of Islamists and pro-Pakistani elements. These organizations have hired Western lobbyists, paid by Arab and Pakistani money, to project Islamic terrorists as freedom fighters fighting for liberation of Jammu & Kashmir from India. At the same time they have recruited known bleeding-heart leftist academics, politicians, and journalists in India to advance their agenda and created a pressure group to favour Kashmir’s secession. These mouthpieces are regularly invited to voice their opinions in the visual media where they keep on harping on the theme that India has failed the youth of Kashmir. Without actually saying that we should hand over the state on a platter to Pakistan, they keep repeating stories of imagined atrocities committed by the security forces that they would like to see withdrawn from Kashmir.
The present generation of the young Kashmiris is totally disconnected from the earlier generation, be it Hindu or Muslim. The Pandits have moved on and settled down to making a new beginning in Jammu and elsewhere in India and abroad. Not being entrepreneurial by nature, they have depended upon executive and administrative employment in either business houses or the government. Both are absent from the valley. There are no employment opportunities for the young in today’s Kashmir and the Pandits are better off outside the valley. Even if the communal climate in the valley stabilizes, the lack of job opportunities will prevent the Pandits to return to their ancestral homes. Pakistan has surely succeeded in completely Islamizing the valley. The Muslim leaders in Kashmir know that the Pandits will not return and their assertion that they are safe once they return is nothing but eyewash. Even if it is safe, the Pandits will go to the valley like other tourists, somewhat like the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards who have settled for generations in America, to visit the mohallas and localities where their ancestors used to live, and to savour the vegetables, fruits and other local products that some of them nostalgically yearn for.
The Muslims on the other hand have boxed themselves into a valley 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, and have lost the ability to look beyond their narrow piece of sky. They have begun to disown their unique heritage and have wholeheartedly adopted the Arabian Wahabi system of their faith. While beating their breasts at the destruction of the holy shrine of the great Sufi saint Shaikh Nur-ud-din (1337-1442 A.D) at Chrar-e-sharif (revered also by the Hindus as Nund Reshi), they had no qualms in letting dreaded terrorists occupy it who eventually set it on fire. The people have forgotten the message of the Shaikh about how Islam should be followed in the following verses from his great body of work:
Should you not shun inner anger?
How can you, your external wrath?
Unless you cleanse you inner mind
You'll lead an ostriched life
"Why are you bent upon to create hatred amongst them?
They are the descendants of one and the same mother,
Serve to the best of your capacity Mussalmans and Hindus.
If you follow this path God will bestow his grace on thee."
And he had foretold how events would unfold if his advice was not followed:
"They will cut the throat of that very cock.
Who calls them to prayers.
They will simply weigh him for their own ends.
I beseech I may not be born among such people Oh! God."
"You have crammed the books only for worldly ends.
Your learning never prevents you from your bad deeds.
You always think in terms of trapping each-other
Your contention is wrong, for you consider.
Yourselves to be amongst the chosen.
I foretell with authority that you will not reach the goal.”
The young Kashmiri Muslims have been inoculated with this poisonous vaccine of a militant Islam at conflict with the rest of the world over religious identity. It is a lament for the lost glories of Islamic Empires that flourished for centuries over large parts of the globe, and have now shrunk to a few sheikhdoms in oil-rich Arabia. The Sheikhs are a powerless elite, dependent upon the West who exploit them for their oil and in return permit them to indulge in their fantasies. But as with Saddam Hussain, these dictators know that they will be tolerated only till they keep on toeing the line of the Western powers. The frustration at this knowledge of helplessness builds anger in the minds of young Muslims who are ready to avenge their lost glory on the first hapless victim they come across. This is what Pakistan has recognized as the weakness of the Kashmiri Muslim youth and has been exploiting through its agents in the mosques, educational institutions, and the media.
As said earlier money has never been in short supply in the valley from the time Mrs. Indira Gandhi took complete control of the Congress party and the country. To keep herself in power she indulged every corrupt politician and hundreds of millions were diverted from public schemes to the private coffers of the powerful and the power-brokers. To keep control on the valley she installed Sheikh Abdullah as CM in 1974, who was no longer the lion that he had been in his earlier phase. A long time in jail and out of power had dulled his fire and he was happy to be back in office. Under his stewardship corruption rose to new heights and all the money that the centre was providing for infrastructure development and employment-generating schemes just went into private hands. Kashmiris were becoming rich without doing anything and the centre was happy to go along turning a blind eye. Indira Gandhi believed that she had brought the state firmly into the Indian Union and that there would be no more talk of a plebiscite or merger with Pakistan. Little did she realize that the funds she was providing were being utilized by the enemies of India to train and mobilize a deadly column of young jihadis who would be completely indoctrinated with the philosophy of militant Islam. After her assassination in 1984 she was succeeded by her son Rajiv who was inexperienced and naïve and thus became a pawn in the hands of his mother’s wily adherents. These parasites had been encouraged by his mother to help her stay in power and they now switched over to his body. Rajiv was completely isolated by this coterie around him and kept in an ‘ivory tower’ that made him lose touch with reality. In 1989, not only did he lose the Lok Sabha elections that he had won five years ago with the greatest majority ever, but the country was almost at the threshold of balkanization as sectarian and fissiparous pressures were tearing the national fabric into shreds. There were, in the famous phrase of Sir Vidya Naipaul, a “million mutinies everywhere”. However, India did ride that crisis except in the valley of Kashmir. The ethnic cleansing of the minorities began in the same year and the valley has been openly rebellious against India from that time onwards.
Going by the comments on Facebook by Kashmiri youth, who seem to have taken to it with great relish, one can see how completely alienated and indoctrinated these young men have been. Instead of Maqbool Sherwani it is Maqbool Bhatt who is their current hero. I have gone through hundreds of profiles and thousands of statements made by them openly on this website and am appalled at the kind of language they are using to denounce India. These are all educated, English speaking, T-shirt and jeans clad youth, and not some bearded, Salwar-Kameez-wearing fanatics. The hatred for India and the Indian security forces in their hearts is running deep and fast. There are a large number of women on Facebook who echo these sentiments, perhaps with even more vehemence. Facebook is a public domain and anyone can access it and read the innermost thoughts of most people who like to post their comments on it. The Kashmiri youth is not in the streets pelting stones at the security forces because they have mundane demands like employment, education or, as we have a tendency to say in India, “bijli, sadak, aur pani”. The youth have no such demands. The writers and intellectuals, who are continuously harping upon the theme that India has not done justice to Kashmir, have never actually put down the nature of the demands of the agitators. They want to gloss over the fact that the young Kashmiri Muslims have only one demand - to be given independence from Indian rule and to establish a complete Islamic state in the valley. The demand for independence is just a pretext as they do not openly want to admit that their ultimate goal is a complete merger with Pakistan. Everybody knows that a landlocked independent Kashmir cannot survive and the moment Indian troops move out, the Pakistani Army will move in and bring the state under its rule. Ask any young Kashmiri in the street and he will confirm that he does not want anything else but Azadi from India.
The pseudo-secular media has conveniently ignored to report on this aspect of the movement in Kashmir. They have not even once asked the question that why the people of Jammu and Ladakh have not resorted to the same tactics as the people of the valley. It is because the truth is inconvenient to their agenda and the real people who control them. The Jyoti Punwanis, Vir Sanghvis and others have compromised themselves to a position on Kashmir for reasons best known to them. Unfortunately, they are in a position to influence public opinion by projecting a wrong image of the Indian Security forces in Kashmir while sympathizing with the openly anti-nationalist and anti-Indian people of the valley of Kashmir. The Government of India is led by a weak Prime Minister and an arrogant-ignorant Home Minister. It is doubly unfortunate that the Congress President, who by virtue of a surname, is in a position to influence policy and decision-making, is instead totally occupied by the mission to have her son anointed as the next Prime Minister. It is he who is dictating policy at this time and there is no one in the Government or the party who dare say a word contrary to his. Much like his father he is too inexperienced and naïve to understand what the enemies of India are planning. The state’s energies are diverted towards holding such wasteful extravaganzas as the Commonwealth Games. Making money has become the mantra of the urban masses with Western lifestyles as the ultimate achievement. The media is actively encouraging this tendency and conspicuous consumption has become the norm. In this pursuit for more and more consumerism, we have forgotten the purpose for which we had fought for our independence in the last century. That independence is under serious threat from an extremely hostile neighbour on our Western flank and our own citizens from the North. Our present indifference to these threats will cost us very dear in the future and may eventually end up with a complete break-up of the entity we know today as India.
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