CPIM’s feet of clay

Background:

Speaking at the 42nd Foundation Day of the CPI(M) party organ Ganashakti, Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said something to the effect that capitalism had to be accepted, that Bengal existed in a bourgeois set-up at the Centre, that the Left alternative emerging in the state was one of industrial development while consolidating gains in agriculture, that the existing land use pattern could not be viewed as the end of history as the Opposition was doing, and that the misgivings of LF partners would have to be cleared through the CPI(M)’s political message.

When contacted by reporters, Jyoti Basu echoed Bhattacharya’s points. Specifically asked about the opposition to private capital by LF partners, Basu stated his party’s line, in almost exactly the same way as Bhattacharyya did (The Hindu, 6th January).

This led to an uproar — some people gloating and others smirking and yet others protesting vociferously. Responding to all this, Prakash Karat, the general secretary of the CPIM issued a statement.

Among other things he posed a query to the RSP on its party programme. This was in response to the RSP General Secretary’s criticism of Bhattacharyya’s statement. The RSP General Secretary had said that while industrialisation was necessary, capitalism was not mandatory for it. He criticised Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Jyoti Basu for their negative attitude towards socialism, that their views appeared to be the views of their party and that they were leading their party into the capitalist fold. This would only demolish the common goals of Left parties. Interestingly, the RSP leader also criticised the Kerala Education Minister and Devaswom Minister (both CPI(M) for making statements after taking unilateral decisions.

Thanx R for that neat summary!

Now, here is my explanation for all this. In very crude terms, Karat is primarily concerned with having enough warm bodies in he Parliament who will vote against two tendencies: promoting communalism and acquescing to US eopolitical and economic interests. The only finite number that he can rely on to deliver on both is the MPs that come from Bengal and from Kerala. Other than these, there would be provisional alliances with other powerful regional or national actors depending on one’s bargaining capacity and on the need of the hour as assessed by the politburo.

But this is actually a phenomenon of the 90s. In the 90s, it was a different ball game. Somehow, it does seem that public memory is indeed short Karat’s wishes notwithstanding. And we do not acknowledge adequately how those older histories shape the present moment. the CPIM in the 80s allied with a number of regional actors in order to consolidate an anti Congress – anti central government platform – the National Front. No one single regional actor was however powerful enough to become a national consensus leader to provide an alternative to the Congress. While several bids were made ultimately it was the shortlived VP Singh government that worked as an experiment.

By the early 90s, each of these regional actors was firmly in place, the center state relations had sufficiently loosened and each state was actually able to act with a greater degree of autonomy in the national and global economies. This situation was actually encouraged by the World Bank and IMF for their own reasons – they did it by selecting focus states and promoting regional actors. So every now and then one of them becomes a critical factor in the national scenario.

In the second half the 90s and until 2004, it was Chandrababu Naidu and SM Krishna and Jayalalitha to an extent and now it is Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s time. Modi is waiting his turn. I see Karat’s choices and utterances, or Prabhat Patnaik’s recent comments about politics and anti olitics and the principal contradiction etc. have to be seen in this broad context. The challenge from Karat’s perspective would be how to get enough bodies in the Lok Sabha who will deliver on those two fronts. From the beginning Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has been demanding his pound of flesh – first from the non CPIM allies – and now from the politburo by saying that we end the MPs to do what needs to be done at the center and so you let us do what we need to do here. He is saying if we let the fiscal crisis spill over (which it did threaten to in 1999 in Bengal) then we will not be able to win the elections.

In Kerala, Prabhat Patnaik attempted to resist it by saying that a fiscal crisis need not necessarily takes down the same path, but he did not really succeed. Resistance from people like PP politically backed by VS has only resulted in faction fighting.

Given this very uncertain situation, Prakash Karat has seen systematically adopting a brinkmanship strategy on both fronts inside and outside the CPIM. Under the circumstances Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee may not need Chandrababu Naidu’s encouragement. But given that it is difficult to predict Naidu’s fortunes in the foreseeable future, (and those of the Congress too) the CPIM despite its loathing for Chandrababu Naidu has not closed its doors on him. Every now and the CPIM leaders send up floaters about a third front. They told Naidu that they are open to him on two conditions. 1) He should firmly distance himself from the BJP. 2) He should tone down on reforms.

Naidu was agreeable to the first condition. He doesnt really care for ideologies of one sort or the other. But wavering on the second one. He was willing to go so far as to say that he wants reforms with a human face. That was not good enough for the CPIM – until recently.

But now after Jyoti Basu’s statement, Naidu who has been playing some role in the very unstable UNPA feels that he has some leverage on the CPIM. Look, even Jyoti Basu agrees with me, so let us go after the congress is what he is saying. What he wants to do is
to really revive the 80s spirit of the region against the center, pushing towards a regional federation to replace the Congress at the Center.

In the highly unstable conditions as of now, the CPIM politburo cannot quite make up its mind what this means or where this can go because the CPIM is a unique creature – unlike the Telugu Desam. CPIM’s roots are in struggles for regional power and ambitions are on a national scale. (In that sense the CPIM that returned to power after the Emergency was a
very different creature from the one that existed in the late 60s.)

BB represents the former and Karat represents the matter. Karat cannot do anything at the center without BB at the helm of affairs in Kolkata. BB needs Karat at the center to be able to carve out more for the region.

It is difficult to foretell how these contradictions will be resolved. But, at the very least, we should stop talking about these kinds of problems 1) as if this whole thing is about Bengal and nothing else 2) as if the only choices available are Yes CPIM and No CPIM. 3) as if this is about a few individuals who act out rational choices completely free of historical path dependencies. 4) As if this is a debate in pure logic.

Hussain Sagar Lake

Khairunnisa

This has been on my mind for over two years now. On September 9th 2005, The Hindu Businessline published a picture of a boat in Hussain Sagar lake under the caption Testing the waters — Khairunnisa. There was no information in the paper on why the boat was named Khairunnisa. It is unusual for a Muslim woman’s name to be seen in such a context in Hyderabad. Who is Khairunnisa ? Why is the boat named after her ? There is apparently a Khairunnisa Begum daughter of in Ibrahim Qutub Shah, whose jagir is now known as Khairatabad. (Although I have heard a more a complex story — about how the watch and ward staff shouted khairiat abaad on finding and securing the child of a ruler mounted on an elephant run amok.) But this is a different Khairunnisa and there is a reason why this boat is now called Khairunnisa.

The boat is named after the Khairunnisa, I was quite convinced, the widow of James Kirkpatrick the sixth British Resident in Hyderabad — from 1798- 1805 — the absent protagonist of William Dalrymple’s novel White Mughals. Kirkpatrick was given the title Hashmat Jung by the Nizam. And he was the architect of the British Residency where the Kothi Women’s College now is. The Khairunnisa after whom the boat is named is the Muslim woman whom Kirkpatrick married. Most stories tell of how her two children were sent to England for studies and how after a brief six year marriage her husband died in Calcutta and how the wife and the children were not near him and so on. There is a brief summary of the story in three articles at Pakistanlinks – they seem to be part of a series but the first two seem to be missing and the remaining three seem to be wrongly numbered. So here is the correct sequence 3 , 4 , 5 .

So why did the AP Tourism suddenly remember Khairunnisa and name a boat after her ? I can only hazard a guess. Hyderabad is repackaging itself in the global markets and in the process, the marketers are trying to dig up tidbids and factoids and weave new stories around them. So Khairunnisa’s life may have been whatever it may have been… but with Darlymple’s novel, it is a name that now stands for East Meeting West a theme that resonates well with the globally ambitious Indians. (And it is not insignificant that the Government of Andhra Pradesh has been bankrolled by DFID of UK since 1997 but that is a different story). My first reaction on seeing the picture of the boat named Khairunnisa was anger. What the heck! Today if I have to comment on it, I guess I would just say it is a little unsettling that East is feminine and West is masculine. And it is a little unsettling that Khairunnisa should be floating around in Husain Sagar’s fetid waters with no apparent relation to the standing Buddha towards whom she ferries party revellers each night. No, I am not a puritan, I am just trying to learn how to tell the real story of Khairunnisa’s journey in Hussain Sagar.

Blueprint for apartheid city

Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna issued orders to the effect that from Jan 15, 2008 everybody in Delhi should be carrying a photo id at all times. Police will be making random checks. Apparently several political leaders and experts have objected to this. The Lt Governor also said people with driving licenses from other cities should have their licenses revalidated in Delhi. This is because people in other states have bad driving habits it seems. SG reports Tejinder Khanna is

A retired bureaucrat, ex-Chairman of Ranbaxy Labs, and one who was part of WTO negotiations as Commerce Secretary. An article in Manushi tells us that he was Food Secretary in 1992 when India imported 3 million tonnes of wheat grain from Australia, US etc. at prices higher than that fixed by the government for domestic procurement. When asked why wheat was imported, he reportedly said,”If the same quantity would have been purchased from the domestic markets, the prices would have shot up.” Apparently dead farmers are better than prosperous farmers.

But this is clearly not Tejinder Khanna’s wiliness although it is significant that a man with a background like that would become the Lt Governor of Delhi now. In AP, the Government appointed C V S K Sarma as the first chief commissioner of Greater Hyderabad — the amalgamation of 12 satellite municipalities and eight gram panchayats with Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad — in April 2007. Sarma was the principal secretary for irrigation prior to this posting — a position that is one of the nerve centers of corruption in most agriculture dominated states and in this case, he held the position at a time when the Congress government was steamrollering irrigation projects everywhere in the state including the Polavaram dam — in short only someone who was completely loyal to the Chief Minister could have survived in that post. But that is a different story. Guess what the punchline is: Hyderabad is again without an elected body. Sarma is both commissioner and special officer. i.e. not even nominal oversight by an elected legislative body over the bureaucracy.

In Hyderabad when I was there in September, I saw posters from the police department at traffic junctions which exhorted people to report anyone that looked suspicious. And the posters gave brilliant clues to the people to know when someone is suspicious: the individual wears unusual clothes, speaks in strange dialects and acts in an unusual manner. Shortly after this, the Hyderabad police started accosting Muslim youth on the streets, harassing them and taking them away. Those with influential family connections would get off lightly after a few hours of harassment. Those with no way of contacting families through cell phones, those with no way of pulling strings, started disappearing.

Bangalore attempted issuing id cards to slum youth some years ago and it was resisted strongly. Hyderabad has not done anything like that till now, but I have been hearing reports that the security around Hitech City area is extremely tight. That is where all the new gated communities also have been emerging. Eventually this will extend to most of the area now known as Cyberabad.But this is not about security alone. That is only one angle. And an angle that makes no sense unless we see it in context. Hazards Center which is part of Sanchal Foundation published a compilation of essays dissecting the Delhi Draft Master Plan in 2005. The title of the book was Blue Print for an Apartheid City. Among other things, one of the essays in the book pointed out how the draft master plan proposed to ban cycle rickshaws because it is cycle rickshaws that drew the poor to the city as a possible livelihood. Delhi like many other cities in India has also been pushing the poor people living in slums and unauthorized colonies to the outskirts of the city — a state driven suburbanization to exclude the poor from the orderly city.Delhi urban development recently drafted a bill on defacement of property. It is apparently based on the Bengal model. I am not sure if it has already been passed. The Government of AP issued a GO in 1998 by which anyone peeing or spitting on the streets will be fined. The fine to be collected by a neighborhood committee. It didnt work. But in all this experimentation the idea is to create a world class city, one that will drive economic growth from the front end — through tertiary sector activities located in the city and in select suburbs. So they keep pushing laws, and withdraw them if there is a lot of resistance and try something else or somewhere else. One rule or one law withdrawn in the face of resistance does not mean the logic changes. They keep coming atcha from different directions — until the resistance breaks down or at least comes to some sort of compromise.

3 books on Conflict that I have not yet read

Beyond the Green Zone has been on the market for several weeks now – I have heard from someone who has seen the first copy off the press — complete with the typos — that it was an immensely satisfying work. I havent seen the book yet but I can make a plug for it even without seeing it. There simply were not too many unembedded journalists in Iraq. So when you come across one, you better grab it. The production of this book actually is a fascinating story of globalization. Dahr Jamail, a fourth generation Lebanese American on his father’s side – a staunch Republican family from Texas — working as a climbing guide in Alaska — equipped with a laptop and no Arabic, and no publishing contracts landed in Baghdad soon after the war started. Months later, as his dispatches posted on his blog caught people’s attention, The New Standard offered him a small retainership to report for their news outlet. Most of his stay in Iraq however was supported through individual contributions from friends and anti war folks who discovered his blog. One such disoverer from India Bhaswati Sengupta, a freelance editor soon turned into an ardent supporter — who started making editorial comments on Dahr’s writing. Soon, this turned into a peculiar kind of outsourcing, with most of Dahr’s stories written from Baghdad and Basra and from Berkeley first being whetted and edited by Bhaswati in Hyderabad, India before finding their way to the net. The book project Beyond the Green Zone -Dispatches from an unembedded Journalist began when he was taking a sabbatical in Colarado after gruelling months of war reporting. It is truly a labor of love and a great instance of a new spirit in international journalism. I commend it.

Kite Runner has already been made into a movie with the same name -Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini, is Afghan American. What fascinates me about it is that it is apart from the fact that it is about conflict, it is also the first Afghan novelist in English. It is the story of Amir, the son of a well to do Pashtun family trying to come to terms with how he betrayed his childhood friend — Hassan, the son of his father’s Hazara servant. I am putting off reading this to a time when I will have the time to face my own demons. They have been knocking at my window for a while now, but I am resolutely ignoring them. I know from experience how amplified one’s own cruelty appears when one looks back at times and places that no longer exist and there are no real possibilities of making amends!

The Scar of David It is impossible to see this book outside of the project Playgrounds for Palestine. I remember watching a moving theatrical performance by a group of Palestinian children in Minneapolis –at the invitation of an Arab young man who spoke in the most impeccable Oxbridge accent who befriended me in the hope that I will reveal the truth about the fatal attraction that Indian men feigning a non violent persona hold for wild eyed caucasian women. And I have known M who works in Palestinian towns with children on theatre projects — a fascinating woman from Hyderabad and the only one I know who can actually trace her lineage to one of the characters in White Mughals — (an 18th century brigadier who went native and whose son turned into a banker with international connections – William Palmer if you insist on knowing trivia) and one who can reenact a horrifying encounter with a Siddi Murshad from her childhood and transport you into a world where it is difficult to distinguish the most outrageous fantasy from the most banal reality. But I didnt know that someone was cooking up a novel. Susie Abulhawa, herself a child of refugees of the Six Day war of 1967, and a Biomedical scientist wrote the Scar of David — is a historical novel that is although aimed at countering the prejudice against Palestinians, I suspect has much to teach us about the horrors of 20th century nationalisms.

Nana Patekar resonates in Karachi

I did not pay much attention to the video titled Ek General Sala Ek General when someone sent it to me several weeks ago. Amitava posted it on his blog with a brief comment “unfair to hijras but angry and resolute”.

I was merely surprised that Nana Patekar had takers in Pakistan. This video is closely modeled on the Nana Patekar’s monologue in the 1997 film Yeshwant.

But watching it a second time now in light of the developments since then, and having read some of the outpourings from young supporters Imran Khan’s party Tehreek E Insaaf (Move for Justice) I wonder if there is an anti Mohajir (Urdu speaking people who migrated to Pakistan from India) subtext in this film. But how does it fit into the politics of Sindh? The first time I heard of the MQM and Jiye Sindh was in the mid 90s when they were still Mohajir Qaumi Movement and Jiye Sindh with strong roots in the Karachi university politics and talk of India supporting anti Pakistan movements across border first began. Two movements that were often mentioned as receiving support from India at that time were MQM and Jiye Sindh. For over a decade I paid no attention to any of this and so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that MQM is now called Muttahida Qaumi Movement and is an influential political party and that it supports the General. And oddly I dont hear anymore about Jiye Sindh — perhaps with the passing of K R Malkani a generation of Sindhis with bitterness in their hearts is now gone? Who can tell, his book Sindh story is online and there is still L K Advani waiting for his term in the PMO. Meanwhile the World Sindhi Institute which represents Sindh in the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization is still active.It will be a while before I can see the woods. Right now it is all a blur with too much information.

Turrebaz Khan Road

Bandaru Dattatreya, urges the Government of Andhra Pradesh to erect a memorial to Turrebaz Khan and Maulvi Allauddin — the two leaders of the 1857 mutinee in Hyderabad. I am intrigued by the demand. There are two roads in Hyderabad named after Turrebaz Khan and Maulvi Allauddin. One that leads from the Kothi chowrasta towards Jambagh – probably less than a kilometer. And the other hugging the river Musi and on one side of the British Residency building which is now Kothi Women’s College. I have no idea when these roads were named after these people. In fact very few people know these roads by these names. There used to be a small pylon in the Bus Bay near the Kothi Chowrasta which said it was a memorial to the martyrs of the 1857 uprising in Hyderabad. I dont know if the pylon is still there. Turrebaz Khan and Maulvi Allauddin have suddenly reappeared like many other resurrected figures from Hyderabad’s past in the last few years.

This is not just about the national to do — 150 years of India’s first war of Independence. It is also about the nostalgia for Old Hyderabad, resentment against the coastal Andhra people who are seen as having literally run over the city with alien symbols. Trouble however is that there is no neat story to tell about Hyderabad. The separate Telangana people actually would have us believe that Hyderabad actually became independent on September 12th 1948 and not on August 15th, 1947 simply because it was on the later date that the Indian Army marched into Hyderabad under the name police action — Operation Polo. But even this story is not an easy one to live with because Osman Ali Khan, the 7th Nizam of Hyderabad actually challenged the GoI’s actions. Despite his surrender, he placed a representative of his at the UN to pursue a case regarding Hyderabad’s status as independent state as proposed by Sir Winston Churchill.

These stories apart, memorializing Turrebaz Khan and Maulvi Allauddin as participants in India’s first War of Independence erases a complex history. The resentment against the British Residency in Hyderabad was actually inspired and fuelled by a strong wave of wahabi religiosity that swept Hyderabad in the 1830s –probably via Hadhrami Arab traders. Under its influence, one member of the ruling Asaf Jahi family launched a full scale assault on the British in 1939 — Mubarriz ud Daula, the brother of the reigning Nasir ud Daula Nawab. Even after Mubarriz was imprisoned, the state of Hyderabad was in utter shambles with the Rohilla Pathans running amock in the countryside and with some backing from the maulvis who preached in Hyderabad’s mosques. In 1957, the Nizam again decided to play safe by supporting the British. The maulvis at the city’s mosques were frequently challenged and heckled by the congregations to be more politically explicit. The British had a big advantage this time too — in the form of Mir Turab Ali Khan – Salar Jung I, the prime minister of Hyderabad who passed on crucial information to the British on a regular basis in return for support for modernizing the state of Hyderabad.

In 1857, the particular incident of an assault on the Residency on July 17th that everyone wanting a pylon for Turrebaz Khan now refer to, was the result of the British residency action to imprison jamedar Cheddha Khan, a captured army deserter. After the morning prayers, Maulvi Allauddin and Turrebaz Khan with a contingent of 500 Rohillas, attacked the Residency from two sides with a view to rescue Cheedha Khan. The assault failed miserably as the British who had prior information from the Salar Jung, had the tanks lined up. Turrebaz Khan and Maulvi Allauddin both tried to escape. The former was shot and wounded and died somewhere near Toopran village. His body was hanged near the residency for demonstration of the British might. The latter was captured in Bangalore a few days later and sent off to kala pani. I wonder if he landed in Singapore.I am sure there are archival references for some of this but I am not sure about anything in Hyderabad. But these stories have been in circulation via Narendra Luther and The Hindu newspaper’s nostalgia columns that go in the name of heritage.
Why are Turrebaz Khan the Rohilla and Maulvi Allauddin the wahabi preacher becoming a symbol of Hyderabad’s spark for freedom now ?

Hair raising tribute

An earnest appeal to y’all students of Bollywood — please consider making a documentary on the career of baldness/telmalish/boot polish/madhouses and jail birds in Hindi movies. I would have done it myself except that I feel horribly unqualified to undertake it. But here is one to whet your taste. I am notoriously unmusical but I suspect the above hair raising rendition by Manna Dey from Boot Polish is a tribute to Mia Tansen — if after watching this you do not begin to love jail birds, shining pates and appreciate the fact that miracles do occur –you must be heartless.

But the same Manna Dey sang in Huzur a more serious version of the song. I cannot find the video of it, but here is a Gohil rendition of it

Ustad Amir Khan and D V Paluskar’s offer a more sober tribute in Baiju Bawra (below) which is good I suppose but where is the social commentary in it ?

But let me not digress. Remember Johny Walker in Pyaasa ? Even if you forget the words of the song — naukar ho ya maalik… apne aage sabhi jhukein hain kya raaja kya sainik, you cannot forget what happens at the end of the song — the tel maalish wala hailing the poet who wrote the song for him Vijay Babu.. jab se gaane lagaa hun, apna business double ho gaya hai..

Through a glass darkly

Farangi’s post Franz Ferdinand’s Last Sigh is one of the sharpest rebukes yet on western media’s coverage of Benazir Bhutto’s killing. Not so much because it asserts that there is a conspiracy and exhorts people to question it, that we all know, but because it identifies a remarkable shift in the American psyche that occurred by the end of the 60s — a disavowal that is closely guarded and sustained through the minutiae of daily currency –an arrangement that is critical to the maintenance of US hegemony in the shifting sands of geopolitics. If you dont believe me, just try to recollect howmany times you hear the caveat — “I dislike conspiracy theories as much as you do” as preface to ponderous pronouncements. The post may seem a bit abstruse for readers not used to this style of writing — and since I am driving unsuspecting new traffic to the post – a couple of quick notes: MSM is main stream media. Franz Ferdinand — the Archduke of Austria whose assassination is often cited as the event that precipitated the World War I.

All well. I am still very annoyed at the complete black out on what the Pakistani newspapers are saying — in English, in Sindhi, in Punjabi, in Urdu…. those utterances and silences are the indices of what the assassination means in Pakistan. And we are so obsessed with what the MSM thinks about us. MSM who ?

Chapati said ‘giddy’ and fell silent!

After reading all the obituaries for BB, I am only left wondering why Baskin Robins has not yet made a deal with Asif Ali Zardari to make BB their mascot girl. Sepoy seems to have been left with a similar impression — Boy! did she have a sweet tooth, he says. But since he frowned at most of the commentators’ who make BB out to be a person ‘unrelatable’ to the vast majority of Pakistanis — I hoped he will go on to explain how Pakistanis actually relate to her. He takes us on a nice, useful and refreshing excursion ( I really mean it as a complement) through the countryside into which Bhutto’s name is inscribed in a million ways, he brings us to the secure knowledge that Pakistanis do relate to her. If you are holding your breath to find out how and why, relax  — apparently they related to her “as Bhutto.” And there is nothing after that. I am trying not to sound wistful but is that all the ‘vertiginous’ chapati said ? That it is ‘giddy’?

Yes of course it is the Bhutto name. That is why it is so important for Asif Ali Zardari to stake a claim to that name. That is no cipher for any fullblooded South Asian. The question is what does Bhutto symbolize ? What does the name say to the vast majority of people –when it comes attached to all these different faces ? If we cannot decode that, we are really not much better than Tariq Ali — well, yes I include him among the dozens of commentators who have given us the Baskin Robins story — perhaps more finegrained, perhaps with greater detail, but it is still about the good, the bad and the ugly in the palace politics. I suspect the ‘chapati’ has more to reveal and hope that the sepoy will share it.