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.

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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.


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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.
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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.