Why does Sharad Pawar still have his job?

I'll get to more of the new government later. Meanwhile, I have one question to ask of the newly elected Congress-led alliance of the United Progressive Alliance: why is Sharad Pawar being given the job of Minister for Agriculture?

Let me tell you a story which might help with the measure of the man.

Not all people, not even in Vidarbha -- India's rural suicide alley -- take their own lives as a reflection of becoming what banks call non-performing assets. Sometimes, they brutally fight back.

On 19 June 2006, still several days away from Manmohan Singh Mark One's visit to Vidarbha, a farmer, Vijay Thakre and his family with sticks and stones beat a moneylender and his associate to death in Pimpalgaon village of Akola district. For good measure, they hacked the moneylender with axes.

Thakre was quite angry, you see. The moneylender, Danode, had loaned Rs 50,000 to him after accepting in mortgage thirteen acres of land Thakre owned-a "medium" farmer. Thakre paid back Rs 300,000-six times the principal. But that wasn't enough for Danode, who took over Thakre's thirteen acres under mortgage. A local politician of the Shiv Sena, Gulabrao Gawande, led a public campaign to get Thakre back his land. But Danode, with the help of his associate Pramod Chanbhare, wouldn't have it.

Thakre wouldn't have it either. Neither would his family. So they did what they did.

Fortunately for the cause of visible peace, many other farmers of Vidarbha were simply content to wait for the prime minister, or die. They would wait, as their then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, his deputy R.R. Patil, and even the then agriculture minister of India, Sharad Pawar -- also from Maharashtra -- had not bothered to once make even a show-visit to a hut of a farmer-family traumatized by debt and death.

For more please read here

Sri Lanka: Beyond the Endgame

Mahinda Rajapaksa is partial to leaps of faith. One such transported him from backroom liberal to president of Sri Lanka. He has since skillfully led a persistent, unforgiving campaign against Tamil Tigers for which no previous administration had either the care or cojones.

Of course, his critics maintain Rajapaksa is setting himself up as president-for-life, bolstered by heavy-handed nepotism and power play. This could further break Sri Lanka at a time it needs desperately to mend.

Those who stump for Rajapaksa and his current leap of faith as victor, including a resurgent army, powerful Buddhist clergy and even, some conservatives drawn from arch-rival United National Party, point to his assertion in a document titled ‘Mahinda Chintanaya’—Mahinda’s Vision. It’s a statement of purpose from 2005, the year he became president. “I will not permit any separatism,” he had asserted. “I will also not permit anyone to destroy democracy in our country.”

Those who see in the president an applicant for a banana republic, refer to a caution in the same document: “O king, you are not the ruler of this land, but the custodian of this land.” The quote is attributed to another Mahinda—Arahat—Emperor Ashoka’s son, as he admonished Devanampiya Tissa, and converted the ancient Lankan king and his court to the way of the Buddha.

This stares the latter-day Mahinda in his face. Because, in the end, rolling over the Tigers might prove an easier task than melding the country’s Tamils—including many callously denied citizenship by political parties including Rajapaksa’s own, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party—and its Diaspora, the key financiers of Tamil Tigers, into true Sri Lankan nationhood. Equally, he will need to sell a peace deal and idea of a peace dividend that such an arrangement can bring, to the Sinhala majority and its chauvinist echelons. It involves what they fear most: a political, constitutionally mandated solution that devolves both power and responsibility to Tamils in the ‘homelands’ of the island’s north and east.

If Rajapaksa fails, Sri Lanka will face another cycle of fierce Tamil resentment. While Tamil Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran is proven many times over as among the most vicious resistance leaders turned terror impresarios of the past three decades, his legacy of battling second-class citizenship still rings true. Emotional protests by the Tamil Diaspora I recently witnessed in London, against the Lankan army’s go-for-broke war, is only one such indicator.

The coalition that Rajapaksa’s SLFP leads, the United People’s Freedom Alliance, in April handsomely won council elections in the western province, the country’s most populous and prosperous. This wipe-out performance in a Buddhist stronghold during one of Sri Lanka’s worst economic crises in living memory is seen as an endorsement of Rajapaksa’s anti-Tiger campaign, a bet for tomorrow over today. Commentaries mention how elections to the executive presidency, due in three years, could be a one-horse race. Ranil Wickremasinghe of the UNP is a pale shadow. Within the SLFP, the once formidable Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga, a past president, is more out than in. The family redoubt of the Bandaranaikes, at 65 Rosmead Place, Colombo, where I once took impeccable Nuwara Eliya tea and animated political conversation, is today a chic hotel; a bit like 10 Janpath taking in paying guests.

With his new support among the Sinhala majority, Rajapaksa is well placed to sell a peace deal. During my recent visit to Sri Lanka, insiders spoke of how several ‘white papers’ are ready to be rolled out. These range from campaigns abroad to bring the Tamil Diaspora to participate in the rebuilding of Sri Lanka, to integrating the island’s Tamils into every aspect of island life—including the administrative and military. Economists and businesspersons spoke longingly of how the north and east, where the fight has for long drained the exchequer and the future, could provide the impetus for major economic growth in the next decade, through infrastructure projects, trade, and literate manpower.

The downside is that, Rajapaksa may take the easier way out and bow to the Sinhala versus Tamil history perpetuated since Independence in 1948. There have been some indications of it in his two-year campaign against the Tigers, especially since early 2009, when heavy civilian casualties among Tamils caught in the crossfire have been regarded as acceptable collateral damage for the sake of victory.

The government has suppressed media and public dissent that questions the Rajapaksa family’s hold on the island’s politics and business. The conglomerate includes the president’s wife and her family; and the presidential brothers: the feared Gotabhaya, Secretary of Defence, and Public Security, Law and Order—the boss of the defence, police, and the intelligence structures—and Basil, the president’s political advisor. Several journalists are in jail or have fled abroad. Many have died, including Lasantha Wickrematunge, the maverick editor of Sunday Leader, who in January 2009 was shot on his way to work. Lasantha was publicly called a “traitor” by Gotabhaya, for daring to expose corruption, and mishandling of certain aspects of the war.

In some ways, his critics maintain, Rajapaksa’s rule has begun to adopt the pro-Sinhala ideological callousness endemic since the days of prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Chandrika’s mother. It was later perpetuated by a string of executive presidents: Junius Jayawardene, Ranasinghe Premadasa, and Chandrika herself. Democratic rights and constitutional empathy in Sri Lanka have for too long been compromised by imperial pretension.

This will need to change. Tamils, and a future for all, must be embraced. Only then will Serendib, beloved of Marco Polo, have a hope in hell for peace and prosperity, and to detach from its sordid recent history.

This article appeared in The Hindustan Times on 28 April 2009.

Tales From Krazy Kat -- Part I

The goings on in Nepal reminds me of a time a couple of years ago. It was a time of strikes - by the Maoists, those in opposition to them in Kathmandu and in the Terai, Nepal's turbulent plains region along its border with India. Garbage piled up as sanitation workers of Kathmandu went on strike, demanding less work hours and more pay. Petrol and diesel retailers were on strike across the country, protesting corruption and high-handedness of the state-run fuel monopoly.

The most flamboyant strike, though, was credited to two ageing Boeing 757s of state-run Nepal Airlines Corporation. One struck work that August in 2007, refusing to fly on account of shoddy maintenance. It led to ten days of cancellation of international operations. In early September, a desperate management ordered two goats ritually sacrificed in front of the plane at Tribhuvan International Airport. It was to appease Akash Bhairab, god of the skies, whose likeness forms part of the airline's logo.

The plane flew. The other one soon flew away, too, to Hong Kong for repairs, but didn't return, on account of it being the subject of an aircraft leasing scandal that has for long dogged former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, of the Nepali Congress, then as now the party in frank opposition to power play by the Maoists.

That December, the remaining jet finally gave up, as an engine was flown to Brunei for overdue checks. All international flights were cancelled for two weeks by Nepal Airlines, which nevertheless continued to advertise direct flights from Kathmandu to Dubai, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Osaka.

Other than that, the airline acted with restraint. It did not sacrifice more goats.

The surreal, brutal plane that Nepal operates on has once again become evident this past month ...

For full post please visit here

Killing Binayak, and other stories

I just heard from Binayak Sen's younger brother Gautam. He teaches at an international school in Turkey.

And you know Binayak, right? He lives in Raipur jail.

Gautam is very concerned that the police in Chhattisgarh are about to trigger what he calls a "medical encounter".

Binayak, a trained doctor whom the state has accused of being a Maoist rebel, needs a coronary bypass. The Sens, Binayak included, trust only the surgeons at Vellore's respected Christian Medical College, of which Binayak is a graduate. It isn't surprising. Vellore alumni from India and abroad, among the most respected names in medicine, have fought to free Binayak for two years.

Were an operation to take place in Raipur, they fear, it would be quite simple to arrange an "accident" at the operating table. Expectedly, authorities in Chhattisgarh are doing what they can to keep Binayak in Raipur.

Read more at Indipepal.com

I'm back, and moving (for now)

Namaste. Namaskaram. Hello-ji. Hi.

It's been a long break from blogging. The last post at chakraVIEW was in August 2007.

I got busy after that, with two books. A non-fiction work, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, was published in January 2008. My second novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta, followed in the autumn of 2008. And just this past month, March 2009, the updated paperback edition of Red Sun did its turn.

It was a lot writing and publishing, and I simply didn't have the bandwidth to continue a blog.

The writing and publishing hasn't stopped, and won't. I'm working on a couple of books, and plan to write in media a lot more than I have these past five years. And, all of a sudden, the urge to blog came back, too.

It won't be here, but at a new blog destination and social networking site, called www.indipepal.com

They tracked me down through chakraVIEW, and invited me to resume, mainly by telling what a nice blog chakraVIEW used to be. Bloody sods. I fell for it. I agreed to blog there along with some others. (No worries about selling out: I retain copyright.)

So there I shall be from April 2009, as chakraVIEW, writing on this and that, mostly 'that', what I like to call 'that which people don't like to talk about'. It could be other India, or another part of the world. But it will be a journey. Let's see where it heads.

Muchly,

Sudeep

Palagummi Sainath, journalist

I’m not sure how many people in India know who Palagummi Sainath is. But I’m damned glad that I do. If you do, too, good for you. Sainath (P. Sainath, as he is better known) winning the Magsaysay Award last week may have something to do with it, but even that is a fine way to get acquainted. The man is a journalist’s journalist, and on any day I’m proud to be a colleague.

I don’t know Sainath personally – I’ve only met him a couple of times several years back – but I know his published work intimately. You won’t find him too often cloistered in air-conditioned workspaces lecturing India on how India ought to be run and lecturing America on how America ought to be run. He will be out there: smelling the smells, hearing the cries, hearing the lies, and getting outraged by the mockery on humanity that is our grand democracy. Sainath writes about the 900 million few give a fuck about. Like you – and Sainath – I’m part of the other 100 million that giddy tales of success are being written about. We’re the dream of our country’s and the world’s marketers. We’re the ones that fly well, eat well, live well and dream well. That isn’t a bad thing. I’m sure Sainath knows it, too.

Only he, and those like him, knows, acknowledges and insists that the Republic of India won’t get too far if it didn’t carry the other 900 million with it. It’s not a burden. It’s an absolute necessity. 1:9 is one hell of a compelling ratio. Ask China, that other socio-economic time bomb.

Sainath is different from many well-meaning folk that write. Let me give you and example: Arundhati Roy. Ms Roy wrote a darn fine book in The God of Small Things. But while her Valutha made love on the banks of Roy’s memory and pining by the backwaters of Ayemenem (and emerge as a guidebook for giddy Japanese tourists), Sainath had already begun to walk on the edge in Bihar, exposing a rotten system and utter callousness of governance and politics in Everybody Loves a Good Drought.

It wasn’t glib. His subsequent career didn’t rest on primping, showing up for photo-ops at Rajghat and Jantar Mantar and disappearing once photographers, speechmaking and fulminating using incorrect data and flowery words, and adopting pre-meditated positions designed to create maximum splash. When Sainath writes – as he has done tirelessly for the past two years – that Farmer X or Y killed himself on account of debt, drought, expensive fertiliser and bad GM cottonseeds in the Vidarbha region of Maharshtra, you can believe it. When he wrote last month about a ludicrously tragic scheme by which the government of Maharashtra, in grand style, gifted Jersey cows to suicide-hit, dirt poor families in that region, and these souls found their high-bred cows were eating more than the hapless quadrupeds brought in, you have to wonder why more people aren’t picking up guns and shooting dead the bureaucratic, lard-headed, corrupt sons of bitches in Mumbai and Nagpur – and indeed, across India.

I’ve wondered that often enough these past two years, as I’ve travelled some of these roads talking to people and watching first-hand the how and why of Maoism in India for Red Sun, a book I’ve been working on and that Penguin will publish. Maoism, like other violent movements, is a no-brainer in India. This is even as our country spawns trillionaires, and enough billionaires to even put Forbes, that benchmark of wealth, into pleasant shock. A bipolar country! No less!

Sainath’s writing tells us stuff about what makes India go around: want, need and the grand circus of corruption. Ms Roy tells us of the art of artful deception, of grammatically passionate ploy – a lesson gladly shed.

The good news is: there are more like Sainath out there, people who choose not to cheapen news and views. There is media, too (heaven knows, not nearly enough) like The Hindu, an often ridiculed paper on account of its stuffiness, but along with The Statesman – now bruised and with a limp, alas – still among a handful of liberal media spaces in this country that boasts as being among the world’s most raucous and freest media spaces. (Raucous, yes. Free, not quite. Not while there still exists a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, an Armed Forces Special Powers Act that chains Kashmir and the Northeast, and various Public Security Acts from Andhra Pradesh to Chhattisgarh to West Bengal that permits government to gag citizens, throw them in jail and for all practical purposes, throw away the keys.)

You will hear more from Sainath. If he doesn’t do a Roy after the Magsaysay, it can only be for the greater common good.

Tears and stuff

Things got a bit intense last evening.

I walked in on my daughter watching a re-run of Jungle Book 2 on television. You know it. Mowgli rediscovers his old friends in the jungle, after discovering hormones in the man-village. My daughter was crying because Mowgli knew he had to return to mankind, and Baloo the bear was giving him a hug to make it easier.

‘Why aren’t you crying?’ My daughter asked me. She was pouring tears. ‘It’s so sad and happy at the same time.’

So I cried a little. I was surprised at how easily the tears came.

We sat there, sniffling, pre-teen daughter and middle-aged father, as the credits rolled up. It felt good to know that in her eyes I wasn’t a wimp.

She went off to bed, as I channel-surfed: a four year-old girl raped in Delhi; real estate dealers in cahoots with politicians brokering a regime-shift in Goa; George W saying something silly; the mess in Andhra Pradesh after police killed protesters demanding government land for the landless; Aussies shipping back Doctor Haneef the terror un-suspect to India. The usual.

Then I chanced on the finals between Iraq and Saudi Arabia at Asia Cup soccer being played in Jakarta. As I watched disbelieving, the Iraqi team—a happy, committed collection of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds leaving angst and vendetta behind—went one goal up. And then won the match.

The entire Iraqi team was crying with joy. They were probably crying in Baghdad and Basra and Kirkuk and up and down the Tigris and Euphrates. I cried, too. If I had a Kalashnikov, I would probably have shot some brass into the air—to hell with my neighbours.

The last time I felt this way over a sporting event was in 1996 when Sri Lanka won the Cricket World Cup. For a brief spell, it brought that torn nation together. Tamil Tigers had declared a ceasefire of sorts for the duration. The government responded. And there was magic. Blood and gore and desperation were kept away for some weeks by the power of emotion woven by eleven people on a green playing field in a foreign land.

Some of that came back, watching the Iraqis win. Maybe they cried because they were happy. Maybe they cried for their nation—they finally could, in public, on live TV as the world watched, and nobody would call them wimps.

(Maybe it’s time someone takes Osama and Dubya, put them in the same cell at Guantanamo, and throws away the keys. That would surely lead to grand celebration in the East and West. I’d cry again, no problem.)