Stranger. Friend.

A moving post by Amitabh Bachchan on Madhushala (and my personal favorite among Amitabh Bachchan's blog posts), his father Harivanshrai Bachchan's most famous poetry collection (the son's English translation of his father's preface to Madhushala is included).

I was struck by these lines from that preface:

My definition of a good poem is that it appears before you like a stranger who impresses you so favorably that you feel like befriending him, and the more you know him the more you like him.

...and responded thus on the blog:

My own experience of poetry focuses less on friendship than on the other trope your father so astutely introduced here, namely that of the stranger. The good poem is the stranger who is never wholly reducible to friendship, it retains something in reserve. And perhaps a better way for me to approach your father’s thought is by recognizing that he sets up two axes, two poles, here: the friend and the stranger; and it is between these two that poetry happens.

(un)Surprising

It's nice to see that the Indian National Congress hasn't been paying much attention to the English-language media narrative of the party's recent election victory: that narrative, fueled by endless representatives of corporate India in news channel studios, would have everyone believe that the UPA's victory, combined with the Left's resounding defeat, signaled a ringing endorsement for greater liberalization of the Indian economy (never mind that the most liberalization-friendly party around (even if by a whisker), namely the BJP, also lost, getting 50% fewer votes than the Congress). With the pesky Communists no longer part of the governing coalition, the story went, the way would be clear for further economic reforms, beginning with the removal of caps on foreign investment in the banking and insurance industries. Naturally, then, the presentation of the new government's first budget by the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, who barely mentioned such measures, and moreover made clear that any loosening of the cap on foreign investment in the banking and insurance sectors would be limited to 49% (up from the current 26%); and, more importantly, announced a host of measures targeted at India's poorest (including a funding increase of 144% for the UPA's signature National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme ("NREGS")), was greeted with some cries of disappointment by India Inc., not to mention a massive 900-point tank on the Mumbai stock exchange.

The startling thing about these reactions is the protestations of surprise that have greeted the budget. It seems far too many in the Indian media and business communities had swallowed their own line about the "meaning" of these elections. But even a casual glance at the results shows that while such overarching narratives might make for attractive TV punditry, constructing them is hazardous where Indian elections are concerned (where, it should never be forgotten, the winning party, which received nearly 40% of the seats, got roughly 27% of the popular vote; even adding all of the Congress' UPA allies does not bring that figure anywhere near 50% -- an issue virtually all first-past-the-post systems have to deal with, although the problem is compounded by India's highly fractured electorate(s)). Even a casual glance at the election results shows that the Left's defeats cannot glibly be put down to a general (as opposed to class-specific) hunger for more free market policies. In its West Bengal bastion, the Left Front, now re-invented as a "pro-development" force not unlike the Congress itself, and (as Nandigram showed) quite willing to use the coercive power of the state to brutal effect in the service of that agenda, sustained significant losses at the hands of the Trinamool Congress, a Congress-breakaway that was now the champion of the small farmers of the sort whose land was taken at gunpoint in Nandigram, i.e., that had effectively outflanked the Left Front from, well, the left. And as for Kerala, that state seems to have been alternating between the Congress and the Left forever (the Congress, having been thrashed there last time, was due); leaving such (half-serious) explanations aside, the infighting in the state's ruling party, and the latter's unpopularity in the wake of serious corruption allegations against a prominent leader, left the Communist-led coalition in a very weak position.

Turning to the Congress, the party's brain trust surely could not have forgotten that the NREGS, and its loan waiver (more accurately a deferral) to struggling farmers, were its two most popular measures -- and it is gratifying that both have received more attention in this year's budget. Despite grave problems with the implementation mechanisms (barely functioning, although there have been some notable successes by virtue of NGO-audits), these initiatives have done some good, and have real potential. [One is gratified, but also a little depressed: the loan deferrals, for instance, are essentially band aids for farming families that are at the end of their tether (tens, if not hundreds, of thousands have committed suicide over the last decade); that even these gestures, embedded in the context of government policies that have proven far more sympathetic to the logic of economic liberalization than to the distress of small farmers, should be decried as "populist" by so many, speaks volumes. At least part of the concern is due to India's ballooning budget deficit; while these are serious concerns, a focus on fiscal discipline to the exclusion of all else, in a country where hundreds of millions live in wretched poverty, and where, additionally, infrastructure investment is an urgent need, smacks of fetish, not merely prudence. Economic liberalization, like the "socialism" that preceded it, has come to India by virtue of being sanctified as the reigning trend; not adopted upon serious reflection.]

But if the lessons the Congress would draw from its election victory should have been obvious, why the surprise among India's urban (relatively) well-heeled? Part of the problem is that far too many do not really listen to politicians: the urban middle classes tend to view Indian politicians only through the prism of corruption and/or opportunism -- with the result that ideological issues do not really register (with the exception of those ideological issues that are too overt to be missed, namely communalism and the self-identified "Marxism" of the Left parties). Thus no-one, it seems, was paying attention to the fact that Sonia Gandhi had praised Indira Gandhi's bank nationalization as far back as last November; or that the current finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, is an Indira Gandhi acolyte of the first rank. I do not quarrel with the view that most politicians might well be scoundrels -- but far too many forget the elementary rule that they are not all scoundrels in the same way. One would do well to ponder the very real distinctions between the various political parties (the fact that both the Congress and the BJP have reached a broad consensus on economic liberalization heightens the significance of the economic issues that do divide them; the differences might be small, but they are meaningful). Had the pundits all done that, they would have agreed that this budget might be many things -- but surprising it isn't.

PUBLIC ENEMIES (English; 2009)

It's 1933, and four years into the Great Depression, John Dillinger is being taken to jail. Even if we didn't know the real-life history of this bank robber, rather popular among "the public" for not taking the ordinary Joe's money (and for sticking it to the banks), Dillinger's smile would clue us in: he isn't going to be staying long. Dillinger doesn't disappoint, that is to say director Michael Mann doesn't disappoint, leading off Public Enemies with a jailbreak sequence the New York Times' Manohla Dargis has rightly called "sensationally choreographed." Nor is this the only memorable action sequence: the film is chock full of them (to the point where the accumulation almost becomes a problem -- the detail of the later sequences doesn't register; by that point the audience has become de-sensitized, and can only register the noise), not least among them Baby Face Nelson's escape from a Chicago apartment building from under the noses of several FBI agents; and Dillinger's last (and most violent) bank heist. That Mann is good at staging action sequences shouldn't come as a surprise; but what is unexpected is his taste for frenetic gunplay -- the pleasures of Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice (or the lack thereof, where the last was concerned), seem serene by comparison.

Dillinger's foil is FBI agent Melvin Purvis, one of J. Edgar Hoover's new breed of agents waging war on crime. The FBI's "new" and "scientific" methods for fighting crime also serve to highlight the passage from the world of stars to those of actors. Johnny Depp is clearly a denizen of the former, Christian Bale, of the latter. This isn't a measure of how good either performer is, but of the sensibility Mann wants the two to bring to their roles: Depp, the Movie Star, is also the criminal John Dillinger (with the same initials as Depp), back when the right outlaw could loom larger-than-life and fire the public's imagination (Jesse James, and in particular, the James played by a sorrowful Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as the frontier era was drawing to a close, also comes to mind), a personality that is revealed in the grand gesture (and belief in gesture is itself belief in personality -- as opposed to mere psychology -- and is perhaps always susceptible to romanticism), and nowhere is this love of gesture more apparent than towards the end of the film, when Dillinger infiltrates (actually, saunters into) the offices of the FBI that is out to get him: the gesture is futile, and recklessly endangers Dillinger, yet one never wonders why he does it -- Depp's Dillinger simply would; Bale is the FBI agent, the "new" sort of law-enforcement official, who is stolid and diligent, too dedicated to his duty to be anything other than valiant in serving it (courage, that is, follows logically from his duty, and is not an ideal that Purvis seems to believe in), who believes in method above all else -- Melvin Purvis is played by an actor, and one who, like most of his contemporaries, is denied access to the star's transcendence (and perhaps wouldn't know what to do with it if he were vouchsafed it). Public Enemies is, in short, a triumph of casting, because both Depp and Bale are very good at what Mann wants them to do; and if in the final analysis the film belongs to Depp, it is because Mann is ever on the side of Stars. No-one should be fooled by the grainy visuals, the very contemporary digital look of this film: it is a monument to a bygone era, and perhaps especially a bygone cinematic era (Depp's Dillinger meets his end right after he's done watching a Clark Gable film), yet rendered so straight that it doesn't have the vibe of homage, and for Mann seems to be simply the way men, women, love, valor, and films ought to be. The realization of this vision isn't unproblematic -- one might even call the vision puerile -- but there can be no doubt that in Public Enemies, Mann has achieved what he set out to do.

No meaningful discussion of Mann's work can omit mention of his visual style: his are the premier contemporary representations of nocturnal urban American spaces (Collateral is the best example), taking in gloss and shiny things with the eye (though not the covetous energy) of a magpie. The poet of things and surfaces is alive and well in Public Enemies, although the quaintness that hardly any period piece can escape means that Mann's eye is obscured from the audience, which is almost forced to believe that the camera lingers on an object not because it is made to, but because the object is an artifact, and doesn't exist anymore in the audience's time and place. The visuals themselves are markedly grainy, shorn of the luster that has been so characteristic of Mann's last few films, almost as if the director were determined to cook a snook at the annoying preciousness of Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition (as inappropriate a cinematic adaptation of a sparsely rendered graphic novel as one can imagine); yet if the film has been shot in very contemporary digital mode, the addiction to close-ups, the dialogue, the whole tone of the film, is nothing if not old school. In many of Mann's films, his earnest sensibility combines visual appeal with the claustrophobia borne of limited vision -- that Public Enemies is spared that fate is largely due to Depp, and also to French actress Marion Cotillard, who takes the rather predictable role of Dillinger's love interest (Billie Frechette) and makes it her own -- along with her acting ability and screen presence, it certainly helps that Cotillard, like so many French actresses (and not enough Hollywood ones) looks and sounds distinctive; beautiful, but not in a generic way. Which isn't to say that the film is rescued by its cast, simply that Mann realizes that a film set around the concerns animating so many films in Hollywood's golden era must be about cinema in some sense, that is, that part of the effect of the 1930s period piece consists of recreating for a 2009 audience what it must have been like to watch a movie, and watch movie-stars (often playing gangsters), back in the day. We now know that experience was imperiled in the long run, and Mann represents that loss by means of the fate of John Dillinger (but not only Dillinger: I've referenced the sequence where Dillinger stares at Clark Gable, Depp's smile the smile of recognition, but even Baby-Face Nelson seems to like nothing better than doing James Cagney impersonations) in a changing world. Not only are his methods -- essentially, walking up to a bank and robbing it quickly, decamping with the loot and a couple of hostages used as cover -- doomed to ultimate failure in an emerging world where law-enforcement knows few jurisdictional bounds, and is metamorphosing into a science; his bank robberies seem like small change when organized crime has itself gone "coast to coast" in the words of Chicago mobster Frank Nitti (played by Billy Camp). Quite fittingly, Dillinger is felled outside a theater showing a movie called "Manhattan Melodrama" -- not a title one could any longer even imagine gracing a movie theater. The expression on Depp's face when he is fatally shot is one of surprise -- his Dillinger never really thought the cops could catch up with him, insisting to Billie that he and his gang were too smart, too fast, and too good for them -- but we can see that it's been a long time coming.

Anonymous

It is odd to mourn the loss of a building one has never seen, the significance of which one does not know, the absence of which one will never feel. And yet that's precisely where I found myself yesterday, as BBC correspondent Sam Miller's voice interrupted my treadmill reverie:

Most evenings, just before sunset, I walk or run in a huge secret park in the heart of modern Delhi. It is really a jungle with footpaths, known only to those who live close by. . . . Two summers ago, back in my local jungle park, I found another ruin, in an area of wilderness so thick with undergrowth that I had to beat my way through it with a stick. There, long-forgotten, was half a mosque, a tree growing out of one of its walls, but the perfect rosettes and squinches created by artisans 700 years ago still intact. I tried to interest my friends and fellow journalists in my discovery of an unlisted ancient mosque in the heart of modern Delhi. I told people about it at Delhi parties and they yawned. I telephoned a leading historian of the medieval Sultanate period, who promised he would get back to me. A guide book writer did come to see and she told me it will be mentioned in the next edition. But I failed to get anyone else half as excited as me.

Miller's pleasure (the photograph he took is enclosed above) would soon be tinged with more than melancholy at the indifference of those around him:

On my return I went back to the mosque and discovered that my co-ordinates were correct. . . . The mosque had gone.
It had been bulldozed and there was no sign it had ever existed. The wilderness had become a building site and squash and badminton courts were being built for - yes - the Commonwealth Games. No-one made a fuss and I have found it hard to make the case that this archaeologically super-rich city is much poorer without one old tumbledown mosque. And though I have been able to immortalise it in photos and text in a book I wrote about my adoptive city, I am also aware that it is just one of dozens of minor ruins that have disappeared in recent years. And more will almost certainly go as the pace of development continues to accelerate. Delhi is a city that is more proud of its future than its past.

Miller's own monument is unlikely to last as long as the mosque did, but I couldn't help but feel grateful at his determination to preserve the trace as best he could. Of such cussed and quixotic sentimentality is memory made. I was reminded of my own visit to Firozabad in 2006, the remains of one of Delhi's medieval capitals, but not one of the modern city's busy tourist sites. Perhaps it was just as well I had the place to myself: the ghosts would have abhorred a crowd, although they do tolerate the occasional prying tourist, and the school children (from cramped houses they share with far too many people for any quiet corners) studying for their exams:

How Not to Reach a Peace Deal

In recent months, there has been some discussion in the media of how close India and Pakistan were to reaching a peace agreement settling the Kashmir dispute, before Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was ousted from power by a popular movement galvanized by Musharraf's attempts to hold on to power by nakedly manipulating Pakistan's judiciary. I have previously expressed skepticism about the truth of such claims about the prospects for a peace deal, but perhaps the more important question to be asked is why, after six years of a "composite dialogue" process and numerous "people-to-people" exchanges, the Indian and Pakistani publics know so little about what their leaders have been saying to their counterparts on the other side, or what the contours of an ultimate deal might look like, or how to get there. This isn't a purely academic question: such mass ignorance ensures that Indo-Pak contacts remain -- even at the best of times -- at a relatively apolitical level, restricted to, for instance, cricket and hockey tours; liberalized visit visa regimes; or low-level trade across the Line of Control dividing Indian-held from Pakistani-held Kashmir, etc. None of these are trivial measures, and I welcome each of them -- but none of these goes any significant way toward preparing the people of India and Pakistan (including the people of the two Kashmirs) for a political settlement (specifically, for the compromises, disappointments, and challenges that must attend any settlement) -- with the result that even minor setbacks (let alone catastrophes like the Mumbai attacks of November 2008) lead to a resurgence of the old anxieties and frustrations, as if no peace process had ever intervened.

It isn't hard to see why leaders prefer to conduct talks in secret: premature (or indeed any) disclosure of negotiating positions, or intimations that one might accept the other side's positions, would likely help mobilize constituencies opposed to the particular proposal, and perhaps to the process in general, potentially derailing them. But the leaders of India and Pakistan have erred too much in the other direction: over the last few years, the substance of talks between the countries have been so confidential that the people of the two countries have known practically nothing about them, beyond that negotiations are taking place. The aim seems to be to present the public with a fait accompli, and then dare it to demur; rather than build support for the substance of what a peace deal might ultimately look like. Over the last five or six years, the governments of India and Pakistan have periodically stressed the desirability of peace, and the necessity of the two sides negotiating -- but have never attempted to secure a mandate (much less forge a consensus) on what the contours of a peace deal might look like. Rather, we have been treated to after-the-fact instances of this or that figure insisting that the parties were one stroke away from an ultimate deal. Not only does the cloak and dagger air of these negotiations make any such claims impossible to verify, but it raises serious questions about the viability of any peace deal that resulted from such a process. It may not be wise to expose every twitch of the peace turtle to the light of day, but to keep the animal under wraps over its entire lifespan smacks of weakness and fear, not the combination of determination and optimism that is needed to make peace between India and Pakistan. [For instance, with respect to the claims that the Musharraf and UPA governments were close to a final peace agreement on Kashmir, one notes that Kashmiri representatives do not appear to have played a meaningful role in the process; it beggars belief that the governments of India and Pakistan continue to believe -- at this late date -- that any solution can simply be presented to Kashmiris. The contours of this deal are not the point -- the deal India and Pakistan supposedly almost struck seems like a pretty good one to me -- the unacceptability of any deal to Kashmiris absent their participation in the process resulting in an agreement most certainly is.] Asif Ali Zardari and Manmohan Singh would do well to keep the failures of the last six years in mind -- beginning, above all, with the failure to take the people of the two countries into even minimal confidence, a monumental failure of the political imagination -- as the foreign secretaries of the two countries prepare to meet next month, in the first sign (since last November's Mumbai attacks) that the countries are prepared to move forward on the peace process.

Stupidity

The recent unrest over the alleged rape and murder of two women in the Kashmiri town of Shopian (that has led to massive protests, with very many people convinced that the perpetrators were Indian army personnel -- so far, evidence to that effect has not been unearthed, although given the general culture of impunity within which uniformed men seem to operate in India when it comes to sexual assault, not to mention in Kashmir, the conviction is a plausible one) has clearly rattled the state government (Chief Minister Omar Abdullah didn't help matters by sticking his neck out early on and claiming that there was no evidence of sexual assault, a claim belied by the autopsy report). So much so that the government has apparently resorted to bullying cable TV operators for showing too much news:

As the protests grew in intensity, information dissemination became a cause of concern for the Omar Abdullah led National Conference-Congress coalition government in the state. It reacted by imposing a crackdown on local Cable TV channels. In its June 6 directive to them, it asked them to limit their news telecasts to 15 minutes a day. The channels were asked not to report anything which goes against the taste of the government and do not give much coverage to the activities of the separatist groups or the protests staged by the masses. . . . [P]rior to imposing curbs, the owners and editors of Cable TV channels in Kashmir were summoned by the authorities and threatened that they had better "behave properly". Editors say the meeting was more of a threat than any discussion on Cable TV reporting. During the meeting, editors were accused of the receiving funds from All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of various separatist organsations operating in Jammu and Kashmir. LINK

Evidently, the cleaner, more transparent administration promised by Omar Abdullah comes replete with a thin skin. [Not to mention that it exposes the absurdity of a media (at least the English-language portion of it) that was utterly complicit in projecting Abdullah as a break from the past, as representing a new start, etc. But as was no less true of Rahul Gandhi, such attitudes spoke volumes about the relative youth and telegenic personae of the candidates in question, and nothing at all about any substantive policies offered by these scions of political dynasties of rather old vintage (Omar Abdullah, for instance, is the son and grandson of Kashmiri Chief Ministers; his father, Farooq Abdullah, simply vacated the CM-in-waiting spot in favor of his son, preferring to be a federal minister in the Manmohan Singh government, a reversal of the NDA-years when the father was CM of Jammu and Kashmir, and the son a federal minister), beyond mouthing banalities like "good governance". Who anyway says (s)he is for bad governance? The bankruptcy of political discourse in the mainstream English-language Indian media (specifically, its insistence on presenting "good" politicians as those who are apolitical providers of good governance, which is nothing more or less than an anti-democratic fetishization of technocrats) never ceases to amaze me.]

The work of the Jammu and Kashmir state government is made easier by the sorts of laws in effect nationwide, that have severe consequences for freedom of expression. Consider this gem from the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995 (Chapter V, Paragraphs 19-20; emphasis mine):

Power to prohibit transmission of certain programmes in public interest. Where an officer, not below the rank 'Of a Group 'A' officer of the Central Government authorised by the State Government in this behalf, thinks it necessary or expedient so to do in the public interest, he may, by order, prohibit any cable operator from transmitting or re-transmitting any particular programme if it is likely to promote, on grounds of religion, race, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, linguistic or regional groups or castes or communities or which is likely to disturb the public tranquillity. . . . Where the Central Government thinks it necessary or expedient so to do in public interest, it may prohibit the operation of any cable television network in such areas as it may, by notification in the Official Gazette, specify in this behalf.

According to one media source (emphasis mine):

The Deputy Commissioner (DC) Srinagar in his notice to various Cable TV channels has given a reference of the Cable Television Network (Regulation) Act, 1995 guidelines saying that no programme should be carried on Cable network which:
Offends good taste or decency.
Contains criticism of friendly countries.
Contains attack on religious communities or visuals or words contemptuous of religious groups or which promote communal attitudes.
Contains anything obscene, defamatory, deliberate, false and suggestive innuendos and half truths.
Is likely to encourage or incite violence or contains anything against maintenance of law and order or which promote anti-national attitudes.
Contains anything affecting the integrity of the nation.

Such laws are not only more worthy of the British Raj than of India's democracy; they are uncommonly stupid: in the context of a state like Jammu and Kashmir, they do not help counter secessionist sentiment, but simply foster a suspicion of all institutions -- a cynicism that is, in the long run, far more harmful to the Indian polity than whatever the state government is afraid the TV channels might show. [Such laws are in effect across India, of course, and not just in Jammu and Kashmir; but, are far less likely to be enforced to the fullest extent in a non-secessionist context; although even here, the example of the Emergency three decades ago shows there is no room for complacency.]

None of this is to absolve the irresponsibility of much of the Kashmiri media (not to mention, perhaps more charitably, the intimidation it is subject to from pro-secessionist groups in addition to the state), but the government's cure is worse than the ailment. For a fascinating piece on media coverage of the Shopian murders, see HERE.

Obama. Irshaad.

This one is too good to pass up: Obama recently told an interviewer (from DAWN, Pakistan's leading English-language newspaper):

'I would love to visit [Pakistan]. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook,’ said Mr Obama.

‘What can you cook?’

‘Oh, keema ... daal ... You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’

‘You read Urdu poetry?’

‘Absolutely.'

Read the rest at POLITICO. Thanks to Tyler for bringing this to my attention! The complete interview with DAWN's Anwar Iqbal is on the newspaper's website.

Lalgarh

[A few related posts here, here, and here.]

In the wake of the Maoists declaring Lalgarh (in West Bengal's Midnapore district) a "liberated zone", the state and central governments last week decided to move against the Maoists, amidst the usual (and breathless) media focus on the military/police action -- and utter disregard for the material conditions that might have led "tribals" in Lalgarh and elsewhere to support the insurgents. Indeed, one CNN-IBN podcast spoke (with no trace of irony) of the liberation of Lalgarh as proving difficult, in part because most of the tribals there were sympathetic to the insurgents! Just who or what is being liberated here? Not too many Naxalite leaders give interviews to the English-language media, but the Lalgarh crisis seems to have changed that for the moment, as even the Naxalites have woken up to the value of public relations: see, for instance, here, here, and here, for first-hand encounters with some Naxalite voices:

...You see, power doesn’t come through weapons alone. Look at the people of Lalgarh (where tribals seized administrative power after the police allegedly tortured some of them on the suspicion that they were harbouring Maoists)—with just home-made bows and arrows, they have stalled police. Guerilla operations depend a lot on people’s support and because people are with us, we have managed to keep the police from reaching us. Our party runs on an annual budget of Rs15-20 crore. That’s what we spend on our operations across the country, and it’s almost the same amount that we raise through donations, seizures and heists. Most of the money is raised in Dandakaranya, Bihar and Jharkhand. ...

...There is no end to revolution. There is no time frame—it seems it will take time… But, if the war strategy is right, we’ll reach our goal soon. Otherwise, we will have to retreat and change course. But we are strictly against joining mainstream politics. Over the last few years, politicians such as Sonia Gandhi and Buddhababu have been advising us to follow the example of Maoists in Nepal, but look at what happened to them. I met Prachanda several times and told him that they were on the wrong track and urged him to change his political stance. We won’t make the same mistake. ...

...I don’t have kids. Our party doesn’t support the idea of having children. There is no ban as such, but the leadership expects the women in our party to undergo sterilization after marriage. This is done to ensure that their political careers are not compromised. ...LINK

One hardly needs to be a Naxalite sympathizer (I am not) to observe that the system has failed "tribals", and nowhere more so than in eastern and central India (in Chattisgarh alone, as Anand Teltumbde recently noted in an incisive piece, "over 100,000 people have been displaced and hundreds of villages abandoned, besides the killing of hundreds in the crossfire between the police and the Naxalites"; the likes of Andhra Pradesh have a somewhat better record -- although that isn't saying much -- of responding to the concerns represented by the Naxalite movement by incorporating some of them (along with erstwhile Naxalites) into the political mainstream) -- and the ruling Left dispensation in West Bengal is not (ideologically) nimble enough to inspire much hope on that front. As Nandigram showed, its response to contemporary ideological challenges has been limited to throwing in its lot with industrial "development", no matter how many farmers have to be displaced; in one fell swoop transforming the Comrades in West Bengal from proletarian revolutionaries to neo-liberal champions of "development" eminently acceptable to the very middle classes once scorned by them. A reminder, if any were needed, that India needs an alternative to Communism in terms of the progressive political space, one that speaks in terms of the Indian polity's great "tribal"-shaped (and Dalit and minority-shaped, though these groups fare better) and perhaps even modernity-shaped blind spots, not in the rhetoric of post-industrial class struggles that even the CPI(M) has trouble taking seriously anymore. As the country negotiates the challenges of twenty-first century globalization, a "post-modern" political ethic is a necessity; India can ill-afford the luxury of a Left simultaneously operating along the political axes of a 1960s time warp, and an authoritarian pro-heavy industry paradigm.

Aditya Nigam has an interesting piece on Kafila about the possibility that was Lalgarh, before the area became a battleground between armed Maoists and state forces: a must-read.

DARKNESS AT NOON (1940): A Note

Darkness at Noon: A Novel by Arthur Koestler

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
An excerpt from Darkness at Noon was included in an English class anthology in middle school, and I had always meant to follow up on Rubashov's travails in the face of the Communist purges of the late 1930s. A chance glimpse of this bright red cover at McNally Jackson nearly two decades later served as my madeleine, and who can resist nostalgia?

Rubashov, it turns out, was not the innocent I had imagined from my textbook excerpt, but instead, a lynchpin of the Revolution and the Communist Party, who had helped build the very system that in time would devour him (and who has himself sacrificed many an innocent on the altar of Revolution, and the redemption-by-history it promises). Yet his is no mere youthful revolutionary fervor turned sour: rather, Rubashov remains a true believer almost to the very end, and even as he faces conviction and death remains open to the possibility that "No. 1" (a thinly disguised Stalin) might even be right in liquidating the Rubashovs who represent the Revolution's founding generation.

Rubashov's uncritical acceptance of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, in particular the "objective" nature of the Marxist-Leninist view of history, makes Darkness at Noon seem more than a little dated, but the book's representation of a system where the notion that the ends justify the means has been taken to its logical (and monstrous) conclusion, where the individual is a mere speck against the backdrop of History (and the favorable verdict it promises), remains permanently relevant. As does the dramatic tension of Rubashov's various interrogation sequences. But the novel seems a bit abstract when it moves away from those sequences, as if Koestler were working out an intellectual puzzle rather than recounting the the fate of Rubashov (and in him, that of an age). Indeed, this reader found himself wondering whether the book might not have worked better as a play consisting only of the interrogation scenes: their distilled terror and intensity (by virtue of their representation of a looming inevitability that is simply a function of the absolute pitilessness of the system, and of the juxtaposition of the frail individual with that system) is ideally suited to the theatrical space.


View all my reviews.

Lights, Camera, Politics! -- II (from Chapati Mystery)

Following-up on this thread, here's more from Chapati Mystery (mine and other folks' comments follow purdah's post The Silver Screen War).

Film Review: FRONTIER GANDHI (2008)

The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace, directed by T.C. McLuhan; screened on June 14, 2009 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of the Muslim Voices festival.

The sheer incongruity of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988) merits some explanation. He lived most of his life on the wrong side of history and political geography: his championing of Pashtun causes in the 1920s and 1930s did not win him the friendship of the British Raj (which ruled the Pashtun lands east of the Durand line as part of British India's North-West Frontier Province ("NWFP")); over time, his Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) movement became the only mass-based predominantly Muslim movement in (what is today) Pakistan to be allied with the Indian National Congress in the struggle for independence -- which, by the 1940s, meant that he had to contend with the rising tide of the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan (not to mention a colonial authority that was far more suspicious of the Khidmatgars than of the League); he couldn't simply be an Afghan nationalist, given that he was born on the side of the Durand line not ruled from Kabul. Finally, he and his movement became misfits in the post-1947 political dispensation, the man himself branded a traitor by the ruling establishment in Pakistan, a Gandhi-lover in a nation-state founded on the two-nation theory. Yet none of this can detract from the fact that Khan was the driving force behind the most (only?) organized Pashtun mass movement of modern times, a force so potent that even six decades after the NWFP voted to join Pakistan in a referendum (the only one of its kind in the sub-continent), "Badshah" ("King") Khan's brand lives on, in Pakistan, by means of the Awami National Party ("ANP"), a Pashtun-centric political party run (for the most part) by his descendants; and in India, by means of Khan's induction into mainstream nationalist historiography's pantheon of heros, as the very archetype of the "good" Muslim.

Yet traces of the man's "difference", his strangeness, remain, defying easy assimilation: his championing of Pashtun nationalism, on both sides of the Durand line, cannot sit comfortably within the Nehruvian project (a problem Indian textbooks have dealt with by passing over it in silence); his preference for an un-partitioned India over Pakistan if the option of "Pashtunistan" was off the table is even more incomprehensible to mainstream Pakistani discourse than Pashtun nationalism is; and his frank religiosity would make the Indian Left uncomfortable. The oddness extends to his physical appearance: he seems immensely tall in the newsreels and photographs, with powerful, yet gentle, eyes, and a nose the size of which beggars belief. Badshah Khan was, quite simply, the echidna of sub-continental politics, the patron saint of all desi political oddities who have never found a home in the region's post-colonial states.

It should thus come as no surprise that the mass movement Khan built is like a compendium of stereotype-busters: fanatically non-violent in a violent region, and composed of people defined -- by both colonial and post-colonial authorities, by "Westerners" as well as by native "others" -- as essentially and irredeemably violent; progressive in a milieu where the term is reserved for secular dispensations; and inter-religious in a place and time when communal identity came to become all but synonymous with political destiny. The story of Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgars touches upon virtually every significant political concern in three South Asian nation-states (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), and is yet practically unknown outside the sub-continent, and simplistically understood within it. All of which is a rather long-winded way of explaining just why I took the train one balmy Sunday afternoon, from Spanish Harlem all the way to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, when I heard that a documentary on the great man's life was going to be screened as part of a festival called "Muslim Voices."

Unfortunately, McLuhan's documentary is nowhere near as interesting as a film on Badshah Khan should be, largely due to a prism that insists on beatifying the man, on representing him as a now-forgotten prophet, rather than as the fascinating political animal he was. The film's title is thus no accident, for Mahatma Gandhi has himself long been consumed by Western audiences as a saint, rather than the enigmatic, frustrating, and great political leader he was. For Frontier Gandhi, as for the Eknath Easwaran book that McLuhan says inspired the film, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan is an almost other-worldly figure, an incarnation of humanistic love, his philosophy of non-violent resistance simply an expression of that love. This is all well-intentioned, and certainly none could deny the ethical import of the tactics championed by Khan and Gandhi, but the effect is not only simple-minded, but downright pernicious. For Khan to tower as the Pashtun Jesus, he must be set against a hopelessly lost people, and an ethos where the only natural thing to do is to fight and kill. As noted above, this is a common stereotype, both in the sub-continent and in the West, but overuse has certainly not dulled its edge (indeed, I have myself heard the Pakistani military's recent interventions in the region justified on the ground that the Pashtuns only appreciate force). Nor does it explain anything: watching this documentary does not enable one to get even a glimmer of how and why Khan's message was able to resonate in the NWFP of his day, how he was able to build up such a formidable organization, and why the movement was not more successful in preventing partition, or even of winning the allegiance of more Muslims (not to mention whether or not Khan's call for a boycott of the 1947 referendum, was a political blunder). Frontier Gandhi gives us, instead, a glimpse of the sacred: we see the holy man in grainy newsreels, while modern-day acolytes profess wonder at his goodness; in short, a devotional, not a documentary (although admittedly one with the benefit of introducing "the West" to an aspect of Pashtun history that has hardly gotten any attention in the post-9/11 world; for a serious engagement with that history, check out Mukulika Banerjee's wonderful The Pathan Unarmed).

Nevertheless, there is much to redeem Frontier Gandhi: despite the problematic framing of her subject, McLuhan allows Badshah Khan to "speak", through scattered doses of his writings (narrated by Om Puri), and audio clips of the man's own wonderfully rich, measured voice. And then there are the videos, very many of them, enabling the audience to catch glimpses of the man, even if he's doing pretty much the same thing in most of them (namely, greeting people) -- and there are some memorable exceptions, such as the excerpt from a very late interview of Khan's wherein he warns that the best solution to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a negotiated one, lest the conflict engulf everyone; or videos of his trip to India in 1969, replete with Indira Gandhi looking at the audience rather than paying any heed to the man speaking at the podium; or one from the 1940s, when an animated Jawaharlal Nehru throws his arm over Badhsah Khan's shoulder. Last, but certainly not least, McLuhan has done the audience a great service by including extensive footage of interviews with surviving Khudai Khidmatgars, from both Pakistan and India. Their ardor and conviction, and (at times) their sorrow and disappointment, shine through. Taken together, the audio/video clips and the interviews take the documentary in a different direction than the one McLuhan (or interviewees like Saeed Naqvi, Eknath Easwaran, and M.J. Akbar) appear to have had in mind -- a far richer and more authentically grounded direction. For those testimonials to a lost world, and to an abiding conviction, this film deserves to be seen.

The General (or, Why The Film Would Be No Better As A Rerun)

Ex-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has been on a mission to burnish his image for some time now, after a cooling off period immediately following his ouster in the face of a committed and inspiring "lawyers' movement" (but not only the lawyers' movement) for democracy. A recent interview in Der Spiegel makes clear that his belief in the centrality of the military to Pakistan's national project (and, presumably, of his own centrality to the cause of the nation) is as strong as ever:

Nothing can happen to Pakistan as long as the armed forces are intact and strong. Anyone who wants to weaken and destabilize Pakistan just has to weaken the army and our intelligence service, ISI, and this is what is happening these days.

Classic military self-righteousness from the man who left Pakistan a much bigger mess than he found it; and implicit is the world-view of the Pakistani military as an uber-caste serving as the only reliable guardians/guarantors of the nation. This sort of PR-drive is part of the wider context of the military's offensive against the Taliban in Swat -- whatever one might say about the merits of opposing the Taliban, there can be little doubt that the Pakistani military is using the opportunity to refurbish its tarnished image, to impress upon all Pakistanis who might oppose it that in times of stress, that only the military can save them. Such image-making is par for the course in many countries -- but given the context of Pakistan's hard won electoral freedoms, and the enduring influence of the military-intelligence apparatus(es) on Pakistan's public life; and given, above all, the all-too-frequent tendency of Pakistan's urbane classes toward facile despair with the venality and inefficiencies of civilian politicians (and consequent acceptance of the more systemic corruption of a military regime, especially one clothed in neo-Ataturk garb) -- Pakistan's democrats (or at least those not too busy cheerleading the military, rather than asking how and why three million people need to be displaced to deal with 4,000 militants) ignore this move at their peril. As does an international community that might yet remain wedded to the vision of a Pakistan that was simply "better managed" under Musharraf, and hence that the man might need to be brought back in some way, shape, or form. Pakistan doesn't need authoritarian "management"; it needs more chaotic renewal, more civilian politics (even if corrupt and sordid), and more reform, of the sort which underpin democracies around the world.

[Aside: with respect to Musharraf's claim on how close India and Pakistan were to resolving the Kashmir dispute (uncritically repeated by sections of the Indian English-language media), I remain skeptical: even if Musharraf's proposals were as set forth here, they were apparently made at precisely the time when Musharraf's internal position within Pakistan was weakening beyond repair in the face of the chief justice controversy/lawyer movement, etc., and thus come across as a desperate attempt to shore up his position. But no-one likes to do deals with weak people they think might not be around to guarantee implementation and continued observance, and I suspect India was of the same mind. The notion that "transit routes" were the main stumbling block is a little hard to swallow, especially given that a Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus-service was inaugurated a few years ago, and that India recently eased restrictions on who could be a passenger. None of this is to suggest that India isn't a past master at never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity (its apparent obliviousness to the Kashmiri separatist movement's renunciation of violence last year is a case in point), but simply that Musharraf's claims here need to be taken with a rather large dose of salt.]

A Scene from NAYAK (Bengali; 1966)

There's a superb sequence in Satyajit Ray's Nayak (Bengali; 1966) where the film-star (played by Uttam Kumar) is talking to a young (and inexperienced, at least where cinema is concerned) female journalist in a railway dining car; the train has stopped at a station, and there is a crowd with its faces pressed against the window, clearly unnerving the journalist (played by Sharmila Tagore); Ray even adds an inspired touch, the ceaseless tapping of the fans' fingers on the window, that not only affects Tagore's character, but also gets under the audience's skin, preventing the scene from being a "comfortable" one for it. Through it all, Kumar's character feigns indifference, the sort of Olympian reserve that, one imagines, might well add to his fans' yearning; and is amused at his female companion's discomfort. Many gazes are in play here: the theatre audience watching the crowd at the train station; the latter itself clamoring for the star's attention; and the celebrity, enjoying the attention, watching the journalist's discomfort; and the journalist herself, hitherto perhaps a bit smug at (what she has imagined is) the shallowness of the celebrity's life, embarrassed by the attention, and feeling the weight the star bears every public moment. I cannot think of a better cinematic representation of the star's aura, of the star's position vis-a-vis the audience.

Satyam commented on the same scene here.

JOHNNY GADDAR (Hindi; 2007): A Follow-Up

As a follow-up to my review of Sriram Raghavan's Johnny Gaddaar, and in connection with MasterPraz's review of the film:



I loved the sequences involving Seshadri (Dharmendra) and his dead wife, and Seshadri's tape of her crooning the “Mora gora angh lai le” song from Bandini (vaguely reminiscent of Krapp's Last Tape -- given what Vikram (Neil Mukesh) does to him, it certainly is Seshadri's last tape)): in evoking the image of an “old world” and aging thief out of sync with more ruthless times today, Raghavan also evokes a bygone era in Bollywood, be it by way of the references to films like Bandini, Jonny Mera Naam, or Parwana. Neil Mukesh’s character might be inspired by the Dev Anand starrer to take "Johnny" as his name for purposes of his plan to rip-off his partners in crime, but his generation has turned ghaddaar (traitor), slaying the father to grab what’s his. Standard Freudian drama, except that this is about cinema (not an Oedipal contest over the mother), and hence the woman singing the song from Bandini is long since dead, and (for the audience) the (cinematic) era she hearkens to, long past. Leaving the living fighting over scraps.

On Bunuel and Surrealism

In response to Satyam's note on surrealism in cinema; and, in particular, to these lines:

It seems to me that Bunuel is a master at this mode precisely because he eschews the earlier Dali-esque ways and resorts to ‘formal’ narratives that are madly surreal otherwise. Or rather his surrealism is all the more effective to the extent that it erupts in the midst of a certain formal rigor.

I think Bunuel is able to produce this effect because he is one of the premier representers of perversity; or rather, one might say his social critique takes the form of revealing the perversity that underlies the ordinary, the routine, the everyday. The surreal in the late Bunuel, that is to say in films like Belle du Jour; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or Cet Obscure Objet de Desire, is not the surreal of Dali (which I would characterize as the presentation of a reality that simultaneously underlies “normal” reality, and is stubbornly other than it), but the effect of unreality produced by the bourgeois insistence on normalcy in the face of abnormality. “Surreal” here is the effect produced by the characters within the film ignoring the elephant in the room — even as the whole film is geared toward showing the audience the world of the film in the elephant’s permanent shadow.

More comments on SATYAMSHOT.

A brief note on Mayawati

In response to the discussion on this (very interesting) post by Shivam Vij:

Those who expect Mayawati to be some kind of political saint — and then criticize her when she isn’t that way — must answer the question why the bar is set so high for her and not for others. I might add that, where the (English-language) Indian media is concerned, there is ample evidence of a class (i.e. not caste) bias too, where “English-medium” politicians always get softer media coverage (fawning in the case of Rahul Gandhi), whereas others don’t get the same solicitude. The point isn’t that Mayawati is or ought to be above reproach (the BSP seems to be more interested in coming to power and capturing the bureaucracy rather than engaging in the sort of sweeping agenda that is cultural, not just political, and can hope to be transformative), or that Rahul Gandhi is or isn’t a decent chap — the point is that the luxury of his wholesomeness is, at least in part, a function of his privilege.

Book Review: AFRICA'S WORLD WAR (2008)

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Africa's World War, Gerard Prunier's fantastic exercise in a sort of double contextualization -- of both the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing trans-continental Congo conflict, involving at least half a dozen countries and yet more non-state militias and organizations -- is essential reading. Prunier analyzes the causes and course of the conflict in significant detail, without losing sight of his non-specialist audience, and all the while going beyond the glib explanations (of the "ancient ethnic hatreds" variety) much loved by the international community when it comes to many conflict situations, especially African ones. Prunier is rightly skeptical of the "New World Order" that emerged in the wake of the Berlin Wall's fall, not to mention the neo-colonial "old" order championed in Africa by the likes of France; at the same time, he eschews the facile (and condescending) anti-imperialism of many on the left, tending to deprive African political actors of agency. But perhaps most notably, Prunier seeks to correct the record when it comes to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, and the movement he leads (the Rwandan Patriotic Front ("RPF")), presenting a far more complicated and disturbing picture of the RPF's activities in the Great Lakes region than readers of Philip Gourevitch's one man pro-RPF lobby would be familiar with. This isn't simply an academic question for Prunier, as he strives to demonstrate how Rwanda's post-genocide government shrewdly (and cynically) exploited the Clinton Administration's guilt over its inaction in the face of the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Rwanda's (then Hutu-led) regime -- with disastrous consequences for the rest of the region, as Rwanda used the excuse of pursuing the genocidaires in the neighboring Congo (then called Zaire) to invade its gargantuan neighbor, fueling a conflict that has been estimated to have claimed four million lives over the last decade -- the deadliest conflict since World War II (indeed Prunier implicitly suggests the Bush Administration, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, were more clear-sighted with respect to the RPF, Powell reportedly telling Kagame at their first meeting that the carte blanche hitherto given the RPF to remake the region in the name of security for the Tutsi-dominated regime, was history).



Africa's World War is a lot more nuanced than the above has probably made it seem. For instance, Prunier's debunking of the myth of the virtuous RPF does not lead him to ignore the very real security threat that the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the RPF's 1994 victory over the genocidaire regime, continued to pose to the new government; but he rightly questions the offensive conflation of the Hutu refugees in general with the genocidaires. Nor does he pull any punches when discussing the RPF's own gross violence and its own blatantly discriminatory attitude towards the Hutus. Finally, the international community's combination of moralistic posturing, cretinous imbecility, and hypocrisy comes in for its share of the flak too. This isn't a book with "good guys" (although this reader found himself wishing Prunier had spent more time fleshing out the character of Joseph Kabila, the seemingly callow successor (and son) of Laurent Kabila, whose prior career had been devoid of anything suggesting that he would turn out to be the shrewd and capable customer he has turned out to be in running a country that was in dire straits when his father took it over from the West's erstwhile Cold War ally (and kleptocrat supreme) Mobutu Sese Seko, and no less so when Mobutu's successor died), but one that highlights the shifting complexities of the region's politics. For instance, taking the "international" dimension of the Congolese wars as an example (one among many), the reader quickly learns that it is impossible to engage with the Congolese wars that brought down the Mobutu regime in 1996-97, and then continued to rage for years due to a variety of reasons, local, economic, and international, without engaging with the history of the Congo's neighbors, including (apart from Rwanda), Uganda (where Kagame and the RPF cut their teeth in the 1980s in that country's civil wars), Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and Angola. The complexity of the situation chronicled in the book can sometimes feel overwhelming, despite the helpful key at the front of the book, and running footnotes might have been more helpful than the appendix; one hopes that future editions spare a thought to this effect for the lay reader.



But no caviling can detract from the fact that Prunier's is the indispensable English-language book for understanding the Great Lakes wars of the last decade, combining empathy and engagement with cynicism regarding the motives of the players that borders on the ruthless. In the final analysis, and despite the book's title, Prunier sees his subject as more analogous to Europe's seventeenth century Thirty Years' War rather than to World War I, both in terms of the conflict's structure (with much of the momentum provided by private/princely interests and greed rather than reasons of state per se, and in terms of its wide-ranging impact. Prunier's thesis is that the conflict has gone a long way toward consigning the "old" African "system" -- a relic of the Cold War and half-hearted de-colonization -- to the dustbin of history, much as the Thirty Years' War paved the way for the Westphalian system that would dominate Europe in subsequent centuries. Especially in the Great Lakes region, the old world, born of imperialism, ethnic conflict, economic pressures, Cold War ripple effects, and the weakness of the nation-state (a weakness, nowhere greater than in the Congo, transforming just about every civil war into a conflict with trans-national ramifications, as everybody's enemy set up shop in the Congo, where the central government was too weak to keep anybody out). As to whether the new beast slouching towards Bethlehem is "better" or "worse" than the dying animal, there are no easy answers -- if the Thirty Years' War is any guide, the jury might remain out for a few centuries yet.


View all my Goodreads reviews.

Not everyone is impressed with Prunier's book, including the U.S. army's Thomas Odom.

All Aboard the Bus

Amidst all the other news going around, India's easing of travel restrictions on Indian citizens traveling to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, risks going unnoticed. Indeed, that might even explain why the government chose this very moment to slip this under the radar and allow Indians -- even those without relatives in the "other" Kashmir -- to travel on the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus:

Any person from any part of the country with or without a relative on the other side can now travel on the Srinangar-Muzaffarabad bus.

The Ministry of External affairs has done away with the tiresome procedure of verification and re-verification. Instead there will be a triple permit system which means a person with just 2 references from PoK can travel to and fro three times without renewing the documents.

The practical benefits of this are unclear -- apart from pilgrims, not too many Indians with no relatives in Pakistan travel there to begin with, let alone to the Pakistani side of the Line of Control in Kashmir; and it is unclear what sorts of "references" will be acceptable; and how liberal the Pakistani authorities will be in issuing permits -- but the move is symbolically important, and perhaps the first sign since last November's Mumbai attacks that the long-term goal of softer borders in the sub-continent remains in place. All well and good, but the move nevertheless testifies to a certain schizophrenia on the part of the Indian government: given that the move is significant primarily as a symbolic matter, it should have been better publicized than it has been -- absent publicity, it is difficult to see how the Indo-Pak peace process can derive benefit from this gesture, that, albeit the right one, seems to have been made when no-one was looking.

Gadhchiroli, Maharashtra: More Police Personnel Die in Naxalite Attack

In some parts of India, the end of the elections was pretty similar to the beginning; that is, it was lived (and many died) in the shadow of the Naxalite insurgencies. The dead this time were 16 police personnel in Gadhchiroli, Maharashtra. This is hardly the first time Gadhchiroli has made the news for the wrong reasons either: Less than four months ago, another 15 policemen were killed there:

The attack is an embarrassment for Maharashtra’s new Chief Minister, Ashok Chavan, who only last month tried to convince Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Naxal activity was declining in his state due to better policing. Speaking at a meeting of the chief ministers of Naxal-troubled states, Chavan had also claimed success in curbing Naxal activity in two neighbouring districts of Gondia and Chandrapur, long the hub of Naxal terror in Maharashtra.

Chavan’s claims may have some value. According to Maharashtra’s Additional Director-General of Police Pankaj Gupta, who heads the state’s anti-Naxal operations, the Naxals have killed 50 policemen in Gadhchiroli since 2005. Compared with this, the nearby district of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh saw more than 70 policemen killed just last year. “This is a one-off incident, a desperate effort by the Naxals to prove their existence,” says Gupta. He claimed the attackers were not from Maharashtra but from Chhatisgarh.

"[O]ne-off incident" indeed:

This region falls in what the Naxals call their “liberated zone”, which covers several districts in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. While the Naxals are quite potent in Chhattisgarh, their violence has come down considerably in Andhra Pradesh, where the police killed many of their leaders in 2005, and in Maharashtra, where 150 Naxals surrendered before the police last year. Said Gadhchiroli Superintendent of Police (SP) Rajesh Pradhan: “Despite a few incidents we have managed to stop the Naxals from expanding the area of their influence.”

A ride through the country, however, tells a different story from the police version. A board boldly declares ‘Red Salute to the Martyrs’ outside a village named Saawargaon, near the encounter site. Villagers huddling in a roadside shack reluctantly admit they fear both the Naxals and the police, and have faced the brunt of both. “The Naxals force us to cook for them and give them shelter,” villager Buddhesingh Naitab told TEHELKA. “If we refuse, they cut off our limbs. But if we help the Naxals, the police arrest us. What do we do?” Three years ago, the police picked up Naitab and his wife accusing him of working for the Naxals. Although they filed no charges, they kept them in custody for one year. Villagers allege the police have detained 250 local people since the February 1 killings. The police, however, deny the charge.

Needless to say, even leaving aside Naxalite coercion, the sort of police brutality Tehelka cites will ensure that the insurgency will not lack for support or recruits.

[UPDATED 5/21/09] ANDHRA PRADESH: Notes on the 2009 Elections

Perhaps in none of the large Indian states is the verdict of the recent elections harder to decipher than Andhra Pradesh. Here, the 2004 picture -- of a Congress/Telengana Rashtriya Samiti ("TRS") alliance opposing the ruling Telegu Desam, part of the BJP-led NDA coalition (the state assembly elections coincided with parliamentary elections in both 2004 and 2009) -- was complicated by the formation, nine months ago, of the Praja Rajyam Party ("PRP"), led by Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi. The PRP's entry into the fray immediately raised the question as to which of the two major parties in the state would benefit more from the newcomer, with conventional wisdom leaning toward the conclusion that the PRP would split the anti-Congress vote, thereby harming the Telegu Desam (itself founded in the 1980s by a Telugu filmstar, the legendary N.T.R; the party's current leader, Chandrababu Naidu, was N.T.R.'s son-in-law, although he took over the party after what was widely seen in the state as a stab-in-the-back of its founder-leader).

As the election returns started trickling in, it seemed that the PRP had done quite well for itself -- at one point, NDTV showed leads for the PRP in no fewer than 7 of Andhra Pradesh's 42 parliamentary constituencies. Those leads did not hold, and the PRP ended the day with no Lok Sabha seats, and only 18 seats in the state assembly. Moreover, any hopes the PRP might have had of playing kingmaker in the state assembly were dashed when the Congress managed to secure a simple majority on its own in the 294-seat house. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss the PRP's performance out of hand, as many in the media have done: although the Election Commission website (apparently inadvertently) omits the PRP's vote-share in the state (select "Andhra Pradesh" from the drop-down menu here; the chart below is from the Commission's site) the total for "Other" parties/candidates (likely garnering no more than 0.01% votes each, from the Commission's data) and the PRP is at 22.35%, suggesting that media claims that the PRP garnered ~15% of the vote are credible (although it is unclear whether the state or parliamentary elections are being referred to; the Election Commission data referenced above is for the Lok Sabha elections). [5/21/09 UPDATE: The Hindu carried additional data on the state assembly elections; according to that piece, the PRP polled over 16% of the votes in the state assembly election, a creditable performance indeed.]



While the PRP might well have under-performed relative to expectations that Chiranjeevi might repeat N.T.R.'s achievement over two decades ago (such expectations were always unrealistic, given that N.T.R.'s Telegu Desam benefited from being the only plausible anti-Congress alternative in the state back in the 1980s; today, the anti-Congress political space is far more crowded), 15% of the vote, a mere nine months after the party's formation, is no mean achievement (the well-established Telegu Desam only garnered 24.93% of the vote, and the winning Congress, 38.95%). If the PRP can hold on to this vote-share, let alone build on it, it cannot be written of as a credible non-Congress alternative in the state (indeed, the low correlation between the party's vote-share and its Lok Sabha seat-share, suggests that the PRP's votes might have been relatively spread out across the state, rather than mostly clustered around the Kaapu-heavy districts of north and coastal Andhra, as many had predicted (Chiranjeevi himself is a Kaapu). This would be bad news for the Telegu Desam, if indeed the PRP drew most of its votes from that party. I remain skeptical as to whether one can simply assume that has happened: the difference in vote-share between the Telegu Desam and the Congress is rather large -- 14.02% --, and has actually increased since 2004, when it was 8.44% (see here, pg. 148); indeed, the Congress is ahead by over 5% even if the vote-shares of the Telegu Desam and all its Third Front allies (i.e. the TRS and the two Communist parties) are added together.** And while the PRP's emphasis on farmer suicides and other agricultural issues during the campaign would presumably have drawn some votes from the Congress, it is doubtful whether these votes would otherwise necessarily have gone to the Telugu Desam, given that Chandrababu Naidu is hardly seen as the most pro-farmer of the three party leaders -- doubtless many rural Andhra voters have not forgotten Naidu's neglect of them as Chief Minister (1995-2004), when he lavished attention on Hyderabad. Even in the absence of the PRP, the Congress was more likely to have been viewed as the more-pro-rural option, not least because of UPA-enacted federal measures like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and last year's $15 billion loan waiver sop to the struggling agricultural sector.

I don't mean to overstate the point: the above notwithstanding, there can be little doubt that the PRP's presence diluted whatever anti-incumbency benefit the Telegu Desam might otherwise have hoped to garner (that some anti-incumbency existed may be gauged from the fact that the Congress' 2004 41.56% vote-share (34 seats contested) has declined to 38.95% (all 42 seats contested)*, and, given the first-past-the-post electoral system, the possibility that the PRP's presence had a significant impact on the number of seats the Congress won cannot be ruled out; the party actually won four more seats this time around than its 2004 29-seat tally (select "Andhra Pradesh" from the drop-down menu here). [But check out this piece, suggesting that the tiny Lok Satta party, as opposed to simply the PRP, might have cost the Telegu Desam some seats.] In any event, whining about the PRP playing spoiler won't get the Telegu Desam very far, unless Naidu's party can demonstrate why it should remain the premier non-Congress party in Andhra Pradesh (indeed, the PRP could legitimately claim that it was hard done by, given that it got ~62% as many votes as Telegu Desam did, but with no Lok Sabha seats to show for it; and in the assembly elections, the Telegu Desam and the Congress got, respectively, 75% and 125% the votes that PRP did, but won (respectively) over five and nearly ten times the number of seats). So far, the Telegu Desam hasn't done so, mirroring the BJP-Congress divide across the nation: under Naidu's leadership, the Telegu Desam seemed as much in favor of economic liberalization when it was in power, as the Congress is at present, with the added disability of trying to overcome rural voters alienated by the party's pre-2004 rule (a turn of events that would surely have shocked N.T.R.). Indeed, the Telegu Desam faces an even more challenging identity issue than the BJP does, given that Naidu's party is just as "secular" as the Congress is; as for the rest, it is no more rural-friendly than the Congress, and cannot be said to have handled the state's economic trajectory any better or worse than that party. The Telegu Desam's tie-up with the Third Front this time around was presumably an attempt to mend fences with these rural voters, although the general lack of credibility of the Left-led formation, and the suspicion that it was simply a collection of disparate parties looking to eventually bolt to either the UPA or the NDA, probably hurt the Telegu Desam in the state. For now, Naidu might be tempted to wait out the current Congress wave, but the PRP's presence has reduced the Telegu Desam's room to maneuver: if the party misreads the 2009 election results, and assumes that its status as the permanent non-Congress alternative in Andhra Pradesh, is a permanent one, it will have made a very big mistake indeed. The Telegu Desam's best bet is probably to return to its rural, populist, that is to say leftward, roots -- its history should ensure it an advantage over the PRP, which so far is a one-man show that cannot yet have laid down deep roots in Andhra Pradesh -- so that it is seen as a credible alternative to the Congress, rather than more of the same, with only the identity of the community-coalition underpinning each party subject to change. As the party of the status quo, and with the PRP nibbling into the margins by attempting to stand for change and speak in a strident pro-farmer voice, the Congress can only benefit from this sort of stasis.

*[I am indebted to Arun for focusing my attention on this point; merely looking at the vote-share would tend to under-estimate the extent of the swing away from the Congress. On the other hand, note that the Congress contested the 2004 elections with the TRS, and presumably that arrangement benefited the Congress to some extent (the TRS' own vote-share has remained quite stable, declining a mere 0.69% from its 2004 total of 6.83% (see here, pg. 148).]

**[The Hindu notes that the difference between, on the one hand, the Congress; and on the other, the Telegu Desam, TRS, and the two Communist parties was narrower in the state assembly elections, a mere ~2%.]

Musings on Satyajit Ray's TEEN KANYA (Bengali; 1961)

I saw Teen Kanya ("Three Women") last night at Lincoln Center, as a sort of delayed coda to "First Light", the Center's superb Satyajit Ray festival last month. This was my first encounter with the film, which is usually available in the West under the title "Two Daughters", and minus one-third of the film, so the fact that the Center was screening the complete 173-minute version was a rare treat.

The film itself -- really three short films centered on a male and a female character in each instance, with no plot or character-link to each other -- is not one of my favorite Ray films, but it perhaps marks a transition in Ray's work, from the seamless naturalism of the Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) to the more enigmatic pleasures of the likes of Nayak (1966). Indeed, the film itself seems to reflect a certain mysterious transitional quality, as its first and third segments, unquestionably naturalistic, are linked by a genre film, a morality play that turns into a ghost story, yet the moral of which seems to be absurd and even farcical in Ray's own eyes.

The first segment focuses on the relationship between a village postmaster, newly arrived from Calcutta, and his relationship with the servant girl who works for him. His interest in her well-being, ranging from personal hygiene to education, begins to make a meaningful difference in her life, until a bout with malaria convinces the postmaster that village-life is not for him. He decides to leave his post, and while one appreciates why he has done so, one cannot help but note that the decision to leave the village and the girl (who has, according to the postmaster's own letter to his mother, been "like a sister" to him), came a little too easily for the postmaster. The third segment features Ray-favorite Soumitra Chatterjee as a law-graduate returning to his village for a two-month vacation, during which time he is irked, intrigued, and disordered enough by the village tomboy that he decides to marry her -- against the wishes of both, his mother, and (as it turns out) the bride herself. The marriage doesn't begin well, with the bride running off on the wedding night (Ray includes a stunning nocturnal swing sequence, symbolizing both the young bride's carefree attitude, as well as the sobering reality that, like the swing, she is no longer free, and must come back down), and thereafter "set free" by her husband, who tells her that he will return to the village when she wants him to. Months later, perhaps more mature (that is to say, scarred by the difference a mere marriage ceremony seems to have made), more conventional and conformist, the girl once known as "Puglee" (the "mad one") demurely indicates that she does.

The intermediate segment is narrated by an amateur writer seeking to explain how the mansion where he lurks came to be haunted, and involves a childless couple who has inherited a large fortune; the wife is clearly scarred by her childlessness, and seems to fill the void with an extreme covetousness as far as jewelry is concerned, going so far as to suspect her own husband of plotting to take them away (her greed might have deeper roots, and there is a sense that she might have ditched an earlier lover on the grounds of his poverty). The wife's obsession deepens, leading to madness and death, but also to a hunger for ornaments that transcends death. The writer has no doubt this story has a moral: the husband has brought all this upon himself by his "softness" and "meekness" toward his wife, by his inability to realize that women like a little brutality in matters of love. That this isn't Ray's view is clear: the writer is in for a nasty surprise himself, and cuts a rather undignified by segment's end.

Personally, I liked the third segment the most, although the relatively upbeat nature of the ending, its seeming endorsement of the tomboy's transformation into a suitably domesticated sort, was troubling. I would have liked to see Ray dwell a bit more on the perverse comedy of Soumitra Chatterjee's character wanting to change the very things about Puglee that attracted him to her in the first place -- though perhaps Chatterjee's attraction is about possession, Puglee's independence simply signifying that the prize is a valuable one.

Teen Kanya is definitely a mysterious film -- that is to say, while none of the segments was especially mysterious, the enframing structure of having all three in a single film, is the enigmatic part of it. Taken together, what do the three women -- important to remember the Bengali title is "Three Women", and not two or three "daughters" -- represent? Abandonment; the madness of desire (a coveting that stands in for other absences, such as (in the film's second segment), children or emotional security); and subjugation? Perhaps; and if so, a dark vision indeed, although -- and this is characteristic of Ray -- the experience of watching this film is never grim.

Some thoughts on THE KINDLY ONES

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The fictional autobiography of a SS officer devoted to his duty -- whatever that may be and however unpleasant the work, such as, um, mass murder -- The Kindly Ones is not a great novel, principally because it isn't clear whether Littell subscribes to the notion of the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt put forward in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as opposed to the notion that the Nazi perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities were evil in some larger than life or monstrous way. This incoherence mars Littell's characterization of the novel's chief protagonist, and hence the book itself: Maximilien Aue is at one level a conscientious and capable Nazi functionary, and if he has a "flaw", it is that he is too honest and sincere, and is thus insensible to the various political currents around him, mastery of which is essential to advancing one's career in any bureaucracy. Aue is also wracked by a traumatic childhood love, namely his sister's; the two were separated by their mother and step-father after their illicit relationship was discovered. Moreover, Aue cannot, even as an adult, seem to forgive his mother for re-marrying after her husband (a World War I veteran drawn to German's burgeoning right wing political scene in the 1920s) goes missing. This Aue -- the vehicle of some rather obvious psychoanalytical cliches -- ends up drawn to Hitler as a sort of replacement father-figure, and winds up a true believer. When exploring the former, Littell's novel is a superb and compelling recreation of the Nazi SS structure, deepening one's appreciation of what Arendt might have meant by her now famous phrase; when exploring the latter, i.e. the erotic/psychological life of Aue, however, The Kindly Ones is just, well, banal, and simply does not justify its thousand-page length.



The above notwithstanding, The Kindly Ones is nevertheless one of the most important novels in years, and ought to be read, principally because of a stunningly plausible recreation of the atmosphere of "total war", and the mentality that enables and implements it. For that achievement, one might forgive the novel its many flaws, not least of them its flimsy and unconvincing evocation of Greek myth (the "kindly ones" of the book's title are the Furies) in a world where industrialized mass slaughter has drained the life from those myths, making them seem quaint. Littell's ability to position his imagination within the Nazi regime is remarkable, leading to a tour de force that is comprehensive and necessarily claustrophobic. Not to mention historically sound: much of the novel makes for a worthy companion-piece to Mark Mazower's indispensable Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rules Europe; both books take the reader deep within the monumental cruelty and imbecility of the Nazi regime, but also within the "normalcy" of the regime. Mazower's work is the more clear-sighted, but Littell's novel is more wounding, imprisoning the reader in a world that is unacceptable, and seemingly inescapable. When we finally do escape from it into Aue's inner life, we are disappointed: his pining for his lost love/sister, his parental baggage, are rather uninteresting, and a weak denouement to a narrative that has taken us from Germany to Ukraine, the Caucasus, Stalingrad, and back to Berlin, all by means of a vantage point that is alien to us. Littell undoubtedly has a point with the Aue family romance, but this reader was past caring by the point The Kindly Ones concludes by delving into it, the novel's anti-climax all the more feeble given the hundreds of pages of "total war" narrative that have preceded it.
View all my reviews on GoodReads.

On a somewhat related note, check out this discussion, principally the exchanges between Spencer L. and me on Nazism.

Mellow

The final Indian election results are in -- here are the state-by-state results, and the nationwide tallies. Perhaps most significant -- though often overlooked -- here are the nationwide vote-shares of the principal parties. And in case you've been living under a rock these past couple of days, the Congress-led UPA alliance has convincingly defeated its rivals, principally the BJP-led NDA alliance; the final margin was far greater than in 2004.

The question is: why, and what do the results mean? It is a question one must hasten to ask, before it is spun every which way, and ultimately into conventional wisdom. This sort of puff-piece, suggesting that the youth-vote factor helped push the Congress across the finishing line, but devoid of hard data (such as, for instance, what proportion of the electorate consisted of young voters in the 2009 elections), is quite typical of the Indian media. Not to mention murmurs from within the NDA that the projection of hardline Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as a possible future PM might have hurt the coalition (the NDA's oficial candidate, L.K. Advani, was 81, after all). And certainly there will be no shortage of verbiage explaining the results as a "victory for secularism", or as the triumph of "vote-bank politics" (read: the specter of en bloc voting by Muslims as somehow illegitimate), or as a sign of the "growing maturity" of an Indian electorate that has shown greater interest in economic and infrastructure development than in communitarian appeals. Evidently, if you thought the country's diversity, its plethora of political parties, and the fractured nature of the electorate (the Congress and BJP combined received fewer than half the votes cast) would give the punditocracy pause, you were wrong.

In the end, my (tentative) inclination is to read the election results as the reward for a moderation that was not just ideological but temperamental: the principal Congress leaders generally seemed relatively calm and unruffled over the course of the campaign, as indeed they had appeared over the preceding five years. Thus, while both major parties spoke of stability, the likes of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, seemed to exude it -- remarkably, the party didn't lose its poise even in the aftermath of Mumbai attack last year (undoubtedly aided by the fact that the urban public's disgust with the status quo was general vis-a-vis all politicians, as opposed to specific to the Congress). To be sure, Advani himself was not lacking in poise, but the BJP definitely sent more mixed signals: extolling development before the national media, but firmly standing by hate-mongers like Varun Gandhi and Ashok Sahu; talking up its own discipline and cohesiveness, even as the part was riven by in-fighting and jockeying by younger leaders none too thrilled to see Modi anointed as heir apparent in the media; and generally floundering for coherence, going so far as to bash an Indo-US nuclear deal that the party had itself championed when in power.

The second point I'd like to make concerns India's rural voters, specifically, the populist measures touted by the Congress/UPA. For the second national election in a row, the Congress has devoted more attention to the economic concerns of rural Indians than the BJP has -- and has reaped the rewards. This isn't to say that the Congress' commitment to economic liberalization is any more or less than the BJP's (there isn't much to choose between the parties on that front these days), but that the Congress is more comfortable with the realization that public support for the sort of cautious, fits-and-starts liberalization India has seen since 1991, will not endure if the rural poor do not see some immediate benefits from the political dispensations championing that liberalization. To the extent the BJP has tried to take small town and rural voters along, it has historically tried to do so by means of cultural issues (such as the Babri mosque/Ramjanambhoomi temple movement). Increasingly, however, that sort of bi-polar mobilization, of a Hindu identity in opposition to a Muslim other imagined to be receiving preferential treatment from the Indian state, has proven difficult in the seat-rich states of the Hindi heartland, as caste-based parties have undermined the plausibility of the BJP's narrative. The Congress has shown signs of picking up the rural baton on economic grounds, and so far appears to have profited as a result.

Perhaps the two points are not unrelated: Shekhar Gupta (editor of the Indian Express) summed it up well on television when he eschewed the grand narratives of "secularism" and "development" in favor of an explanation that the Indian electorate has, over the past few years, tended to vote for parties who run campaigns addressing the public's aspirations, not its resentments. While the recent history of India hardly affords room for complacency -- it was less than a year ago that large-scale communal violence in Orissa killed dozens and displaced tens of thousands; and 2008 was the worst year on record as far as terrorism was concerned, with serial blasts in cities across the country -- the political atmosphere does seem a shade less shrill than it used to be in the decade leading up to the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 and beyond. I wouldn't ascribe any permanence to this softening of the edges, nor a tendency toward ever-increasing moderation, but Gupta's comment does capture the tenor of the moment. Given where the country has been in the recent past, and where it could easily go, I'll chalk that up as a victory of sorts.

[UPDATED 5/17/09] Indian Election Flash: West Bengal

I wrote recently that an electoral wake-up call for the Left Front in West Bengal would be good for the progressive political space in India. As it turns out, West Bengal's voters appear to have delivered far more than a wake-up call in the parliamentary elections: although results aren't official yet, the Left Front appears set to record its worst Lok Sabha performance in decades, with (according to NDTV) the core constituent party -- the CPI(M) -- on course to record its worst performance since its very first election. In the wake of Nandigram and Singur, the wheel has certainly turned: today it is the CPI(M) that is associated with the cause of urban, pro-private enterprise voters, and the Trinamool Congress that has taken up cudgels on behalf of the small farmers the CPI(M) first took for granted, then brutally tried to shunt aside in Nandigram and Singur. The ripple effects have ranged far and wide, beyond those two districts (the fact that the anti-CPI(M) vote wasn't split between the Congress and Trinamool this time around surely helped), and the CPI(M) will know it is in for the fight of its life as far as the 2011 state assembly elections are concerned. The party machinery remains formidable, and it has recovered from setbacks before, so the two Congress parties would be well-advised not to celebrate prematurely, but come 2011, the CPI(M) will surely face its toughest test yet. The interesting question in the run-up to those elections is what lessons the Left Front will draw from its 2009 electoral disaster (nationwide, it is on course to win fewer than half the seats it won in 2004), and whether the Nandigram/Singur aftermath has permanently tarnished its chances of going back to its pro-rural poor stance. I suspect not beyond the two directly affected districts, but only time will tell. But one thing is clear: if the Left Front is to hold on in West Bengal two years from now, another ideological contortion is called for. That should make the members of the party's Politburo happy; whether it gladdens the heart of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the foremost capitalist among the comrades, is another matter. Already there are rumors that the knives might be out in the politburo for "Brand Buddha" -- the Left's post-election maneuvers promises to be more exciting than anything in its election campaign.

May 17 UPDATE: It would, however, be premature to write the Left Front's obituary in West Bengal. While the Trinamool Congress increased its voter-share from a little over 21% in 2004 (see here, pg. 126; the party's abbreviation is "AITC") to over 31% in 2009 (select "West Bengal" in the drop-down menu here), a stunning 50% shift, that is still less dramatic than its seat gain, from 1 in 2004 to 19 this time around (and that vote-share was almost certainly helped by the fact that the Congress and Trinamool pooled their resources in the 2009 elections). And the Left Front remains the political formation with the largest vote-share (although the point made above, about Trinamool and the Congress joining forces, could be read to mean that the Left's premier position is artificial: the combined vote-share of Trinamool and the Congress was quite close to that of the Left in 2009; select "West Bengal" in the dropdown menu here).

[UPDATED 5/17/09] Indian Election Flash: the Congress in U.P.

I'll admit it: the Congress looks set to win a lot more seats in Uttar Pradesh than I (or anyone else) had expected. [NDTV is currently projecting around 20 seats for the Congress in the 80-seat contingent the state sends to the Indian Parliament, more than twice as many as the party won in 2004.] The big question is whether this heralds some sort of revival for the Congress in India's most populous state, or if it is just a blip, with 20 seats basically the Congress' "limit" in the state -- too early to tell, although it speaks volumes about the extent to which the Congress has fallen away in the Hindi heartland over the last two decades, that losing three-quarters of the seats in U.P. seems like a stunningly good result for the Congress in the state.

But certainly I am chastened enough by these results to lay off on pooh poohing the Congress' U.P. prospects for -- oh, a few days. To the extent this mini-revival is due to real party-building efforts at the grassroots by Rahul Gandhi (as I write this the Congress' Anand Sharma is on air giving credit to the Gandhi scion for his work in U.P.; it's impossible to know how seriously one can take these sorts of pronouncements, given the culture of sycophancy that is by now intrinsic to the experience of being a Congressman), I might well have under-estimated Gandhi's taste for the unglamorous grind. If so, that would be a faint glimmer of hope, beyond these election results -- Indian democracy can only benefit from healthier political party structures, that aren't simply extensions of the leader at the party's core (i.e., structures of the sort that may be seen at present only in the Left Front and the BJP -- although the influence of various Sangh organizations on the latter is of course highly problematic). Who knows, perhaps the Gandhi family might even decide democracy is a good idea within the Congress party.

May 17 UPDATE: Here's some more color in response to the various media pronouncements about the Congress' revival in Uttar Pradesh (click on the link, select Uttar Pradesh from the drop-down menu and check out the various parties' voter-share): in the sort of disheartening result the first-past-the-post electoral system makes all too possible, the Bahujan Samaj Part won one less seat than the Congress -- despite garnering 50% more votes than the Congress. Comparing the 2004 results from the state (see here, pg. 125), it seems that the Congress has increased its share of the U.P. vote by approximately 50% (the BSP has also increased its share, by roughly an eighth: see here, pg. 123; by contrast, the BJP has declined from over 22% of the vote-share in 2004 (see here, pg. 122) to 17.5% in 2009).

A Response to Graham Fuller

Graham Fuller argues in The Huffington Post that the Obama Administration's policies are making the situation worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fuller's criticisms are certainly worth bearing in mind as one thinks about the wider strategic implications of the tactics currently being used by the U.S.. However, two points jumped out at me:

First, Fuller claims that "[i]t is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border." But this would argue in favor of the Administration’s policy — i.e., one could just as easily argue that because the border is so porous, one cannot simply focus on the Afghan side, ignoring the Pakistani side. Stated differently, one can critique U.S. tactics on various grounds, such as excessive civilian casualties; or on the grounds that the tactics (e.g. drone attacks) might not serve the strategy (destroying Al-Qaida) -- or that even if they do serve the strategy (and both the Administration and the Pakistani government seem to agree that the drone attacks have put enormous pressure on Al Qaida/"foreign fighter"-types), they might well have the potentially dangerous side-effect of destabilizing Pakistan -- but one cannot critique U.S. policy based on the border's porousness, since the former is in large part a function of the latter.

Second, according to Fuller:

India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.

This elides the crucial question: i.e. is it necessarily the case that India poses the preeminent threat to Pakistan? Fuller seems to see this question in static/eternal terms, but threat perceptions can easily evolve with changing circumstances. For instance, Germany was clearly France’s biggest geopolitical threat in 1914, and in 1939 -- but obviously not in 1959. Coincidentally, just two days ago, Pakistan's President Zardari said he did not regard India as a threat to Pakistan — while one can pooh pooh this as the words of a weak civilian President under immense pressure from all quarters, Zardari has been very consistent on this issue ever since he took over leadership of the Pakistan People's Party in the wake of the assassination of his wife Benazir Bhutto.

Fuller's point might well hold as far as the Pakistani military is concerned; and there can be little doubt that such views in the Indian and Pakistani military/intelligence apparatuses have contributed to the current cycle in Afghanistan, with an Indian/(arguably) non-Pashtun alliance arrayed against a Pakistani/Pashtun alliance, but Fuller seems to veer very close to Robert Kaplan's geopolitical determinism, essentially implying there's little anyone can do about this. But one could just as easily argue that the situation calls for the Administration to engage with Indo-Pak concerns within the Afghan context, rather than throw its hands up in the face of the two countries' competing interests -- as defined (at least in the case of Pakistan) by the military/intelligence establishment. And in any event, different viewpoints on India abound, even within Pakistan: I have already referred to Zardari's statement, but more broadly, there is no reason to believe that the Pakistani military’s perception of threats to the country are the same as that of the country's civilian political class, not to mention that within the civilian category one will find a great diversity of opinions. [The fact that the military's views carry more weight should hardly be determinative; that is precisely the sort of thinking the Obama Administration would be well-advised to eschew as having a corrosive effect on democratic legitimacy in Pakistan.] By all accounts the PPP, the PML(N), the MQM, and the ANP do not have identical views on the nature of the threat that is or is not posed by India. To its credit, so far the Obama Administration does not seem to accept Indo-Pak hostility as a "given" -- a welcome approach indeed. The diversity of civilian views on the subject needs to be engaged with, not ignored in favor of the conventional wisdom of a Pakistani military/intelligence establishment that has, for far too long, excluded or subordinated the country's civilian leadership as far as framing a coherent and workable foreign policy is concerned.

Nandigram -- III

In many ways, the Communist government in West Bengal has been among the best in India since it assumed power over three decades ago -- most significantly on the issue of land reform (helping to deliver the state from the cycle of a repressive Congress government and a Naxalite insurgency); but also in terms of financial corruption and even-handed treatment of the state's different religious communities. Like virtually all of India's Marxist political parties, however, the CPI(M) remains intellectually hidebound, wedded to a Soviet-style conception of left politics that has increasingly made it seem like an anachronism in contemporary India, but given the abysmal standards of so many in Indian politics, the CPI(M) hasn't done too badly at all (it is currently in the process of trying to address the Indian middle class' most serious charge against it, namely that it has allowed West Bengal's industrial development to wither away on its watch).

All the more reason, then, for the CPI(M) to lose seats in West Bengal in the ongoing elections. Hopefully lots of them. For, as has been clear for years, but never more so than in the wake of Nandigram, the party structure has been utterly corrupted, its morality corroded by over thirty years of uninterrupted exercise of power in the state. And when the party's power is challenged, its dominant status gives it the power to kill, rape, and intimidate with impunity -- there is no other authority to appeal to, for especially in rural West Bengal, there is no meaningful distinction between the Communist party and the arms of the state. The CPI(M)'s electoral domination of West Bengal (facilitated, at least at the margins but really to an unknowable degree, by foul means) is, by now, bad for democracy (i.e., not just for state institutions but for democratic spaces in general), bad for any progressive potential in the CPI(M)'s program, and bad for progressive politics in general. A stint on the state opposition benches, or at a minimum a chastening loss of seats in the contingent of MPs sent by West Bengal to Parliament, will do both democracy, and the party, good.

In the meantime, there is the slow drip of continuing horror in Nandigram (but not only in Nandigram; it is only that the true nature of what the CPI(M) is becoming has been revealed there, because it has been met with resistance), atrocities such as those inflicted on the likes of Sabina Begum and Yaseen Meer.

Plus Ça Change...

The New York Times carried a piece today on rising attacks on the Roma in Hungary in the wake of the ongoing economic crisis. Hungary isn't the only place where the Roma continue to be marginalized, even despised:

In the Czech Republic, where radical right-wing demonstrators have clashed with the police as they tried to march through Roma neighborhoods, a small child and her parents were severely burned after assailants firebombed their home in the town of Vitkov this month. The police in Slovakia were caught on video recently tormenting six Roma boys they had arrested, forcing them to undress, hit and kiss one another.

In the past five years, attitudes toward Roma in many parts of Eastern Europe have hardened, and new extremists have started to use the Roma issue in a way that either they didn’t dare to or didn’t get an airing before,” said Michael Stewart, coordinator of the Europe-wide Roma Research Network.

All in all, the article serves as a reminder that Isabel Fonseca's superb book on the ultimate "outsiders" (to Europe, to the very concept of political modernity as refracted through the concept of the nation-state) remains of abiding relevance...

Red Star Rising

The Naxalite hijacking earlier today of a train en route to one of India's busiest stations (Mughal Sarai in eastern Uttar Pradesh, near Varanasi) highlights the truth of Manmohan Singh's claim, a few years ago, that the Naxalites constituted the single greatest security threat to India. Alarms about the Naxals might seem odd (the spate of attacks during the Indian elections notwithstanding), given the sort of 2008 the country has had, with multiple serial blasts in cities across India attributed to Muslim extremists, a handful of lesser bomb attacks in Western India attributed to Hindu extremists, all culminating in the hair-raising 1970s-style Mumbai attacks last November, carried out by Pakistan-based terrorists. Compared to the spectacular nature of these sorts of terrorist attacks, the slow drip of Naxalite violence -- a handful of dead people here, a bomb explosion there -- and often in some of India's dustiest and most faraway corners, might not seem like a very big deal at all. And certainly, the violence barely registers in the country's major metros, and, consequently, in the major Indian media outlets.

This is a mistake, for the Naxalite movement threatens the Indian state at a structural level, in a way that terrorist blasts do not. The latter might well account for more deaths (certainly in 2008, although even this is likely untrue in other years), and presumably threaten foreign investment and tourism; but the Naxalite movement represents a potent challenge to the Indian state's claims of sovereignty in large tracts of land across multiple states. It is a challenge that has withstood the test of time, and it would be no exaggeration to say that in multiple districts, the Maoist insurgency has, if not supplanted the Indian state, reduced it to the level of co-sovereign. In this it has much in common with the creeping Taliban insurgency in Pakistan: like the Taliban, the Naxalites insist upon an alternate legal and social regime in areas they control, complete with tax and judicial mechanisms. Like the Taliban, the Naxalites feed off the very real grievances of an oppressed peasantry, and it is no coincidence that the insurgency has deepest roots in those parts of India where post-1947 land reform has either not been meaningful, or where aboriginal ("tribal" or "adivasi") peoples have been excluded from both the political and economic fruits of the last sixty years (and this, even as they are disproportionately likely to be dispossessed by the sorts of large scale mining and other industrial projects that help fuel the industrial development the benefits of which are reaped by others). And like the Taliban, the Naxalites sap the state's prestige, by demonstrating that it lacks both efficacy and legitimacy. Typically, this is done by scores of attacks on policemen, soldiers, and indeed anyone wearing a government-issued uniform, but nothing makes the symbolic aim clearer than the train hijacking this post started out with: the insurgents took over a train (variously reported as having 700, or 75, passengers aboard), for over four hours, ultimately releasing the passengers unharmed. This operation, coming on the eve of the election's second phase of polling, and in the wake of a series of daring attacks during the first phase earlier this month, conveyed the message that the Indian state cannot foreclose large-scale Naxal attacks despite its intensive deployment of security forces to ensure a peaceful election. That's the kind of political ad worth a million posters, and the urban Indian public ignores it at its peril.

The solution cannot be a military one alone: as the example of states -- such as Andhra Pradesh, to an extent -- makes clear, tackling the Naxalite movement requires more than paying lip service to social justice. It requires, at a minimum, land re-distribution, judicious amnesties, and even cooptation of some Naxalite leaders by the Indian political process. But it will also require what no government, state or central, has so far shown the imagination to consider: a devolution of power in favor of Indian aboriginal communities, to an extent far greater than currently exists. "Federalism" need not be defined purely in terms of sub-national territorial units; it can be supplemented by a new kind of political arrangement better adapted to the needs of many of India's aboriginal/"forest"-communities. At present, these communities are almost as likely to be alienated from the state capital and its power structures, as they are from the national capital and its halls of power. The creation of ever-smaller states is not likely to address this problem, so long as so much power continues to be vested in a bureaucratic/urban class that simply does not include enough adivasis. By contrast, greater local/communitarian control over natural resources has worked rather well in the context of the Himalayan Chipko movement, and something similar, and more comprehensive, deserves to be tried in the context of Naxalite-hit Central India as well. It certainly would do no worse than the sort of "initiatives" used by the Chattisgarh government.

Pakistan Vacuum, Taliban March

Abdur-Rahman Abid's recent piece in DAWN (one of Pakistan's most respected English-language newspapers) bears the headline "Buner Falls to Swat Taliban". If anything, the actual article is even more worrying, referring as it does to Taliban gains in towns as "settled" (i.e., not part of the frontier agencies, and administered as "ordinary" parts of the North West Frontier Province ("NWFP")) as Mardan; and more than one media report confirms that the district of Buner -- approximately 60 kilometers from Islamabad -- is indeed in Taliban hands. While it is important not to ring the alarm bells too soon -- for instance, I do not believe the Punjab is on the verge of a Taliban take-over as a recent article in the New York Times suggested, and, more broadly, do not believe that Pakistan is in any way close to a Somalia-style implosion -- it seems plain as daylight that the so-called peace deals with the Taliban are not working.

Away from the unhelpful rhetoric that perennially raises the specter of "appeasement" and Munich 1938, it is clear that the peace deals do not represent a durable or stable solution to the political crisis in large parts of Pakistan's Pashtun areas, not solely (or perhaps even principally) because the Taliban are using the peace deals to extend their sway, but because these sorts of pacts cannot rescue the legitimacy of the Pakistani state in those Pashtun areas. That is, the peace deals cannot be said to have caused increasing Taliban sway, because these deals are a consequence, and not a cause, of the bankruptcy of the state in its Pashtun areas (the latter qualification is important: as yet there is no evidence that the state's legitimacy has dissipated in Punjab, or Sind; and, consequently, that the Pakistani state faces an existential crisis in those provinces, which together constitute nearly nine-tenths of the country's population). Taliban influence in the Pashtun areas has been on the rise in recent years, with or without peace deals. Conversely, however, it would be a mistake to conclude (as the Pakistani state increasingly appears to have done, based on its lack of success) that military force ought not to play any role at all in countering the Taliban's rise -- the rather autonomous militias grouped under that umbrella term are unlikely to allow the sort of political or cultural space that one might ordinarily count on peace to open up, and, ultimately, to undermine the Taliban's ethos. Some force is going to be necessary to dislodge them. But the problem is that the central government has as yet offered no idea to accompany either military force, or its opposite strategy of pursuing peace deals with the Taliban. By now, it is patently clear that the Indo-centrism of the two nation theory upon which Pakistan is founded, has very little relevance in the context of the contemporary geo-political situation of the Pashtuns.

The question need not have been raised at all, had the state "delivered" in places like Swat; but the confluence of multiple factors, such as the alienation of areas like Swat from the national mainstream; the reality of the state and its military as guardians of a status quo that has not proven willing to take even elementary steps towards economic re-distribution; and the stresses of the war in Afghanistan; has quite overwhelmed the idea of Pakistan in these areas -- increasingly, that foundational idea seems irrelevant to the people of the region, and until this ideological and political vacuum is addressed, it will make little difference whether the central government makes peace with, or wages war on, the Taliban: either way, the militants appear to be the only ones on the ground with a governing ideology, the only ones who can lay claim to legitimacy -- their politics claim Islam as the source, and since the central government can itself not disavow the notion of a politics premised on Islam, it is left to argue simply that the Taliban's Islam is wrong-headed. This is not adequate -- not least because the government (and indeed, most of the country's urban well-heeled classes), implicitly maintain the fiction that there can be a single, authoritative view of what is or is not Islam, a view that ought to be accepted by all as "correct," essentially concedes the field to the likes of the Taliban. If it boils down to that, the government and the urban elites simply lack the cultural authenticity, and are simply too wedded to the status quo, to ever get the better of the argument -- and aren't clear on what the argument even is. But absolutist Islam needs to be jettisoned before the Taliban can be challenged -- it won't do to say that "good" absolutist Islam should replace the vision offered by the Taliban -- and the state needs to be recast into a more pluralistic, democratic polity. The latter cannot happen without the former; achieving a more relativistic, more just polity, is not only the right end to strive toward, it is the practical thing to do as well: it is the only way "Pakistan" can ever mean something concrete for the people of Buner and Swat. Faced with a meaningful choice, who would put money on them choosing the Taliban? Not I.