Mani Shankar Aiyar

when-manmohan-singh-engaged-pervez-musharraf

Sat Jan 11 11:00:28 IST 2025

No prime minister of India made a more constructive contribution towards establishing an equilibrium between India and Pakistan than Dr Manmohan Singh. Building on the Islamabad Declaration of January 2004, proclaimed jointly by prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and president Pervez Musharraf, Singh initiated with his counterpart a process of sustained dialogue which yielded the most positive results, specifically with regard to the issue of Jammu and Kashmir that, but for the perversity of destiny, might have opened the path to lasting peace and harmony.

In initiating the process, Singh fully recognised that finding a via media to the vexed question of J&K would be the optimal way of settling other issues. It was further agreed that a quiet backchannel was essential to a result-oriented dialogue. Second, the interlocutors chosen by both leaders were not chosen because of their position in the bureaucratic hierarchy but because of the immense trust Musharraf had in a friend, Tariq Aziz, and Singh had in a retired former high commissioner to Pakistan, Satinder Kumar Lambah. They reported only to their respective principals.

Foreign ministers and others were kept in the loop on a “need-to-know” basis at the discretion of the two leaders, but directions on how to proceed came only from the respective heads. Over a period of about a thousand days, meeting at various locations outside the subcontinent, the two special envoys hammered out an agreement that built on two key bipartisan statements by Vajpayee and Singh: “insaniyat, kashmiriyat, jamhuriyat” (humanity, the Kashmiri way of life, and democracy) by Vajpayee, and bringing about a situation “where one could have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Islamabad, and dinner in Kabul” by Singh.

Although Musharraf summarised the agreement as a “four-point” programme, foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri’s detailed account of the negotiations (see his tome, Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove, backed in all relevant specifics by Lambah’s In Pursuit of Peace: India-Pakistan Relations Under Six Prime Ministers) shows that the number of points on which agreement was reached was close to 16 after taking the fine print into account.

The essence of what both sides accepted was that there would be no exchange of people or territories but that the Line of Control would be rendered “irrelevant” by freely allowing Kashmiris to cross the LoC in both directions to foster family relations, encourage fraternal friendships, promote trade and investment, and set up an inter-governmental mechanism to try to ensure similar levels of prosperity and democratic freedoms for all Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC. This was undergirded by the common understanding that there could be no independent, sovereign Kashmir.

This draft agreement, except for one issue to be ironed out by the two heads—whether to describe it as a “joint management” or “joint cooperative” mechanism—was readied to be signed when Singh visited Islamabad at the end of February 2007.

However, the Pakistan president got involved in a fracas over domestic issues with the chief justice of Pakistan (nothing to do with India or the draft), leading to the bar in all Pakistani courts striking in support of the chief justice who had embarked on a country-wide protest tour. This resulted in Singh’s visit being postponed by a month and then dropped indefinitely.

But signed or not, the backchannel agreement definitively established that sincere, sustained dialogue, even with a Pakistani military government, could generate positive outcomes—which surgical strikes and armed attacks deep into Pakistani territory never could achieve.

Instead of building on this enlightened initiative, Singh’s successor has shown how unenlightened he is by failing for over a decade to summon the wisdom and the courage to engage with Pakistan.

As this is his last column, the author thanks his readers for their patronage over a decade and more, and wishes them all a happy new year.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

has-narendra-modis-india-abandoned-the-sri-lankan-tamils

Sat Dec 28 10:43:01 IST 2024

Anura Kumara Dissanayake has made New Delhi his first stop abroad after being sworn in as the president of Sri Lanka in October 2024 and winning a two-thirds majority for the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance in November’s parliamentary elections. But before you start cheering, pause for a moment and ask yourself: who is this leader who has successfully overthrown 75 years of rule by a handful of families that have held the nation in their iron grip since the independence of Sri Lanka?

While heading the NPP coalition, Dissanayake represents the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—People’s Liberation Front—that took to vicious violence and conducted two major insurrections. As the most prominent youth leader of the JVP, he was an active participant in terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, including Sri Lankan Tamils.

While recalling this less than savoury past, we have to note that Dissanayake has apologised for past violence and, in consequence, his candidates won all but one district in the Tamil-majority north and east provinces. His two-thirds majority is the result—in his own words—of his country-wide support from “north, east, west and south”.

The JVP was earlier opposed to any devolution to the Tamil-majority areas and it has refused to entertain the long-standing Tamil demand for a federal set-up and the inclusion of Tamil among Sri Lanka’s official languages. In the recent elections, however, the Tamils abandoned their own traditional Tamil leaders and supported Dissanayake despite his reputation as a violent hardcore Sinhala-Buddhist extremist.

But, for all that, there is one major lacuna that is crying to be filled: the final place of the Tamil minority in Sinhala-majority Sri Lanka. To settle this key question, the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution was negotiated by former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi with former Sri Lankan president Junius Jayewardene in 1987. It explicitly assured the merged north-eastern province, where the Tamils are in a majority, of a place of equality and honour in Sri Lanka where, on all important issues, including land and law and order, the Tamil majority would be able to rule itself without the fetters of the central government in a unitary state. That fell short of both federation and separation advocated by most Tamil political and militant groups but was reluctantly endorsed by the Sri Lankan government as the only alternative to the disintegration of their nation-state.

But neither then nor now has the JVP acknowledged the validity or even legitimacy of the 1987 accord, which they hold was imposed on Sri Lanka by India through the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution. The JVP stand reflected the anger of the naval rating who almost killed Rajiv Gandhi with the butt of his rifle at the farewell parade for the departing prime minister.

So, notwithstanding the 34 paragraphs of the joint communique that sets the course for the future of India-Sri Lanka relations, the key question of the future for Tamils in Sri Lanka remains unanswered: if not the 13th amendment, then what?

Has Narendra Modi’s India abandoned the Sri Lankan Tamils, with dangerous implications for New Delhi-Chennai relations and thus the unity and integrity of India? Or has Dissanayake taken the Modi establishment into confidence about what he has in mind? Above all, has the JVP leopard changed its spots? Or is the Dissanayake dispensation on the road to the same kind of minority-bashing, as is the Modi government?

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

why-are-we-hindutvising-foreign-policy

Sat Dec 14 12:21:16 IST 2024

As if it were not bad enough that India’s domestic polity has been poisoned by communalism as never before, increasingly, foreign policy, too, is being given a communal twist. This is most evident in relation to Bangladesh. The enormous gains of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War are being frittered away in a vengeful attack by the Narendra Modi government and its ‘godi’ media, in the name of protecting the Hindu minority, on the consequences of the Monsoon Revolution that overthrew our much-favoured Sheikh Hasina as prime minister of Bangladesh. In view of continuing atrocities against India’s Muslims, such chutzpah quite takes one’s breath away.

We did not bring Hasina to power in Dhaka. It was the people of Bangladesh who elected her in 1996 and again in 2009. It is they who overthrew her on August 5, 2024. Our government refuses to accept the self-evident truth that Hasina had compromised her moral right to the premiership by rigging the elections of 2014 and 2019 and forfeited it completely by the time the people’s frustration at this perversion of democracy spilled on to the streets.

Bangladesh is not a province of India. It is a foreign country. Yet, when it comes to Bangladesh (as, indeed, when it comes to any neighbour smaller than us) we assume the right to settle their matters to our liking (although we rarely succeed). Yes, Hasina was good for us. But even as we reserve the right to elect or dethrone any prime minister of our country, so also do the Bangladeshis in theirs. That is their sovereign right.

True, Hasina was driven from office not in an election but by the army refusing to follow her orders to shoot. At this, she felt she had to flee. She flew to India. We welcomed her. I certainly applaud our giving her refuge and refusing to extradite her. But having done our duty, should we not give the interim authorities in Dhaka the opportunity to settle down and hold elections when they are ready—elections that Hasina’s Awami League may win if an adequate majority of Bangladeshis so decide. That is for them, not us, to determine.

Faced with this impasse, the Modi establishment and their collaborators in the media have charged Bangladeshis with being anti-Hindu. Mahfuz Anam, a leading Bangladeshi journalist and editor and publisher of The Daily Star, deplores “the venom that is being spewed, the hatred that is being spread, and the demeaning stereotype that is being portrayed about us (which) seems to be geared towards generating a hatred for Bangladeshis among the Indian people”.

Recalling that it was student power that opposed Muhammad Ali Jinnah when he sought to make Urdu the sole national language of Pakistan and student agitations that brought down the Ayub Khan regime and brought in Mujib as the liberator, and has now outed his daughter, Anam points to student agitations having been the traditional medium for political expression when other means of communication are strangled.

The validity of this assertion will be tested when elections are held. Meanwhile, in answer to charges of widespread anti-Hindu violence and rioting, Anam’s own newspaper and journalist investigators from Bangladesh’s premier Bengali newspaper, Prothom Alo, have visited every district and sub-district of the country to check on the truth of these allegations. In a majority of cases, they have found that Hindus have been attacked not because of their religion but because of their affiliation to the Awami League and involvement in atrocities inflicted on their local political opponents during the previous regime.

One hopes Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri will ascertain the truth (or otherwise) of this view when he was in Dhaka for foreign office-level consultations rather than demonising in advance the people of Bangladesh as anti-Hindu.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

detaching-morality-from-economic-policy

Sat Nov 30 10:53:28 IST 2024

Is the Adani imbroglio an episodic, one-off incident—or does it reflect a major systemic lacuna in our conception of development and democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi had said the national objective must be “to wipe every tear from every eye” and earlier answered a question about his “dream for India” by saying he would “work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country” in the making of which it is their voice that shall prevail. It was this vision that provided the crucial ethical dimension to the national goal of securing development through democracy—for, clearly, the voice of the most disadvantaged would count only in a democratic polity.

After much cogitation and debate, this approach of prioritising the uplift of the poor, as distinct from incentivising the rich to become richer, led to the enunciation of a “socialistic pattern of society” as the objective of equitable democratic development. This cumbersome expression was often reduced to the single word “socialism”.

This form of “socialism” was later incorporated in the Preamble to our Constitution. Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna has underlined that “the way we understand socialism in India is very different from the way other academics might understand [it]. In our context, socialism means welfare state…in which the State must ensure… that there is equality of opportunity”.

This ethical dimension has been underplayed ever since the country, in the name of economic reforms, has been bewitched with “GDP” and “per capita income” as the chief criteria for measuring development, pushing aside other Constitutional criteria such as “equality” and “equal opportunity”. In the pursuit of this model of private sector driven development, growing inequalities of income have transformed into humongous inequalities of wealth and the domination (even capture) of key levers of governance by giant business entities that are “too large to fail”. Where in the Nehruvian era, the public sector was given the primary role to promote governance objectives, in Modi’s “New India” it is the private sector, specifically a handful of private sector giants, that are being entrusted with promoting national goals such as a massive switchover from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Thus, we are saddled with a public sector Solar Energy Corporation of India that produces no solar power itself but is the channel through which state electricity distribution companies are compelled to purchase renewable solar energy from a monopolistic private entity, claimed to be the “largest” in the world, however burdensome the tariffs might be on state budgetary resources. Adani’s indictment in a US court alleges that he bribed state government “officials” (a term used in the US for even elected representatives) who were baulking at purchasing excessively expensive renewable energy from Adani Green through SECI. The indictment also carries the implication that despite evidence of violations under the (Indian) Prevention of Corruption Act, the Indian regulator, the Securities Exchange Board of India, had failed to carry out its regulatory duties vis-à-vis Narendra Modi’s flagship private entity, the Adani group.

Economies which relied on private enterprise, such as the US “robber barons” of the 19th and early 20th century whose shenanigans brought on the Depression and led to Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-trust legislation, have found reflection in the Japanese ‘zaibatsu’ leading to Japanese armed invasions of its neighbours in the 1930s and 1940s in quest of an Asian “co-prosperity sphere”, and the rise of Hitler on the corporate shoulders of ThyssenKrupp. So too, Boris Yeltsin’s transmogrification of the Soviet socialist economy into the notorious ‘oligarchs’ of Russia.

Equally, Korea’s ‘chaebols’. In China, too, Dengonomics has been characterised by massive corruption.

The Adani imbroglio is thus not the outcome of one business giant’s dodgy ways but symptomatic of our dismantling ethics from economic policy.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

olympics-2036-host-and-ghosts

Sat Nov 16 14:49:35 IST 2024

The Indian Olympics Association (IOA) has sent the International Olympics Committee (IOC) its ‘letter of intent’ to host the Olympics in 2036—appositely enough the centenary of the very year, 1936, when Adolf Hitler hosted the Games in Berlin!

The letter, reportedly drafted in consultation with the Indian government, might have been written by Jawaharlal Nehru, the bête noire of the BJP. For it invokes not “1,200 dark years of slavery” as claimed by Narendra Modi, but the “vast cultural diversity” of the country, shaped “by thousands of years of history”, as the raison d’être for our bid.

Repudiating the known ideological view of the sangh parivar, the letter proudly proclaims that “our society is a mosaic of religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism, each contributing to our rich heritage and society”.

The government must think the rest of the world are fools who do not know the 100-year record of hindutva from Savarkar through Golwalkar to Modi which excoriates our minorities and treats all encounters with “outsiders” as having had the most deleterious consequences for Hindus. Or the many nasty things their ideological mentors have had to say about Buddhism, its message of non-violence and compassion, and the contempt in which they hold emperor Asoka for having deprived the Hindu of his ‘masculinity’.

The letter shows our government thinks the diplomatic missions in our national capital were asleep at their desks when, in the campaign speeches of the prime minister and his cohort, the Muslim minority was publicly targeted. They might hide, but the world knows the hideous record of the brutal killings by their supporters of innocent Muslims suspected of consuming or transporting cow’s meat, most of which have turned out to be false allegations, but only after the victims were tortured, bullied and finally put to death.

We can fully expect our competitors (who include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Indonesia) to pass on this open secret to the IOC in case someone there missed it. We might also expect one of these countries (or, possibly, Canada) to inform the IOC executive board of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) that pointedly excludes Muslims from the ambit of refugees seeking shelter in our land. This despite the Rohingya Muslims being the largest cohort of displaced persons in our immediate neighbourhood.

And many would whisper, if not shout out, the carnage of Gujarat 2002, particularly in Ahmedabad, which is apparently intended as the host city. Why not Imphal in Manipur, a sports-mad state, where internecine tribal conflict would best diminish in the international spotlight?

Our sports priorities are wholly misplaced. We wish to host glittering international sports events but, unlike previous Asian hosts, we are hopeless at Olympic sports. In demographic terms, we have virtually the lowest per capita haul of Olympic medals. Even in hockey, in which Dhyan Chand first demonstrated our prowess before Hitler in Berlin, we have since slipped down the international scale. The only sport in which we have occasionally excelled is cricket, which is confined to a dozen Commonwealth countries.

We need to become a sporting nation, not a sports-hosting nation. For that we need a scheme that brings sports, sports training, talent search and nutritious nurturing to the doorstep of every Indian child in every rural or tribal backwater and urban slum. That is where our sporting talent lies. Assiduously searching out and nurturing that talent is not, alas, our national priority. And the world knows it. As Union sports minister (2006-08), I fostered just such a scheme that, unfortunately, has since withered on the vine. Which is why I think the IOA’s ‘letter of intent’ will remain the last will and testament of the Modi government.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

india-china-back-to-basics

Sun Nov 03 09:44:27 IST 2024

The Narendra Modi-Xi Jinping handshake in Kazan provides the right opportunity to ask the most basic question: what is our long-term perspective on India-China relations?

The question was, in fact, raised and settled back in 1950. In a famed letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, deputy prime minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel set out his concerns over China’s increasing belligerence towards any kind of pretence to independence by Tibet.

Nehru decided to take the issue to cabinet instead of leaving it as a bilateral difference of opinion between himself and his deputy. He had every reason to believe that Sardar Patel would be present at the cabinet meeting. Tragically, the Sardar remained bedridden and died within three weeks of Nehru detailing his counter-argument to all members of the cabinet through his note of November 18, 1950.

Urging that “we should be clear in our minds as to what we are aiming at, not only in the immediate future but from a long-term view”, Nehru’s starting point, obvious as it is, bears reiteration: communist China “is going to be our close neighbour for a long time to come”. It cannot be wished away. No power on earth can either replace it—as, at the time, the American establishment hawks were pressing their government to do—nor could we “save Tibet” from a Chinese takeover, as several Indian establishment hawks were urging him to do. He significantly added that “we might be able to help Tibet retain a large measure of autonomy”. That was eventually written into the Panchsheel agreement of 1954, but violated by the Chinese before the ink ran dry on the signatures of the two sides.

Communism and a feudal theocracy could not really be accommodated in a single package, especially, as Nehru reminded his cabinet colleagues, Tibetan independence was only “40 years” old compared to centuries of kowtowing to Peking (now Beijing). Moreover, the new rulers were atheists, unlike their imperial predecessors, with no need of spiritual guidance from the Dalai Lama. That was the reality with which we had to come to terms. And under these terms, China might “formally grant Tibet autonomy” but that autonomy “can obviously not be anything like the autonomy verging on independence that Tibet had enjoyed” over the previous four decades. Prescient!

Pointing to the “tremendously long frontier” between China and India, Nehru awoke both countries to the need to reaffirm the ground reality by mutual agreement. But China was unprepared to talk to him about the border for close to a decade and that then became the bone of contention leading to the conflict of 1962. While expressing the view that he did not anticipate a “major attack”, Nehru conceded that “there are certainly chances of a gradual infiltration” and even of the Chinese taking “possession of disputed territory” (emphasis added) but underlined that to make “full provision for a feared attack” would be to “cast an intolerable burden” on us. However, we must “take all necessary precautions to prevent” the “infiltration” and unwarranted claims to “disputed territory”.

Nehru, thus, concluded that “if China and India are inveterately hostile to each other”, there will be “repeated wars bringing destruction to both”. But if “India and China (are) at peace… it would make a vast difference”.

Our larger strategic aim should be to ensure that “India and China (are) at peace”. In this context, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has evoked “the power of engaging in continuous dialogue because, sooner or later, solutions will emerge”. Should that not apply to Pakistan?

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

kashmir-kashmiris-need-delhis-trust

Sat Oct 19 11:09:41 IST 2024

Of the 49 seats in the Kashmir valley, the National Conference won 42; the Congress, six; the CPI(M), one; the BJP, zero; the Jamaat-e-Islami, zero. It was a clean sweep for INDIA.

It is not that the Central government’s representatives since August 5, 2019, have done nothing. It is appreciated that ‘normalcy’ of a kind has been restored—even if at the point of the AK-47. It is appreciated that schools and colleges are open, that hospitals and primary health centres are working, that Central welfare schemes are being implemented, that new development schemes have been undertaken, that the economy has been re-geared, that fresh private investment is being sought, that transport is running smoothly.

There is no doubt of the tourist boom and of the planeloads of curious visitors and pilgrims, particularly Hindus, from all over the country, being flown in. It is also evident that free and fair elections have been held, notwithstanding some gerrymandering to increase Jammu seats. And, yet, the BJP could garner only 5 per cent of the vote in the valley. Why? Because ‘Man does not live by bread alone’.

More because of its poetic cadence than because of any deep philosophical insight, Atal Bihari Vajpayee hit the right note when he formulated the essence of a lasting solution to the valley’s alienation as lying in, “Kashmiriyat, jamhooriyat, insaaniyat” (Kashmir’s inclusive culture, democracy, and common humanity). Protest against the denial of these three vital requirements has been registered right across the valley.

The forced integration through the reading down of articles 370 and 35A, the bifurcation of the state, and its downgrading to a Union territory, are a denial of the Kashmiri identity to force a people proud of their composite credentials into the straitjacket of ‘uniformity’ that lies at the core of the hindutva project. Kashmir chose India in preference to Pakistan because its leaders recognised that Kashmiriyat would be safer in secularism than in Islamic Pakistan, for exclusion and Kashmir’s traditions of inclusion are incompatible. However, Kashmir could only be Indian if it were encouraged to remain Kashmiri—the same deal that led to the Dravidian movement abandoning separatism in favour of being Tamil in India, provided always they would remain Tamil in India.

Self-respect, dignity, and the preservation of identity, require self-rule. In our freedom movement, we were prepared to remain within the empire provided, like other dominions, we could rule ourselves through our own elected representatives and a government based on majorities in the state and central legislatures. It is only after that demand found no takers in Westminster that on January 26, 1929, Jawaharlal Nehru, as Congress president, was authorised to declare purna swaraj (complete or unfettered independence). Something similar is being demanded in Kashmir: their right to full statehood as applicable to other states of the Union of India—failing which aazaadi (complete or unfettered independence—purna swaraj). Until that is understood, until Delhi recognises that what unites J&K is the common demand of the Hindu majority in Jammu and the Muslim majority in Kashmir for full-fledged democracy (jamhooriyat) in full-fledged statehood. This is clear from the Lokniti-CSDS survey which shows 80 per cent Kashmiris and over 43 per cent Jammu-ites seeking the restoration of statehood without delay.

Above all is the need for insaaniyat (humanity), that is law and order that are self-ordained and not enforced by dictate from above through a panoply of weapons and tens of thousands of soldiers, paramilitary and security forces. There is no insaaniyat in a soldier cradling his weapon at every street-corner. Nor is there any insaaniyat in treating every Kashmiri as a terrorist—kinetic or potential. What is needed and must be made evident is trust—in the Kashmiri, in Kashmiriyat, in jamhooriyat and in insaaniyat. Omar Abdullah has his work cut out.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

our-government-neither-applauds-nor-boos-it-just-steps-aside

Sat Oct 05 11:27:21 IST 2024

When I read about India’s abstention on the UN resolution regarding the International Court of Justice’s decision to start hearings on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I was shamed as an Indian. But when I read India’s cringeworthy Explanation of Vote [EoV], I felt humiliated as a human being.

I doubt that there has been a more mealy-mouthed opening sentence in any EoV that matches that of our permanent representative (PR). After the world (and ICJ) have witnessed nearly a year of the inhuman massacre of some 40,000 non-combatant Palestinians (and the revenge killing of a handful of Hamas militants), and the brutal repeated displacement of close to a million civilians being driven under fire from one part of the tiny Gaza Strip to another, while being denied food and water and health services on so horrific a scale of inhumanity that the usually sober, restrained ICJ has found itself with no alternative but to investigate whether Israel is in violation of the Geneva convention on genocide, all our PR is permitted by the Modi government to say is—I quote, “Today’s voting takes place in the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in Gaza”!

No, mate, it takes place in the background of the ICJ determination to investigate genocide by Israel. One hundred and twenty-four member-states applaud the decision; 43 don’t. India does not know whether to annoy Modi’s role model, Benjamin Netanyahu, or abandon the Palestinian cause we have supported since Mahatma Gandhi’s time. And so, having lost our moral compass, we dither. Our government neither applauds nor boos. It just steps aside. That is the tragic point to which the Modi cohort has brought Jawaharlal Nehru’s independent foreign policy, a policy that, till Modi’s arrival, constituted a national consensus. Nonalignment is now neutrality.

Our PR’s EoV goes on with the revelation that the “conflict”—as if we are talking of one of those incidents that brings in Yogi Adityanath’s bulldozers—has been going on “for more than eleven months”. Really, eleven months, counted to the last decimal point by Aryabhata’s descendants? Yes, eleven months during which we have been adding to Israel’s firepower while dishing out cliches to the Palestinians. Our PR is not to say ”genocide”; so, he restricts himself to “humanitarian crisis”. What, however, is being voted on is the question of ‘Genocide’.

Forty-three countries have the guts to say they will not accept an investigation into genocide whatever the ICJ may say. They comprise mainly the European countries who mercilessly committed outrage after outrage on the Jewish people for millennia, ending in the Holocaust. No Arab nation was involved in the Holocaust. Indeed, it was only when Muslims ruled Andalusia (modern Iberia) for 781 years (711-1492 CE) that the Jews lived in peace and honour. ‘Holocaust’ is a European disease extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. And the poor Palestinians are being made to pay the price of giving the opening to Europe to rid itself of its Jews.

The PR ended the oration written for him in Delhi with the ringing words, “Our efforts should be directed to bringing the two sides closer, not drive them further apart”. Wah! Wah! Mashallah. The viswaguru-cum-mitra is going to bring the butcher and the animal for slaughter closer by cowering on the knife’s edge. Abstention? Faugh!

Meanwhile, on the ground, Israel, strengthened by the negative western vote and the pusillanimity of the Indian position, has resorted to what one commentator has characterised as “the violent choreography of incremental escalation”. With pagers and walkie-talkies exploding in crowded places, killing hundreds of Lebanese (and a handful of Hezbollah militants), West Asia and Iran are being dragged by the rogue state of Israel into a frightening apocalypse. Yahweh alone can save us.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

how-modi-learnt-to-love-the-bomb

Sat Sep 21 10:46:34 IST 2024

Narendra Modi is the first Indian prime minister ever to not be on record on nuclear disarmament. His attention has been devoted to building our nuclear capabilities and delivery systems without mentioning universal disarmament. The authoritative International Panel on Fissile Materials has estimated, mainly on the basis of Indian government data, that we now have approximately 680kg (plus/minus 160kg) of weapons-grade plutonium in addition to highly enriched uranium to make 130-210 nuclear warheads, although our capacity to launch them is limited to an estimated 172. We are, however, rapidly developing missile delivery systems. Agni-V is in the final stages of operationalisation. Its unique feature is that it can be stored in canisters to enable pre-mating of missiles and warheads, besides perhaps taking our range to 6,000km (from Prithvi-II’s 350km). Next in line is the medium-range Agni-P, which replaces the first three Agni missiles. It can be equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles or variations thereof to match Pakistan’s medium-range Ababeel, which is armed with MIRVs. Long-range Agni-VI, an inter-continental ballistic missile, follows. This arguably presages the “decoupling” of our nuclear strategy for deterring China, which involves long-range missiles, from deterring Pakistan with highly sophisticated short-range ballistic missiles. We are well and truly into a nuclear arms race, precisely of the kind we used to deplore when the US and the Soviet Union were playing catch-up.

Meanwhile, the second side of the triad—air—has been bolstered with Rafale, the upgrading of Mirage 2000-H to Mirage 2000-5, the upgrading also of Jaguar with DARIN-III precision attack and avionics (despite the decision to retire the Jaguar soon). We must also note the proposed establishment of maintenance, repair, overhaul facilities near Jewar airport in Noida. We are also strengthening the third side of the triad—naval—by the commissioning of a second nuclear submarine, INS Arighaat, on August 29, 2024, and a large naval base at Rambilli.

These are all pointers to the Modi establishment surreptitiously drifting away from the two pillars of the nuclear weapons policy formulated by the Vajpayee government in the aftermath of Pokhran-II: ‘Minimum Nuclear Deterrence’ and ‘No First Use’. We are now switching to the same nuclear deterrence theories of Mutually Assured Destruction and a never-ending nuclear arms race that we used to warn against from Mahatma Gandhi onwards. To cite Rajiv Gandhi: “There can be no iron-clad guarantee against the use of weapons of mass destruction… the insane logic of mutually assured destruction will ensure that nothing survives”.

With the highest density of population in the world in Indian cities, our vulnerability to nuclear attack is arguably the highest in the world. We would become an uninhabitable wasteland. ‘Bombing Bombay’, a 1999 paper by M.V. Ramana of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimated, on 1991 census figures, that “a 15-kiloton explosion” in Bombay would result in “1,60,000 to 8,66,000 (instantaneous) deaths”, followed by “hundreds of thousands” of “injuries or burns” leading to the painful death of most, besides “genetic mutations” that would last for generations. Population density in Bombay stood at 16,461 per sqkm in 1991. North-east Delhi in 2001 had a density of 29,397 persons. The higher the density, the higher the instantaneous loss of life.

That is why we consistently advocated universal nuclear disarmament even as we became a nuclear weapon state. It is Modi’s failure to continue that advocacy of disarmament that is the single biggest threat to the continuation of our existence.

(Views expressed are personal.)

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

honest-peace-broker-nehru-vs-master-of-hugs-modi

Sat Sep 07 10:56:55 IST 2024

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed that while earlier we were distanced from everybody, under him we are now friends with everybody. Since Modi has been in charge of foreign policy for 10 years, let us compare his 10 years with Jawaharlal Nehru’s first 10 years.

Nehru set out on uncharted territory. The world was divided into two warring camps and every other country had joined one or the other. We were the first colony to emerge from imperial bondage. Hence, while “we look(ed) upon the world with clear and friendly eyes”, our foreign policy had to be as independent as our newly won domestic independence. Moreover, it had to be based on the values that had informed our unique freedom struggle: fierce opposition to all forms of domination but through non-violence. An early manifestation of independent thought and action was our voting against the partition of Palestine despite being neither Arab nor Muslim, for partition solves nothing, it only aggravates hatred and bitterness.

Both camps initially looked on our independent stand with suspicion but shortly came to realise that without an honest peace-broker nothing could be resolved. And India became that peace-broker, whether by chairing the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in 1953 that led to armistice in the Korean peninsula or by being trusted by all belligerents to conclude the Geneva Accords in 1954 without even being a formal participant in the talks. Nehru’s envoy, V.K. Krishna Menon, managed it simply by making himself available for mediation and ironing out misunderstandings between the contending parties. It led to Nehru’s India helming all three International Commissions of Control and Supervision in Indochina. Nehru, thus, emerged as the world’s much-needed man of peace and the world turned to India to lead UN peace-keeping forces in Gaza after the Suez war of 1956, in Cyprus, and in Congo.

So convinced were the sceptics in both camps about India’s indispensability in a divided world that when Nehru went to the US in 1949, he was received with great warmth and honour. And when he visited China in 1954 and the Soviet Union in 1955, millions lined the streets to greet him. India’s profile in the world had, and has, never been greater.

Meanwhile, Nehru’s India took the lead in vigorously advocating and diligently promoting global decolonisation. Virtually every emerging nation of Asia, Africa and Latin America, even Yugoslavia in Europe, followed the Nehruvian lead in proclaiming non-alignment as the core of their foreign policy. Where we started out all alone, two-thirds of the UN member-states followed in our wake. And Modi claims we were distanced from everybody?

What is Modi’s ten-year record in foreign policy? He has wrecked our relationships in the neighbourhood, putting the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in deep freeze, aggravating hostility with Pakistan, overplaying the Sheikh Hasina card in Bangladesh, and alienating Nepal by grossly, but unsuccessfully, interfering in their internal affairs, especially during their delicate process of Constitution-making. He ended 35 years of peace and tranquillity with China by whispering one thing in Xi Jinping’s ear and quite another in the US president’s. Palestinians just don’t trust us anymore and Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Modi expressed “total solidarity”, faces charges of genocide in Gaza.

On the war in Ukraine, Modi has reduced foreign policy to a bearhug with Vladimir Putin without mentioning the U word and another bearhug to Volodymyr Zelensky without mentioning the R word. Because we now lack the courage to make our stand clear, Zelensky slams India the minute Modi flies out of Kyiv. Foreign policy does not mean being everything to everybody. It means having the courage to stand up for the choice you have made. Modi lacks that courage and thinks he can make up for it by engineering overseas Indians to rally to his personality cult.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

lesson-from-bangladesh

Fri Aug 23 15:20:55 IST 2024

The ‘Monsoon Revolution’ of August 5, 2024, was not about Bangladesh’s relations with India but about the relationship of Bangladesh with Bangladeshis. Understanding this fundamental distinction will not only help us put issues arising out of the toppling of Sheikh Hasina in perspective but also learn important lessons from these dramatic developments.

Hasina’s 16 years in power were marked by rapid economic growth that belied Henry Kissinger’s description of the country at birth as a “basket case”. Per capita GDP rose to equal that of India’s. The garments sector saw Bangladesh, as a Least Developed Country (LDC), taking full advantage of duty-free access to become a major global player in the sector. It also ensured massive women’s participation in the work force. Remittances from overseas workers spiralled to dizzy levels. At the same time, the strong emphasis on education, health and women’s empowerment, raised Bangladesh on the Human Development Index to a point that overtook India.

Meanwhile, micro-finance, especially through the Grameen Bank, based on the twin perception that poor women are prudent savers and investors, as well as culturally and economically to be trusted to service and return small loans to continue accessing such finance, promoted participatory grassroots development. The private sector flourished, albeit in an atmosphere of oligarchs and “endemic corruption”. Nevertheless, the economic miracle appeared to guarantee political stability.

Since literally the minute that Generals Arora and Niazi signed the surrender documents on December 16, 1971, I have been involved with Bangladesh. So, the Kolkata Telegraph sent me on a week-long visit to Bangladesh in December 2021 to take a close look at the country on the 50th anniversary of its liberation. My friends arranged for me to meet a wide range of people, among whom was one of Sheikh Hasina’s closest advisers. He bluntly admitted, in confidence, that in sharp contrast to the “free and fair elections” that had brought her to power in 2009, there followed an uncontested “walkover” in 2014, and blatant, if unnecessary, rigging in 2019 (“unnecessary” because she would have won anyway). There was a two-fold consequence of this: first, a complete absence of “legitimacy in the eyes of the people” for her government and, second, “some 70 per cent of MPs being businessmen and the cabinet packed with tycoons”. Authoritarianism had spawned, said others, “sham elections, arbitrary government and a corrupt, overweening bureaucracy”.

There was massive popular dissatisfaction, said some, with electoral authoritarianism that had led to a “climate of fear” and the “weakening of institutions”, particularly, the “completely politicised judiciary” which resulted in “gross abuses of human rights going un-investigated” and even “judicial financial corruption at the highest level”. Another said, “We are barely a democracy,” pointing to “forced disappearances” of political opponents, secret prisons, and “extra-judicial killings”. There was muzzling of the media through the denial of government ads to critical newspapers and TV outlets, the Digital Security Act that sounded the “death knell of investigative journalism”, and the “sedition law which hangs like a sword of Damocles over our citizens”. As the “denial of democracy leads to the denial of justice”, the only answer lies, said the key Hasina adviser, in free and fair elections in 2024. That did not happen. Hence, the ‘Monsoon Revolution’.

The BJP says they have nothing to learn from all this. But almost every sentence of what I wrote about Bangladesh three years ago can be transposed to Narendra Modi’s India. The elections of 2024, which cut him down to size, were the consequence of his government being as flawed as Hasina’s and for much the same reasons. Although his agenda remains unchanged, his survival depends on his alliance partners. Should they get miffed, as they are already indicating, Modi, like Hasina, could become history.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

niti-aayog-not-transforming-india

Sat Aug 10 11:52:47 IST 2024

Is the NITI Aayog an “institute” or a “commission”? With his childish penchant for converting Hindi words into English acronyms, Narendra Modi has expanded NITI—“sound advice”—to “National Institute for Transforming India”, and then added “Aayog”, Hindi for “commission”. So, NITI Aayog remains mystified over its role. The erstwhile Planning Commission had hard financial clout. The NITI Aayog’s role is at best “advisory”, moreover, the NITI Aayog’s attempt to position itself as the principal think-tank of the government has failed because there is endless overlap between “advice” tendered by NITI and the quite separate counsels, often on the same set of subjects, by the prime minister’s economic advisory council and the chief economic advisor sitting in the finance ministry (and oftentimes the Reserve Bank of India), not to mention the private think-tanks of saffron tendency such as the India Foundation and the Vivekananda Foundation, and earlier world-renowned independent think-tanks like the Centre for Policy Research that the saffron forces are attempting to sabotage and infiltrate. Worse, these various bodies outdo each other to act as echo chambers for what the prime minister wishes to hear—for if they did not, they would soon be out on their ear.

No wonder then that the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, has called for the “NITI Aayog to be scrapped” and demanded that the Planning Commission be brought back. Seven INDIA alliance-led state governments boycotted the NITI governing council session and three other chief ministers found it not worth their time to attend. Not one CM ever stayed away from consultative meetings with the Planning Commission because it was not just a talk shop but a hard bargaining counter where states, irrespective of the political colour of their governments, were afforded a bilateral forum to negotiate their way to a mutually acceptable conclusion on “rupees, annas and pies” to undertake the development and welfare activities entrusted to them by the Constitution.

Then, the Modi government invented the “double engine” to back states governed by the BJP to the detriment of the equitable formulae that the Planning Commission used to promote fair distribution without regard to political colouring. So, instead of “cooperative federalism”, we have “authoritarian federalism”, threatening the unity and integrity of India. The non-attendance by ten CMs of the NITI governing council is an early warning signal that to save our nation we must reverse gear.

The Constitution was written under the shadow of a possible Balkanisation of the country. To prevent that from happening, authority was loaded in favour of the Centre. So, instead of declaring India a federal Republic, we became a Union of states. One deleterious consequence of this, which has become apparent only after we got Central and state governments of different hues, is that while the seventh schedule clearly divides responsibilities between Centre and states such that much of grassroots economic and human development have been entrusted to states and panchayat raj institutions, the raising and distribution of financial resources is principally the Union’s responsibility. Therefore, the Constitution established an independent finance commission to determine the states’ share of divisible national resources, but as most remunerative taxes are reserved for the Centre, states stand with a begging bowl to get their due share, resulting in centrally sponsored schemes to bridge the gap between states’ duties and the funds required to discharge them. This aggravates central domination. That is the principal reason for our abject failure in attaining “inclusive growth”, that is, spreading the fruits of development to those most in need.

Modi aims at attaining Viksit Bharat 2047 through a clutch of oligopolists. That is the wrong way of making India prosperous—for it leaves ordinary Indians lagging behind. Gandhiji weeps.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

the-ugly-indian-in-nepal

Sat Jul 27 11:11:00 IST 2024

Narendra Modi is faced in Nepal with a failure of policy as Kathmandu looks increasingly to China and turns more and more resentful of India. Indeed, the political mood in Nepal is such that it is the current state of India-Nepal relations that is the principal reason behind Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s return to office as prime minister in coalition with a party that had hitherto been regarded as our most reliable friend, the Nepali Congress led by the veteran Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Reports from Kathmandu indicate that this churning in Nepal is principally on account of the supine way in which Oli’s immediate predecessor, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, had surrendered to the virtually imperial demands made by the Modi government on Prachanda’s official visit to Delhi in June 2023. On that visit, Prachanda eschewed the opportunity to pursue Nepal’s principal concerns with Modi saying that it would have “ruin(ed) the atmosphere”. His opponents, both within the alliance he had forged to become PM and among the commentariat and opposition in parliament, deplored such appeasement of a bullying ‘big brother’.

Among the fierce reactions, the sharpest retort came from a former minister who described Prachanda and his cohort as lampasarbadis—spineless cowards, crawling when they were only asked to bend! Others said India had reduced Nepal’s sovereignty to the “third stratum”, below even the “provincial establishments” in India. Indeed, Modi’s hauteur and ill-treatment of Nepalese leaders, going back to the Modi sarkar’s economic boycott of Nepal in 2015 because they had dared proclaim a constitution for Nepal without incorporating the amendments Delhi had suggested, has led even to our staunchest friend in that country, the Nepali Congress, joining in the chorus against Prachanda’s pusillanimous failure to advance Nepal’s interests against an India that seems determined to unilaterally and even whimsically trample on them. Finally, the Nepalese are not unaware of the BJP desire to see the Republic of Nepal revert to a monarchy that had proclaimed a Hindu Rashtra in Nepal and has had intimate ancestral links with Yogi Adityanath’s ashram in Gorakhpur. Muddying the waters further is the sangh parivar’s angry rejection of Oli’s assertion that the Ayodhya of Lord Ram lies in Nepal and not India!

Principal among Nepal’s current grievances is the Modi government’s refusal to cooperate with Nepal in operationalising their Chinese-built international airports at Bhairahawa and Pokhara on the sole ground that China had helped build them. There is also burgeoning anger at India refusing to buy power from Chinese-assisted hydroelectric plants, despite China winning the contracts in international bidding.

“Hypocrisy” is what Nepalese commentators describe these prohibitions as, given the massive and growing imports and investments that India makes from China to keep its own economy chugging. There is also the simmering issue of whether the Lipulk-Limpiyadhura-Kalapani triangle belongs to India or Nepal. Moreover, the Modi government refuses to release the report of the joint India-Nepal Eminent Persons Group that reviewed the gamut of India-Nepal relations at the behest of both governments, only because the constructive recommendations made by the group in the common interest of the two countries are not in accord with the Modi government’s colonial approach to Nepal. Nepal also resents India forcing into cold storage the multilateral SAARC initiative for bilateral Indo-Pak reasons. That is a formidable agenda which requires attention at the highest level, and not, as Prachanda had done, to be kept off the table for New Delhi to feel ‘comfortable’ as he put it with Kathmandu.

It was the image of the “Ugly American” that fundamentally caused the undoing of the US in Vietnam. We should never forget that Nepali sovereignty deserves respect as it occupies the central sector of the Himalayan chain that separates both countries from China.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

are-the-brits-racist-or-are-we

Sat Jul 13 17:24:02 IST 2024

While an Indian-origin UK PM has lost his premiership, in the emerging line-up for his succession as leader of the Tory party are two ladies of Indian origin—Suella Braverman and Priti Patel—and two contenders of African heritage, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch. There appears to be only one aspirant of indubitably British origin, Tom Tugendhat.

Moreover, the House of Commons now has—hold your breath—28 elected members of Indian origin, 12 of them Sikhs and two Muslims, and 15 of Pakistan origin, including at least six Indian and six Pakistani-origin women. As many as 13 per cent of the members are from ethnic minorities. It should shame us in India where the 14 per cent Muslim minority constitute less than four per cent of our Lok Sabha and Modi’s new council of ministers—for the first time ever—contains no Muslim.

It should shame us even more when we contrast the UK’s smooth transition to multi-coloured diversity in contrast to Sushma Swaraj’s threatened tonsure of her abundant hair if we had an Italian-born PM.

Readers of my generation would recall Enoch Powell’s infamous speech in Birmingham on April 20, 1968, when he predicted that “rivers of blood” would flow in the UK if immigrants from the former Empire, now the “New Commonwealth”, and particularly from South Asia, were to flow without impediment into the “green and pleasant land” of Great Britain, especially in view of the non-discrimination clauses of the Race Relations Act. Even more alarmingly, polls showed that three quarters of all Britons agreed with him. Yet, the Conservative party dismissed Powell within 24 hours from his high-profile position as the shadow defence secretary. Rivers of blood have indeed flowed in India and Pakistan, and in East and West Africa, from where a large segment of Britain’s immigrants come, but no river of blood has flown in the UK itself.

In his 1968 speech, Powell quoted one of his constituents as saying, “In this country, in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” Now, nearly 60 years have passed since that dire prediction and the British electorate have voluntarily handed political representation to an impressive number of non-whites, ironically many from precisely the area in the Midlands that once elected Powell. He had gone on to say, “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation” to be encouraging such an influx. It amounts, he said to “watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. (Powell, who had strong India connections, didn’t seem to remember that in England, unlike India, the natives bury their dead and don’t burn them!) He went on to claim that Britons were being made “strangers in their own country”.

I have lived only a year-and-a-half in England as a university student. That was just a few years before the Powell speech. Far from being racist, my fellow-students and dons were uniformly kind and helpful. So were the general public. Years later, on a panel I shared with the renowned London-based lawyer, Sarosh Zaiwalla, he was asked whether in all his many years in England he had experienced any racist prejudice. He replied, “Never”. For while the British in colonial India did indeed include racist “white trash”, many were deeply committed to discovering our own much-neglected heritage to reveal “The Wonder That Was India”. It was imperialism that brought out the worst in them. At home, they were more gentle, more accommodating, electing Dadabhai Naoroji, Mancherjee Bhownaggree and Shapurji Saklatvala to the Commons when India was still in their grip—and now many, many more. They deserve our humble tribute.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

modi-s-chutzpah-is-his-nemesis

Sat Jun 29 18:45:38 IST 2024

When the actual election results turned the exit poll predictions topsy-turvy, we had a week of euphoria in which we thought “We, the People” had rescued democracy; curtailed authoritarianism; reined in a potential dictator; saved our Constitution; revived the institutions of democracy; finished with the misuse of investigative and enforcement agencies; ended the age of the ‘godi’ media; shown up Islamophobic communalism for the inhuman menace it is; and restored the country to fundamental decency as expressed in our fundamental rights. An emeritus professor of philosophy drew attention to the parallel between the Modi hubris and Aeschylus’ play, ‘The Persians’, which depicts the Persian emperor Xerxes “combining foolishness with arrogance” to invade Greece and finding when he is beaten back that his people “no longer curb their tongue” for “a strong yoke has been removed”.

The past fortnight has shown that Modi does not see the results that way. For him, nothing has changed. He has sworn in virtually every previous ministerial colleague, including the dreaded Amit Shah. He distributes minor portfolios to his major coalition partners and resists their requests for the position of speaker. Clearly, he has no intention to loosen his iron grip on the running of the house and the longevity of elected MPs. He gives no recognition to the plain fact that he now has to contend with a revivified opposition that is snapping at his heels in a house where his majority is “very fragile” after the “tectonic shift” caused by the elections where “space has been blown open”, as Rahul Gandhi has said.

On the ground, Kejriwal is granted bail only to have it set aside almost immediately. Despite winning his seat from jail, after eight years of continuing incarceration, Engineer Sheikh Abdul Rashid does not yet know whether he will be released on bail to take his oath of office and whether he will have to do his duties as the MP for North Kashmir from prison or as a free man. Monstrously, Arundhati Roy is charged under the draconian UAPA and threatened with imprisonment without bail for a speech made more than a decade ago. Two French journalists are “forced to leave the country” and their Overseas Citizen of India status withdrawn despite both being long married to Indian spouses. The three new criminal procedure codes, endowed with highly Sanskritised names to remove the stain of the “colonial mindset” while retaining colonial times oppression, such as “sedition”, are to be implemented without giving Parliament an opportunity to review them. The re-inducted Union Minister Giriraj Singh is not pulled up for saying he too will do nothing for his Muslim constituents because, by not voting for him, they have “weakened Sanatan (Hinduism) to bring Ghazwa-e-Hind to Bharat”. All this in just the last fortnight! Like the Bourbon monarchs, Modi has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.

That will spell Modi’s doom. What happens to national unity when delimitation issues loom following the 2026 census? Does Modi have the dexterity to accommodate stern southern warnings? Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu will stick to him as long as he serves their purpose, but their purpose is milking the Centre and retaining the loyalty of their minorities. So, what happens to fiscal devolution, cooperative federalism, and the Uniform Civil Code? No ‘One Nation, One Election’, no ‘caste census’? Will the RSS acquiesce in the abandonment of their core demands? And how will Modi deflect an attack from the rear from the RSS, for which Mohan Bhagwat has already sounded the bugle? Will there be an RSS-sponsored Gadkari take-over?

Modi once warned me in Parliament that I would soon be dumped in the bin of the bhoole-bisre (the forgotten and abandoned). Modi will soon be joining me there.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

will-modi-third-run-its-full-term

Sat Jun 15 11:11:02 IST 2024

The Narendra Modi government has a wafer-thin majority. Either of Modi’s partners, the JD(U) with 12 seats or the TDP with 16, can upset the apple cart. That was the condition of V.P. Singh’s government. It lasted 11 months. That too was the condition of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s first government in 1996. That lasted 13 days. The plug can be pulled at any time.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Modi is offering a “consensual” government. Implicitly, this acknowledges that his previous governments were authoritarian and built around a personality cult. Both defining characteristics were integral to Modi’s personality and political past. They are also the defining characteristics of the hindutva ideology he espouses. How then, short of a lobotomy, can his protestations of running a third government opposite to his previous two be taken seriously?

First, what becomes of hindutva? Shaheen Bagh has triumphed. The Preamble to the Constitution, symbol of the Muslim women’s protest, has won. “Love jihad”, “land jihad”, now even “vote jihad” thrown out of the window. No to “bulldozer” politics. No more lynching for votes; no more riots for votes; no more genocide for votes. No more demanding that secularists “go to Pakistan” (and, in my case, “take your daughters with you!”) No more appeasement of the majority. No more vote banking by demonising religious minorities. Dog whistling and innuendo out. Hate speech denounced. Hate actions even more so. What then remains of hindutva?

On the very eve of its centenary, hindutva has been stopped in its tracks. After 10 years of power-drunk majoritarianism, will Nagpur accept that the Ram Mandir is all that remains of hindutva? Will the saffron cadre acknowledge that the dismantling of democratic institutions has to stop? That the weaponisation of governance agencies can no longer be fostered? Will they quiescently accept being shorn of their wolf’s clothing?

Will the electorate further tolerate a fawning judiciary denying the principle of “bail, not jail” that has made “the process the punishment” and converted Kashmir into “an open prison”? And a complaisant Election Commission? The voter cannot hold the courts or EC to account; so, will he/she turn on the government?

Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu are not offering their indispensable support for free. They know—and Modi knows—that one tantrum and it is curtains for Modi 3.0. Theirs is a case of ‘Dil maange more’. Does Modi have the wherewithal to meet their incessant demands?

The capture of mainstream media by favoured barons has already led to viewers drifting away, and even media celebrities have. We are in the age of podcasts and YouTubers. They can’t be taken over by moneybags. They are a standing monument to fear denied. Freedom of expression has been reaffirmed. Can Modi reverse that?

And what of Modi himself? The truth is now out: Modi is a biological being. He is no instrument of divinity, as he imagines himself. His attempt to combine the roles of the prime minister and the chief priest has been mocked. His claim to being the sole source of every welfare scheme and every government initiative has been laughed out of court. His mugshot on every hoarding, every poster, every ad, every document, even Covid inoculation certificates, has been seen for what it is: narcissism and megalomania. His making this election a popularity contest on himself has been punctured. He is alone in asking, “Mirror, mirror on the wall/tell me who is fairest of them all.” Can Modi so drastically transmogrify himself? Only a psychiatrist can tell.

Which is why I foresee only two years at most for the next Lok Sabha election.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

why-bjp-is-not-contesting-in-kashmir

Fri May 31 17:40:00 IST 2024

Union Home Minister Amit Shah claims “there is no greater testament to the removal of Article 370” than the high polling percentages in the Kashmir valley. Then why is the BJP not contesting any of the three seats in the valley?

The fact is that the reading down of Article 370—the principal boast of the BJP—is the key issue in all three constituencies where the main contenders—the National Conference (NC) of the Abdullahs and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of the Muftis—are fighting it out. Article 370 is seen as the symbol of the “identity“ and “dignity” of the Valley inhabitants, as the feisty daughter of Mehbooba, Iltija, who is making her political debut, keeps emphasising. It is also seen as the guarantor of the “rights” of the Kashmiri people. Most importantly, it is seen by Kashmir’s mainstream nationalist parties as their principal shield against the separatists. The National Conference’s candidate for Srinagar, Aga Ruhullah Mehdi, a prominent Shia cleric, affirms, “For us… Article 370 was a pro-mainstream and pro-democracy argument.” That is why all candidates of the principal parties contesting, irrespective of their other differences, are committed to advocating the restoration of Article 370, however hollowed out it had become. But the BJP, for all the empty boasts of the lieutenant governor, the home minister, and the prime minister about “restoring normalcy” by diminishing insurgency and street protests, bringing in lakhs of tourists, and undertaking massive infrastructure works, is hiding behind the skirts of their “proxies”: Sajjad Lone’s People’s Conference, Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party, and Ghulam Nabi Azad’s Democratic Progressive Azad Party, at least the latter two of which are set to lose their deposits.

The problem with the BJP is that it does not understand at all the psyche of the people of Kashmir and Ladakh and not even of the people of Jammu. Their focus is on hindutva and what they choose to call “development”, but they do not recognise that “man does not live by bread alone”.

In any case, long before the outrage on August 5, 2019, J&K was far ahead of most states, especially the bastions of the BJP—Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh—on every indicator of economic and human development (such as education and health), and Central budgetary support to the state. Such largesse had not “bought” the Kashmiris either before 2019 or after, because while they are all, of course, seeking peace and personal security and getting better-off, like human beings everywhere, they also seek, like human beings everywhere, honour and respect, and value above all else their “identity”, “dignity” and “rights”. Instead of bringing balm to such wounds, the BJP has turned J&K into “an open-air prison” to instill an atmosphere of fear.

.They have also resorted to the colonial practice of “divide and rule”, most nakedly evidenced in their delimitation commission irrationally joining Anantnag, the fortress of the Mufti family, to Poonch-Rajouri in Jammu over the formidable Pir Panjal range. In my view, this violates the principle of “geographic continuity” which is enshrined in clause 3 of the Delimitation Act. But, worse, the BJP have “deepened the ethnic divide” of Pahari from Gujjar and Bakerwal by granting Paharis ST status on the very eve of the election in the face of strident Gujjar-Bakerwal protests. The National Conference have retaliated by naming Mian Altaf Ahmed, a spiritual leader revered by the Gujjars, who has thrice been an MLA and whose father and grandfather have both been elected to the state assembly, as the candidate to oppose Mehbooba. She has deplored such “peer-mureed” politics, but can she successfully oppose it?

Again, the BJP is nowhere in the picture, the final proof of their politics in J&K over Article 370 having failed.

modi-divides-and-rules

Sat May 18 11:43:48 IST 2024

As the final phases of the general elections draw to a close, an increasingly panicky Prime Minister Narendra Modi has started upping the ante on the question of reservations for Muslims, once again attempting to rebuild his majority by forcing a Hindu-Muslim divide.

If, as the BJP has long been stressing, and Modi has been underlining, religion is nowhere mentioned in the First Amendment of 1951, which brought in reservations for Other Backward Classes, it is also necessary to underline that “caste” is also nowhere mentioned in this connection. The operative word is “classes”—a point stressed by Jawaharlal Nehru moving the legislation to give effect to the recommendations of the select committee set up by Parliament. “Classes”, of course, include both castes and communities. That is why Nehru, moving the amendment on May 29, 1951, described our aim as being “to realise an egalitarian society”, given the indisputable fact and social reality that, “infinite divisions have grown up in our… social structure”. He, specifically, described these infinite divisions as relating to “the caste system or religious divisions”. The use of the words “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs) was clearly designed to address all backward groups whether of castes, or occupations, or religion.

Therefore, the Mandal Commission included a number of Muslim castes in their OBC list, as well as occupations common to Hindus and Muslims, such as butchers and barbers. Thus, right from the start, certain Muslim castes have been considered backward, the term not being regarded as exclusive to Hindu society. The issue has never been, as Modi seems to think, of whether or not Islamic theology recognises caste: Indian Muslims have always been categorised on caste lines (arzal, as the lowest). Modi implicitly recognises this when he hoots what he claims he is doing for ‘Pasmanda Muslims’. Why not reservations for them, especially as the Justices Rajindar Sachar and Ranganath Mishra commissions found that the Muslim community as a whole was almost as backward as SCs and STs and “more backward” than non-Muslim OBCs, excluding Muslims who fall in the ‘creamy layer’, as for everyone else?

The problem of including Muslim castes among OBCs has always come up against the barrier of 50 per cent being the maximum share of reservations laid down by the Supreme Court. This has proliferated the practice by states, especially the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka, of providing Muslim sub-quotas within existing OBC quotas, thereby bringing a religion dimension into the quite different question of treating OBC reservations for backward classes of Muslims as “an extension of equality” and not an “exception to the principles of equality and non-discrimination”, as explained by Faizan Mustafa, vice-chancellor, Chanakya National Law University. This has been further confirmed in a series of Supreme Court judgments such as in Balaji (1962), Royappa (1973), and State of Kerala v/s N.M. Thomas (1975), besides the more renowned case of Indra Sawhney (1992).

To overcome the 50 per cent barrier, the Congress manifesto lays down a strategy to achieve the objective, beginning with a “caste survey” to move from “estimates” to facts on the ground. This will be the necessary preliminary to moving legislation to dismantle the 50 per cent barrier and giving OBCs of all religious persuasions a level ground to work towards removing their present educational and social backwardness, while otherwise tackling economic issues of rampant poverty and unemployment.

This is the logical way forward. Modi seeks to give this a communal colour. That may have succeeded in the past elections, but the electorate are waking up to the reality that it is not the Indian Muslim or Pakistan that is the bugbear. It is their economic and social condition after a decade of the Modi sarkar that is making them wonder whether Modi’s promised “achche din” (good days) have really arrived.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

modi-s-muslim-love-hate-hugs-and-kisses-for-sultans-contempt-for-ordinary-folks

Sat May 04 11:45:45 IST 2024

I have long been intrigued by the prime minister’s desire to hug every passing sheikh and sultan and his contrasting contempt for the ordinary Indian Muslim. The contempt becomes particularly evident at election time when the audience are invited to identify the transgressors by their dress (libhaz), the numbers of their children, or as infiltrators and traitors (ghuspait/gaddaar). Where any other party leader would immediately be pulled up, the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) does not appear to apply, in the eyes of the Election Commission of India as presently constituted, to the prime minister. Secular fundamentalists like me are outraged but clearly the general electorate, especially in the Hindi heartland, are only amused by these sly innuendos. Muslims—at any rate, Indian Muslims, it seems, are fair game—but woe betide any opposition candidate or leader who dares step on what passes for “Hindu sentiment”. Then the knives are drawn (in some cases, literally) and “appeasement”-bashing comes into its own. Reinforcing this contempt for the Indian Muslim is the portrayal of Pakistani Muslims as secessionists-turned-terrorists. Thus are the Indian and Pakistani Muslim linked together in the sangh parivar imagination as the “enemy”.

And, thus, is carried forward the Savarkar-Hedgewar-Golwalkar thesis that the Muslim and the Christian can never be true Indians because while they may by birth and ancestry belong to the “pitra bhoomi’ (the fatherland) of Bharat, this land can never be their “punya bhoomi” (sacred or holy land) because their land of worship is located to the distant west of the sub-continent. Regarding Muslims as essentially invaders from outside, the race theories of Hitler and his ilk held a special appeal for the leaders of the RSS. To imported Nazi notions of “race purity”, they added the fascination for violence that B.S. Moonje brought to Nagpur from a visit to Mussolini’s fascist Italy. It gave organisational structure to Savarkar’s belief that the “Hindu discovers himself only in violence” (cf. Vinayak Chaturvedi’s defining study of hindutva).

In the eyes of hindutva bhakts, it is the ineluctable presence of a 200-million strong Muslim community in Bharat that comes in the way of the realisation of a Hindu rashtra, while the slightly larger number of Muslims in breakaway Pakistan makes impossible the realisation of a Hindu rashtra in ‘Akhand Bharat’. On the other hand, the Muslims of the Gulf region, and West Asia and North Africa in general, are in their own punya bhoomi and hence of no concern to the Hindu rashtra that the sangh parivar aims at securing in the pitra-cum-punya bhoomi of Bharat.  Hence, hugs and kisses on the cheek for the rulers of Muslim lands but subversion of identity for the Indian Muslim; demonisation as “tushtikaran” (appeasement) of measures of compassion for a wretchedly deprived minority, economically, socially and educationally, as revealed by the Justice Rajinder Sachar Commission; fierce opposition to the hijab and a personal civil code for the minorities; perversion of history leading to the avenging of real and imagined happenings in the mediaeval past; rejection of our composite culture and the syncretic heritage of our great civilisation to which all communities have contributed, more often than not in creative partnership, in language, literature, poetry, music and song, dance, painting and architecture; threats to the security of life and limb for Muslims; the bulldozer for their humble dwellings; harassment and discrimination in their everyday existence; sneers for their clothing and way of life; obstacles in their places of worship and burial grounds; all of this leading to lynching, cow-protection related vigilante violence, rape and mass murder.

So, it is not Islam or the Muslim ummah to which the BJP objects. It is just to them being here!

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

bjp-cant-scale-dravidian-wall

Sat Apr 20 11:24:24 IST 2024

Days before several states went to the polls on April 19, Prashant Kishor, the nation’s leading soothsayer, forecast that the BJP, a rookie in Tamil Nadu politics, is going to stun the nation by carrying off at least 16 of the 40 seats in TN (including one in Puducherry). On the other hand, Dayanidhi Maran, speaking for the DMK, has sneered at this suggestion, describing the BJP in TN as “a keyboard warrior” that thinks elections can be won on social media platforms and the internet without feet on the ground.

The BJP has additionally invested heavily in Narendra Modi, believing that his numerous visits to TN will more than make up for the near absence of any interest in the BJP in the past. There is also hope in the local leadership of the TN BJP president, K. Annamalai, a 40-year-old former IPS officer who is the new kid on the block. Third, there is the BJP’s alliance with the PMK, a party that claims to represent the extremely backward community of the Vanniyar, whose numbers are quite significant in the north of the state but electorally not significant. Fourth, flogging Katchatheevu, an issue resolved half a century ago. And fifth, thinking the sengol, placed by the speaker’s chair, will kindle Tamil pride. It doesn’t. It is a symbol of Brahmin domination.

How does this face up to the ruling DMK whose alliance won 38 of the 39 seats in the state (plus Puducherry) in the 2019 Lok Sabha election? “Very poorly” would be the common sense response to that question. It is astonishing that any political commentator, however eminent, could believe differently now. For one thing, while the Dravidian movement took indigenous roots since more than a century ago when the Justice Party was formed, hindutva is an alien political philosophy with little or no resonance in the state. The Justice Party challenged the domination of the Congress in the 1920s. But by the 1930s, the Dravidian movement was radicalised by Thanthai Periyar E.V. Ramasamy Naicker and taken to the streets to demand “equality” in a society dominated by a tiny percentage of Brahmins, basing themselves on religion. Logically, therefore, the movement also became atheistic. While EVR’s refusal to participate in the narrower political field enabled Rajaji to form a Congress government in 1937, once the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha received the Rajaji provincial government’s backing, EVR undertook a long march from Trichy to Madras that sparked the Dravidian refusal to accept the imposition of Hindi on the state. This also sparked a parallel movement to return to the chen Tamizh (classical Tamil) of a rich cultural past, which added to the momentum of alienation from the Sanskritic and vedic propagation of an India that excluded the Dravidian Tamils, who were also racially distinct from the Aryans of the north. How can the BJP, representing the quintessence of everything the Dravidian movement rejects, turn the tables on this bastion of Dravidian assertion?

There is also the pent-up anger at other forms of BJP imposition, such as NEET and the forthcoming delimitation, which might reduce TN seats for dramatically regulating its population growth while rewarding UP, the worst performer in family planning, by increasing its seats from 80 to 140.

Moreover, atavistic vengeance on our mediaeval history, which is at the core of hindutva, is so absent from Tamil sentiment that the Dravidian movement has no bias against Muslims. As Dayanidhi says, “DMK is 100 per cent for secularism”. The minorities are “born here. They are part of India. Hence, the Ram Mandir issue has little traction”. And as for the Gujarat model and the UP “double engine”, Dayanidhi pertinently asks if these are so successful, “Why are people from UP and Gujarat coming to Chennai to work?” Good question! Round One to INDIA.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

inequality-in-todays-india

Sat Apr 06 15:12:55 IST 2024

I happened to be a Union cabinet minister when Dr Manmohan Singh had his most spectacular achievement: GDP grew at 9.4 per cent, the highest rate ever and unbeaten since then. While the prime minister and Indian public opinion (particularly big business) were congratulating themselves on having broken the shackles of four decades of the so-called “licence-permit raj” and were eagerly anticipating double digit GDP growth to give China a run for its money, I got myself into deep trouble with the PM and the party by remarking at a meeting that 9.4 per cent GDP growth meant only that 94 per cent of Indians had grown at 0.94 per cent, while the fat cats who constitute 0.94 per cent of our population had grown by 9,400 per cent! It was clearly something of an off-colour joke at what I thought was a confidential get-together to discuss corporate linkages with panchayats, the portfolio I was handling. My remarks were leaked a few days later to the press and inevitably there was a huge rumpus leading to my being reprimanded at the highest levels in no uncertain terms.

I am, therefore, relieved (if deeply disturbed) that the World Inequality Database has revealed that three decades of liberalisation have humongously increased inequality. Between the regimes of Jawaharlal Nehru and P.V. Narasimha Rao, the share in national income of the “top 1 per cent”, which in colonial times had peaked at 21 per cent, shrank by the early 1980s to just 6 per cent. At the start of the reforms, the gap in national income share between the “top 10 per cent” and the “bottom 50 per cent” was 11 per cent (down from 16 per cent in 1951). Post reforms, it soared to 42.7 per cent in 2022, with the top 10 per cent claiming nearly 58 per cent of national income. Reforms also helped the “top 1 per cent” to more than double their national income share to nearly 23 per cent. The bottom 50 per cent now gets only 15 per cent of the pie. This is clearly in violation of the preambular pledge in the Constitution to “equality, of status and opportunity” and “justice, social, economic and political”, besides the Directive Principle in Article 38(2): “The State shall, in particular, strive to minimise the inequalities in income.” The Narendra Modi government, desperate for a Uniform Civil Code, is in blatant violation of the far more relevant Directive Principle relating to income inequality by endeavouring to maximise, not “minimise inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities”.

We may have attained the global fifth position in overall national income but are floundering at virtually the bottom on global indices that measure levels of justice in the distribution of the wealth of the nation. It was not for Adani and Ambani and others of the “suit-boot” gang that we won our freedom. Yet, in complete contrast with the goals of our Independence struggle and our constitutional injunctions, “India,” under the Modi dispensation says JNU emeritus professor, Aditya Mukherjee, “is witnessing obscene levels of inequality”, with the top 0.1 per cent capturing 9.6 per cent of national income—almost to the last decimal point what I had foretold as a minister.

While the incomes of the richie-rich have risen to stratospheric levels, there is the parallel tragedy of “stagnancy in income growth among the majority of the population” (World Inequality Database). Add to this the rampant unemployment among “casual labour”, the most deprived segment of our society, which plummeted from a share of employment of 28 per cent among men and women in 2011-12 to a dismal 23 per cent for men and a woeful 17 per cent for women in 2022-23.

In consequence, a clear nexus emerges between wealth and political power, symbolised by Ambani securing from the government the conversion of a defence airport into an international airport for 10 days to facilitate a celebrity family event. Would this ever have happened for any other Indian (other, of course, than Adani)? So long as money makes the mare go round, there can be no elimination of “inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities” which was the solemn constitution duty laid down by our founding fathers.

All of which explains why I remain an unreconstructed Nehruvian socialist.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

caa-thin-end-of-the-wedge

Sat Mar 23 14:33:06 IST 2024

With the announcement of dates for the coming general elections, the ruling establishment has suddenly found the courage to notify rules for the implementation of the nearly five-year old Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 [CAA], which had drawn the ire of the women of Shaheen Bagh and led to months-long demonstrations in Delhi, replicated all over the country, forcing the Modi government to back off from implementing it. By notifying the CAA rules on election eve, Amit Shah’s ministry has sought to overcome the setback they suffered in the winter of 2019/2020 when through prolonged day-and-night-long demonstrations in the bitter cold by poor, neglected, non-political Muslim women anchored themselves to the Preamble of the Constitution (and not the Holy Quran or the sharia) to point to the incompatibility of the CAA with India’s constitutional order. It was a brilliant strategic move that left the home ministry gasping as it challenged the standard construct of the demonstration as an Islamic movement with sectarian religious overtones. It was only the outbreak of the pandemic in mid-March 2020 that gave Shah’s ministry the opportunity to catch their breath.

The CAA was immediately contested in the Supreme Court which, after a long wait of close to half a decade on a crucial constitutional matter, has at last indicated its readiness to take up over 200 petitions that have been filed before it. And even as the issue becomes sub judice, the Modi government has notified the rules in flagrant disregard of constitutional propriety. In one reckoning, by breaking the nexus between the CAA and the National Register for Citizens (NRC) the government has negatived the apprehension of the minorities that the CAA is but a preliminary step to bringing religious compartmentalisation into our constitutional jurisprudence by explicitly excluding Muslim refugees from our neighbouring countries in an Indian law to open the constitutional path to rendering Indian Muslims as second-class citizens of our country. I do not think the independent women protestors of Shaheen Bagh are so naïve as to imagine that notifying the CAA rules before operationalising NRC amounts to removing the Indian Muslim minority from the crosshairs of this government. The overarching saffron goal remains to render Muslims as frightened hordes living on sufferance and dominated by the Hindu majority.

This is not an issue that concerns only Indian Muslims. It concerns all of us as the CAA is the first breach in a constitutional order guaranteeing “Equality”—the pledge in the Preamble—to all irrespective of religion, and the guarantee of “equal protection before the law” to “all persons” (not only “citizens”) residing “within the territory of India” (Article 14: Part III, Fundamental Rights).

Ironically, the principal contemporary humanitarian problem in our region is not the persecution of non-Muslims by the Muslim regimes of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh (the three countries covered by the CAA) but of Muslims in their own countries at the hands of both non-Islamic and Islamic regimes. The most looming of these issues are the Rohingya Muslims suffering genocidal murder and mayhem at the hands of Myanmar’s Buddhist rulers; Muslim minorities (Shia, Hazara, Ahmadiyya) battling jihadi Sunni Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Uighur Muslims threatened with cultural genocide in avowedly atheistic communist China. Besides, Sri Lankan Tamils (Hindu, Christian, Muslim) facing Buddhist racio-religious extremism in confrontation with dominant elements of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority. If the CAA were really being driven by the humanitarian call of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, it would have addressed itself to these persecuted minorities.

Instead, the CAA picks on a virtual non-issue only to propagate its hindutva political agenda and add to its hindutva vote-bank in an election year. What cynical, opportunistic hypocrisy!

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

north-south-divide-is-growing

Sat Mar 09 11:24:28 IST 2024

The prime minister reminds me of the Tamil parable of the man who pinched the baby to make it cry, and then rocked the cradle to calm it down. He first creates a north-south divide by putting in place fiscal structures that favour the north and discriminate against the south, then denounces the opposition in Parliament for dividing north from south. He then sets out on a tour of southern Indian states to mollify the outraged people and has the gall to claim in Tamil Nadu, where his party is a non-entity, that the state is on “the cusp of a historical political change” that will bring it into the BJP net.

We would have long ago become the fifth largest global economy if the north had matched the south’s rates of economic growth. And our per capita income levels would be much higher than the global low at which we stagnate if the north had controlled its population growth and undertaken human resource development as effectively as the south, particularly Tamil Nadu, has done. The expatriate community of little Kerala contributes a disproportionately high share of remittances that have raised our nation’s foreign exchange reserves to over $600 billion. And it is the IT crowd from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh that dominates the Indian contribution to this fast-growing premier sector in the US and Europe, reflected in remittances to their home states. And, of course, the capital of Karnataka, Bengaluru, is the shining hub of our pioneering position in information technology and the export of services which drives our impressive foreign exchange earnings, while Tamil Nadu is the manufacturing hub besides being the nation’s granary.

Yet, it is principally these states of the south that are being severely discriminated against when it comes to raising national tax revenues and then distributing their share of the divisible pool to the states. Praveen Chakravarty, the top data analyst of the Congress, has shown that the taxpayer in states like TN and Kerala averages Rs20,000 yearly in contributing to the national tax kitty, but the average contribution of the Bihar taxpayer is a measly Rs4,500. And while “the average person in Bihar, UP or Madhya Pradesh gets back Rs260 for every Rs100 paid in taxes, the average Kannadiga gets back only Rs40”.

Is this fair? Does it not amount to fiscal punishment for outstanding economic performance? Does it surprise you that virtually the entire Karnataka cabinet fetched up in Delhi for an unprecedented demonstration to protest such discrimination? Or the statements emanating almost daily from other southern chief ministers?

It is the Modi government that has created this lop-sided fiscal structure. In 2014, it came into office just when the 14th Finance Commission submitted its report recommending that the states’ share of “the divisible pool” be raised from 32 per cent to a whopping 41 per cent. It presaged, everyone thought, the onset of genuine “cooperative federalism” in fiscal relations between the Centre and the states. But then, as pointed out by K.M. Chandrasekhar, Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet secretary, the Modi government perverted the process by resorting to “cesses and surcharges that do not have to be shared with the states”. They also ensured that two-thirds of the increase in states’ share came from adding, for the first time ever, plan expenditure to non-plan expenditure in measuring the states’ share. And sharply increasing the states’ share of financing centrally sponsored schemes. It is this trompe l’oeil (illusory trick) that has been passed off as implementing the 14th FC’s revolutionary recommendation.

“Cooperative federalism” has thus been rendered a farce, played out at the cost of all states but particularly the faster growing, better performing southern states, none of which is run by a “double engine sarkar”!

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

pak-army-defeated-again

Sat Feb 24 10:56:57 IST 2024

It is a given among our Pakistan experts that elections or no elections, the only winner is the Pakistan army for even a democratically elected civilian government is soon brought to heel by the faujis. And so, the conventional wisdom goes, should a political government go out of line, the army will bring it down. It will even hang the incumbent civilian prime minister as witness the extra-judicial murder of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

I always doubted the logic of this argument. Which is why five years ago I attributed Imran Khan’s massive win at least as much to his immense personal popularity as to the alleged backing he received from the Pakistan army. It seemed to me more as if the army were riding his wave than getting their puppet elected over the will of the people. That the army believed the Pak election of five years ago was their doing, I have no doubt. After all their media (and, to the extent it matters, our own) were proclaiming the generals as the real power behind Imran’s spectacular win. For a year or two into Imran’s regime, it seemed the standard view of Pakistan’s democracy as a farce enacted by their armed forces might indeed be true, but as the Americans moved out of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s role as a strategic American asset diminished before disappearing altogether, Imran started hewing his own path without orders from, or consultation with, the medal wearers. Differences reached such a point that Imran’s supporters actually attacked the home of the corps commander in Rawalpindi. The army moved in swiftly and had Imran’s government not only dismissed but Imran himself put in prison. His principal political opponent, Nawaz Shariff, was encouraged to return to Pakistan with immunity from further prosecution despite having been driven into forced exile on these very grounds by the same forces now welcoming him back. It seemed the army playbook was again open, and Imran would suffer persecution at the hands of those who had been pleased to back his electoral bid five years ago.

While Imran was imprisoned, effectively for life with the judiciary doing the army’s bidding, his party was dissolved, his symbol—the cricket bat which he had carried to victory for Pakistan so often—was taken away from him, and none of his supporters were permitted to stand in the February 2024 general elections except as independent candidates with individual election symbols that differed from seat to seat. They were also deprived of the time required to familiarise the electorate with their new symbols and could claim no title in their individual campaigns to their party’s name. The army sat back smugly to view the outcome of their exertions.

I happened to be in Lahore on polling day. Peace and tranquility reigned. Patient queues formed at polling booths. There were virtually no incidents of violence. It was generally believed that the populace was resigned to its traditional place as the silent spectators of manoeuvres in high places to deny them their true voice. Results were expected to flow in within hours of the closing of the polls. Instead, to everyone’s astonishment, counting went on through the night giving trends that betrayed the army’s expectations. Independents in their hordes were surging forward. The moral victory was the people’s voice. Imran-backed independents scored a century. Nawaz was left trailing at 30 per cent less seats; Zardari-Bhutto got less than half Imran’s score. The real loser was the army.

A government without Imran’s party may indeed be formed, but February 8, 2024, will be chalked up as the historic day on which the people of Pakistan defeated their army.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

isnt-the-ram-temple-in-ayodhya-a-victory-for-jinnah

Fri Feb 09 14:39:08 IST 2024

Who is the big winner from the inauguration of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya on January 22? The hindutvist PM, of course. Yet, is not the bigger winner Muhammad Ali Jinnah? For we are now an avowed ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and Jinnah always maintained that whatever its pretensions to secularism, independent India was in fact a ‘Hindu Raj’.

Gandhi sought to counter such a thesis by making Hindu-Muslim unity the fulcrum around which an independent Indian nation-state would be spun. In spiritual terms, this emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity was expressed in the ineluctable belief that different religions are but different paths that lead to the same Truth. In political terms, Gandhi made Hindu-Muslim unity the leitmotif of the freedom movement, beginning with merging the demand for the restoration of the Khilafat with his non-violent civil disobedience satyagraha. In his personal life, his close associates included the Ali brothers, Dr M.A. Ansari, Dr Zakir Hussain and, above all, Maulana Azad. On the Dandi March, he stayed the last night before picking up a fistful of salt with a Muslim host and nominated Abbas Tyabji to lead the satyagraha in the event of his arrest. Above all, it was his designating Jawaharlal Nehru as his true successor that demonstrated his unwavering conviction that independent India, whether partitioned or not, could only be true to itself and its heritage by refusing to be a sectarian state. To this, Nehru added the coda that the state would have no religion. Now we have a prime minister who has displaced the four Shankaracharyas to emerge as the chief Hindu priest.

Nehru distilled the essential truth of the evolution of Indic civilisation as being inscribed on “ancient palimpsests” that are placed one upon the other without quite obscuring previous texts. From that arose a process of absorption, assimilation and synthesis that transformed military conquests into a composite heritage that drew the best from every source, victor or vanquished.

Moreover, it was precisely over the period of the Delhi sultanate (1192-1526) that the Bhakti movement (and its Muslim counterpart, Sufism) got under way. It was over six centuries of Sultanate and Mughal rule (1526-1858) that Ramanujacharya and Swami Ramanand, Sant Tukaram and Krishna Chaitanya, Sankardev and Ravi Das, Kabir and Surdas and Mira, and then the ten gurus of Sikhism defined bhakti as the most popular form of religion. Indeed, Acharya Goswami Tulsidas began his famed “Ramcharitmanas” in 1574 in Ayodhya in the very shadow of the Babri Masjid built in 1528, without once mentioning the destruction of any Ram temple. Now we have the vice president informing the JNU convocation that the “pain of 500 years has ended” with the inauguration of the Ram Temple. Yet, the biggest Ram bhakt of them all, Mahatma Gandhi, never felt that “pain”. He never mentioned the Babri Masjid and unlike the hindutvists celebrating what the Supreme Court has described as the “egregious violation of the law” in violently bringing down the masjid, actually ensured that all mosques and shrines of the Muslim community in Delhi were returned to the Muslims when, at partition, Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan started occupying them. Hence, argued Nehru, while Pakistan could become an “Islamic nation” if it wished, India would not follow suit by becoming a “Hindu nation”. It would remain “secular”. B.R. Ambedkar agreed and the nation concurred. At least till 2014.

What, after all, is “secularism”? At its most basic, it is the right of Indian Muslims to remain Muslim with the same constitutional and legal rights as Indians of other faiths. Now, under the assault of Hindutva authoritarianism and majoritarianism, that national consensus on a secular India is being radically transformed—in the direction that Jinnah had affirmed it would.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

what-makes-mohamed-muizzu-so-angry

Sat Jan 27 11:09:46 IST 2024

On November 3, 1988, a group of well-armed mercenaries recruited by dissident Maldivian expatriates disembarked in Male, capital of the Maldives, and within a few hours succeeded in capturing most government buildings, including the presidential palace, and holding hundreds of civilians and one government minister hostage. The president, Abdul Gayoom, escaped their clutches and appealed to India for help. Rajiv Gandhi immediately sent in Air Force planes to undertake reconnaissance and thereafter landed Army personnel who quickly took control of the situation and restored the Maldives to its elected president who had won his third term with a majority of 95 per cent. Gayoom expressed his “deep gratitude” to India for bringing the Maldives back to freedom and democracy. Rajiv Gandhi informed the leaders of the opposition of the action taken and next day made a statement in the Lok Sabha explaining our policy and announcing that the withdrawal of Indian troops would begin the same day, leaving behind only a small contingent for “mopping up” operations. He emphasised that the Indian armed forces had been called in only at the instance of the Maldives itself whom he described as “one of our closest and friendliest neighbours”, to whose rescue we came because of “our commitment to peace and stability in our region” and to demonstrate “our belief that the countries of the region can resolve their problems in a spirit of friendship and cooperation, free of outside influence”. India was seen as a benevolent and friendly presence in South Asia.

With the advent of the Modi government, all that has changed. India is now seen as an interfering bully. And Muizzu has been elected as president on his campaign slogan, “India Out”! He has demanded the removal by March 15 of the 77 [Indian] Army personnel and 12 military medical officers as well as the return of the helicopters and Dornier aircraft we have loaned the Maldives in the name of surveillance and undertaking hydrological surveys. He has also visited China and forged a “strategic” partnership with them. It is India out and China in, with Pakistan slavering on the sidelines. What has transformed the India-Maldives relationship since the Modi-Jaishankar team came to office?

Several factors, foremost among them the discrimination against, and hounding of, the Muslim community that ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is inflicting on our largest minority. The Maldives is 100 per cent Muslim. Second, India’s blocking of SAARC which the Maldivians (and much of South Asia) regard as the sole instrument for binding South Asia closer together. Third, India blindly opposing the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative which the Maldives see as their economic lifeline. Fourth, the attempts by the sangh parivar’s drumbeaters to promote Lakshadweep as an alternative tourist destination to the Maldives, little realising that tourism which separates the bikini from the burkha in tourist atolls is the basic reason for the Maldives far outwitting Lakshadweep as an international high-end tourism spot. Fifth, the contrary efforts by a BJP-appointed administrator, Praful Patel, to impose Hindu cultural and dietary values on Lakshadweep-Minicoy whose inhabitants are as one hundred per cent Islamic as the Maldives. Sixth, insensitivity toward the linguistic bonds between Minicoy and the Maldives where the common language is Divehi. While Rajiv Gandhi carried schoolbooks in Divehi as his gifts to the Maldivian people, the Modi-Jaishankar duo have nothing to offer but arrogance. Indeed, it is the policy of projecting the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ of Bharat as the hegemonic South Asian power by right and India as the world’s Vishwaguru that has caused the apple cart to tumble over. Abh samjhe ki Muizzu ko gussa kyon aata hai [Now you understand why Muizzu gets angry]?

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

when-the-rebuilt-somnath-temple-was-inaugurated

Sat Jan 13 11:04:11 IST 2024

As the leaders of the INDIA alliance mull over the invitations they have received to the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, this column makes bold to remind them of a similar occasion in 1951 when the rebuilt Somnath Temple was inaugurated.

The story begins with the integration of Junagadh state with the Indian Union in November 1947. It was immediately announced on the spot that the temple at Somnath, located within the state, which had been destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century, would be rebuilt. The Union cabinet was seized of the issue in December 1947 and the minutes recorded that it had been agreed that the reconstruction of the Somnath Temple would be undertaken at state expense. When Nehru was informed of this, he was furious. Denying that any such decision had been taken, he had the minutes altered accordingly and ordered K.M. Munshi, his minister of works and housing and the most determined proponent of the project, that a secular country could not possibly undertake such an act of historical revenge funded by the treasury. Asked whether, in that case, there would be any objection to finding the means to do so from private sources, Nehru agreed that so long as the state was not involved, there could be no objection to such a private initiative.

Munshi, backed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, then set about raising funds through crowd funding and massive donations from some industrialists. By 1950, enough had been collected to begin the reconstruction of the temple. This too was completed by 1951 and the organisers were all set for a grand inauguration when a further complication arose. They wanted the president, Dr Rajendra Prasad, to be present. Prasad was keen to go. Nehru, totally alarmed at this wanton display of state patronage to a private religious function, convened a cabinet meeting that passed a resolution requesting the president not to go as this would be violative of the fundamental principle of our constitutional democracy that the state has no religion.

When the president insisted on going, the cabinet again advised him, in the interests of preserving a strict line between personal religion and state action, not to go. This stymied the president as the Constitution specified that the president could return for reconsideration any decision of the cabinet but not if it were reiterated.

Prasad then enquired whether he could go in his personal capacity. Nehru’s view was that he was free to do what he wished as a private citizen but not as one holding the highest constitutional position in the land. Which meant that neither protocol nor security could be provided to Prasad at Somnath. At this point, Morarji Desai, home minister in Bombay, came up with an alternative. The Bombay Province Fairs and Melas Act provided that it was the state‘s responsibility to ensure law and order at fairs. As such, this act could be tweaked to provide the president, albeit in his personal capacity, with the protection he needed. The organisers would look after protocol. Thus, the separation of the state from religion was preserved but could not be portrayed as anything but vengeance on history and holding our largest minority responsible for whatever their co-religionists might have done a millennia ago. This to Nehru was anathema.

On emerging from the challenge to his secularism from within, Nehru, on Gandhi Jayanti, 1951, gave the nation his understanding of secular activism: “If anyone raises his hand against another in the name of religion, I will fight him till the last breath of my life, whether from within the government or outside.” Thus, was laid the foundations of secular India.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

restoring-dignity-to-parliamentary-proceedings

Fri Dec 29 14:47:22 IST 2023

While accepting from the Rashtrapati the outstanding parliamentarian award for 2006, I publicly pledged never again to participate in the disruption of parliamentary proceedings. Through approximately my first decade in the Lok Sabha (1991-2001, with some interruptions) I had served in a house where debate was the norm and disruption the exception. In the period of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s premiership (1999-2004), when the Congress was in opposition, dignity, decorum and discussion began giving way to frequent disruption of proceedings. Our then chief whip, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, was the guiding light for such unparliamentary behaviour but he was backed to the hilt by opposition MPs. Entering the well of the house, carrying placards into Parliament to catch TV’s eye, and demonstrating at the foot of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue gradually displaced sober debate as the preferred mode of protesting government’s policies, thought and action. This brought no public opprobrium on the Congress as we succeeded in winning the 2004 general elections and becoming the ruling party for all of a decade (2004-2014).

The lesson the BJP, in opposition during that decade, seems to have learned is that demonstration, and not discussion, is the way back to power. During the decade of UPA rule, the BJP outclassed the previous Congress record of expressing dissent through demonstration. Both Somnath Chatterjee, presiding over the lower house, and Hamid Ansari, presiding over the upper house, begged, scolded, and reprimanded parliamentarians for boorish behaviour designed to close down proceedings.

With both halves of the house eschewing debate in favour of disruption, India, that is Bharat, has rapidly descended to the nadir now reached. Is there a way out? I commend the suggestion proposed by Chakshu Roy of PRS Legislative Research in a newspaper: instead of the day’s agenda being set by the government for the entire week, bar the two-and-a-half hours set aside on Friday afternoons for private members‘ business, specific days of the sitting be reserved for opposition business. I would add that the house then sit for at least 180 days in the year to give both sides adequate space and opportunity to voice their concerns. That might, just might, render Parliament less dysfunctional.

Notwithstanding such a systemic response to the current establishment view of treating “disruptions as a disciplinary problem” that has led to the suspension of virtually all opposition MPs, it seems to me that the fundamental problem remains of few MPs being given adequate time to express their views whereas demonstrations give all concerned MPs the opportunity to participate in the proceedings on an equal footing. Also, while a good speech requires careful preparation, disruption requires no preparation at all! How does one tackle that psychological issue? Only by restoring dignity to parliamentary proceedings.

In the earliest Lok Sabhas and Rajya Sabhas, coinciding with Jawaharlal Nehru’s premiership, parliamentary proceedings went smoothly, with the press carefully reporting summaries of the main arguments made, so that notorious disrupters like Mani Ram Bagri were decried. This was essentially because Nehru made a point of frequently attending Parliament, particularly when he and his government were under attack.

Indeed, on my first visit to Parliament in 1960, I watched bewitched as Comrade Dange lit into Nehru for dismissing the communist government in Kerala. The house and the prime minister heard him out without any interruption. The current prime minister devalues Parliament by almost never being in the house and then leaning on presiding officers to be particularly harsh on the opposition and restrained on his own MPs. That is the current crux of the problem.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

whats-similar-between-hindutva-and-zionism

Fri Dec 15 18:11:42 IST 2023

Attending a conference in Johannesburg on solidarity with Palestine, I said, “Let me begin by clarifying that I am not here on behalf of my government….” Thunderous applause greeted that opening line. It reflected the extent to which the “Arab street” has been grievously alienated by Narendra Modi’s declaration of “total solidarity” with Israel, a 180-degree turn from our rock-solid stand with the Palestinians for most of the past century.

To understand the Arab shock, we need to go back to the view that Mahatma Gandhi expressed in 1938 even as the question of Jewish settlement in Palestinian lands began to assume proportions that threatened the very lives and livelihood of the indigenous Palestinian people and even their existence in their traditional homeland. Gandhiji wrote in his magazine Harijan (November 26, 1938) with reference to the racial and religious discrimination the Jews had faced for millennia and the vicious pogroms in Europe, east and west, climaxed by Hitler’s “final solution”—the liquidation of the entire community—that, “My sympathies are all with the Jews, but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me….They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart.” He formulated his basic position in a famous aphorism: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England to the English and France to the French.”

Unsurprisingly, therefore, India, under Jawaharlal Nehru, still suffering the pain of the partition, should have been one of the few countries to vote in the UN in November 1947 against the partition of Palestine. Notwithstanding the onset of the Cold War, the proposal to partition Palestine had brought the Soviet bloc together with the US-led bloc of white Christian nations to atone for their centuries of sins against the Jews by pushing the Jewish issue out their domain and into the Arab heartland. Given that the Jews in Europe had been safe and privileged only during the 700 years (711-1492 CE) of Muslim rule in Andalusia—present-day Spain and Portugal—Gandhi’s advice was the only one that could have led to the Jews and Arabs living together in harmony in a joint homeland. Echoing this view were the two Jewish rabbis attending the Johannesburg conference on behalf of “Jews against Zionism”.

The “one-state” solution was championed by Gandhi’s favourite disciple, Nehru, as prime minister. When this was not accepted, the UN proposed an alternative “two-state” solution in 1967. It has been on the table for the last half-century, but Israel is adamant on ridding themselves of, or subordinating to second-class citizenship, the Arab residents of Palestine.

Modi has reversed the long-held Indian position principally because hindutva is premised on same parameters as Zionism: hostility to Islam. Zionism is not Judaism even as hindutva is not Hinduism. Modi, as an avid hindutvist, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as an avid Zionist, are as similar as two peas in a pod because, as Christophe Jaffrelot points out, “Hindu nationalism and Zionism are rooted in a long history of hindutva’s admiration of Zionist ethno-nationalism.” Jaffrelot adds that this is “possibly because both have found a common enemy in their country’s largest religious minority.” I would only change “possibly” to “certainly”. For, as V.D. Savarkar had written from a diametrically opposite angle to Gandhi’s, “If Palestine becomes a Jewish state, it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” Little wonder then that Modi stands in solidarity with Netanyahu.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

india-alliance-should-get-its-act-together

Sat Dec 02 11:44:49 IST 2023

As the results of the five assembly elections taking place will be available to the reader at just about the same time as this column, it makes little sense to speculate on the outcome.

The fact is that time and again, especially since 2003, it has been shown that these five assembly elections, always held on the eve of the general elections, are not the heats for the final to be run a few months hence. No one learned this lesson more bitterly than Atal Bihari Vajpayee who, on the basis of these elections won handsomely by the BJP in 2003, decided to advance the Lok Sabha poll by six months—and suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a Congress-led opposition that came together by circumstance more than design at virtually the last moment. Apart from a determination to oust the BJP from the Centre, there was little or nothing by way of seat-sharing and no single manifesto. The common minimum programme came after, not before, the post-election formation of the United Progressive Alliance.

This shows that for all the handwringing over the INDIA alliance not having faced this round of assembly elections with any element of joint purpose, there is still plenty of time for the alliance to show its composite face. However, it would be best to not attempt a repeat of the 2004 jugaad but embark on defeating the BJP in a more scientific manner.

The fundamentals are already clear. In 2014 and even more so in 2019, the BJP won a formidable victory, not because a majority voted them in but because the majority vote (of around 69 per cent in 2014 and about 63 per cent in 2019) was hopelessly fractionated.

This shows that “getting their act together” is the principal task before the INDIA alliance. With Sonia Gandhi present in Mumbai (she was not there in Patna), they were able to give themselves a name and set up committees to prepare for one-on-one contests in as many seats as possible, as well as to outline an agenda to present to the voter. This was not for the assembly elections but only for the national elections as they did not have in the five state assemblies the common stake they definitely have in the outcome of the next general elections. As such, with the assembly elections out of the way, the time has come to give teeth to the alliance.

“Giving teeth” is an exercise in both arithmetic and chemistry. The arithmetic lies in coming to mutual agreement on which seats are going to be allotted to which member of the INDIA alliance to forge the largest possible number of one-on-one contests with the BJP in as many seats as possible. This definitely does not mean maximal agreement. Even 300 seats in states where the BJP either won marginally or won preponderantly—essentially the Hindi-speaking Gangetic basin from Gangotri to the Sunderbans—will place on its head the arithmetic of the BJP’s overwhelming victory in the two previous national polls. But, in and of itself, arithmetic alone won’t do. The favourable maths should also spark a chemical reaction that will alter voter perceptions of the prospects for themselves and the INDIA grouping over the next five years. Some of the elements of such a promising joint outlook have already become clear in the present round of polls. There are pointers, too, to what might hold even greater appeal in the near future. Putting all these together is INDIA’s next task—and please pardon the pun, for it is also Bharat’s next task.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

just-as-yuval-noah-harari-had-envisioned

Sat Nov 18 11:13:36 IST 2023

Yuval Noah Harari has emerged as one of the 21st century’s most recognised public intellectuals. In the midst of the Israel-Palestine war in Gaza, it is useful to revisit his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, published in 2018.

He writes that ‘terrorism’ is a “strategy almost always adopted by very weak parties who cannot inflict much material damage on their enemies”. They resort to terror because spreading “fear is their main story”. Most important of all, “There is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.” He goes on to say that terrorists calculate that when the “enraged enemy uses his massive strength against them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create”. He further underlines, “Provoking the enemy to action without eliminating any of his weapons or options is an act of desperation taken only when there is no option.”

Although in 2018, when the book was published, Harari, like most Israelis, took virtually no note of Hamas (there is only one passing mention of Hamas at p.173), as he, like most Israelis, was totally complacent that Israel’s military and intelligence had the Palestinians completely cowed, his extraordinarily accurate perception of “desperation” leaving the oppressed with “little choice” but resort to foredoomed violence is that “since they are very weak, and have no other military option, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain”. That is why Hamas unleashed its limited stock of missiles in virtually one go, then broke through the Israeli barricades to capture about 200 hostages to bargain for the release of their own men and women—some 2,000 of them locked in Israeli jails.

They knew, of course, that Israel would retaliate—and retaliate inhumanely, viciously, and disproportionately. As Harari had predicted, “Fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact.” So that, “Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stance and the balance of power changes.” For, again as Harari says, “Terrorism is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage.”

There can be no peace without justice. And it is justice of which the Palestinians have been deprived. For 75 years, Israel has been driving Palestinians out of their millennial homeland. To do this, it was Israel that introduced terrorism to West Asia. Organs like Irgun, Palmach and the Stern Gang secured independent Israel. At least two of their leading men became PMs of Israel: Yigal Allon and Menachem Begin.

Yasser Arafat, in retaliation, set up the Palestine Liberation Organization, but, after violence failed, sent his team for secret negotiations in Oslo. It led to the accord that brought Arafat back from Tunis to Gaza City but instead of a Palestinian state got only panchayati raj in the Gaza Strip, solving nothing. In consequence, Hamas won a free and fair election over the PLO. Ironically, it was Israel that funded Hamas to divide the Palestinian resistance. Now Hamas has shown its true mettle to morally defeat Benjamin Netanyahu, exactly in the manner predicted by Harari. Harari even foresees this when he links “Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi and Netanyahu” (p. 179) as peas sprouting from the same pod.

Hamas will fight and Israel will retaliate until and unless the Palestinian resistance turns Gandhian and shakes the world’s conscience as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela did by basing their liberation movements on relentless, determined non-violent resistance.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

our-sporting-icons-are-found-by-chance

Sat Nov 04 11:05:43 IST 2023

As a former Union minister of sports (2006-08), I am deeply distressed to hear of India’s bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games. I witnessed with my own eyes the ghastly corruption that the much smaller Commonwealth Games engendered; the false promises and outright lies that made it possible for the Games to be awarded to India; the humungous expenditure, estimated at Rs60,000 crore by well-informed observers; the giddy egotism of those running the organising committee; the mess they made of it; the ill-repute that India won internationally from all the shenanigans; and the consequential termination of the outstanding political career of the chief minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit and the less regrettable ending of the career of the principal heavyweight, Suresh Kalmadi. It was also the Commonwealth Games that signalled the beginning of the end of the Manmohan Singh government. Fortunately, for me, I opted out by begging to be relieved of this ministerial post before irretrievably staining my reputation.

I feared this bid was in the offing when the prime minister, congratulating the 100 or so medal winners in the Asian Games, announced that this showed India had become “a sporting nation”. It has not. As one of our most impressive international gold medal winners, the champ shooter Abhinav Bindra, put it, “If we as a nation are going to embrace sport”, we cannot look at it through “just one prism: winning medals”. We need, above all, to devise ways and means of enabling our children and youth to have easy and affordable access to sports facilities in every panchayat and every mohalla of our vast country. The Tamil Nadu government, back in Karunanidhi’s day, had demonstrated how as many as seven different games and sports can be taught and played in a single acre of land. That will never happen countrywide so long as the Union government prioritises the meretricious hosting of international games events over spending even a fraction of the munificent amounts involved in starting playgrounds and appointing coaches in every one of our 2.6 lakh village panchayats and uncounted lakhs of urban bastis and mohallas. That is where the sporting talent of India lies hidden. What talent we are now finding is almost accidental. Our sporting icons are found by chance, not by systematic scientific search for talent over a wide spectrum of sports in every nook and corner of our country, and then assiduously training and investing in them till they emerge as world champions.

If we invest enormous resources in becoming a “sports-hosting” nation, the ones who suffer the most would be our children and youth who could well use that humungous expenditure to truly use “the power of sports to take it to communities and build character through the medium of sports,” as Bindra so tellingly puts it.

PM Modi does not seem to have seen the irony of his hosting the Olympics on the very centenary of Adolf Hitler having hosted the Berlin Olympics in 1936. American journalist William Shirer said, “No previous games had seen such a spectacular organisation nor such a lavish display of entertainment… Goring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors…(the) “Italian Night” gathered more than a thousand guests in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights”. You can bet that is the PM’s aim. British historian Alan Bullock said, “Germany’s new masters entertained with a splendour that rivalled the displays of the tsars of Russia”. To go by the sheer ostentation of G20, we can be sure our government will match the tsars display for display. That is the object of the bid. We, as a nation, would be foolish to fall for it.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

no-peace-possible-without-justice-to-persecuted-palestinians

Sat Oct 21 13:14:32 IST 2023

As Benyamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi are cut from the same majoritarian-authoritarian cloth, it is hardly surprising that Modi has overturned decades of India’s Palestine policy to affirm total solidarity with Israel in the face of Hamas reviving the Palestinian resistance. And it has taken the ministry of external affairs nearly a week to restore a faint measure of balance by issuing an anodyne statement aimed at appeasing outraged Arab sentiment.

Our Palestine policy has been fundamentally founded on Mahatma Gandhi’s famous observation in 1938: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs as England belongs to the English and France to the French.” While Britain dilly-dallied over relinquishing its League of Nations mandate over Palestine, the Zionists, through a host of organisations—Haganah, Lehi, and above all, Irgun—introduced terrorism to Palestine, laying mines and sparking explosions; shooting dead numerous British policemen and army personnel; assassinating the UN mediator, Count Bernadotte; blowing up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, and mercilessly murdering countless Palestinians. How ironic that the Israelis now complain of Arab “terrorism”.

The principal plank of Zionist policy has been to drive out the Palestinians from their homesteads and relentlessly implement state discrimination against those who remain. Horrified at the treatment being meted out to the Palestinians, a leading Zionist philosopher, Martin Buber, as far back as 1950, condemned Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. To understand the import of Buber’s condemnation, readers need to be reminded that he was the Rabindranath Tagore of the Zionist movement and had been expressly sent to India in the late 1930s to persuade Mahatma Gandhiji to view the Zionist cause more favourably. Gandhi, however, stuck to his position that while indeed the Jews were an admirable people who had suffered centuries of persecution at Christian hands in Europe, Europe could not compensate them for their terrible misfortunes at Hitler’s hands by taking away from Arabs the land that indubitably belonged to the Palestinians. The Zionists retorted that there were no such people as the Palestinians and that, therefore, “a people without land were entitled to a land without people”. Thus did Zionism seek to efface millennia of existential Arab reality. No wonder the Palestinians refer to the creation of Israel as Al Nakba, the Catastrophe.

There can be no peace between Israel and Palestine without justice to the persecuted Palestinian people. There was a flicker of hope when the UN in 1967 adopted the “land for peace” resolution that envisaged a “two-state” solution—Israel and a Palestine state living next to each other in harmony. But Israel has consistently refused to countenance a sovereign state for the poor Palestinians. It never even sincerely implemented the Oslo Accord with Yasser Arafat, or the White House Rose Garden understanding brokered in 1993 by US President Bill Clinton. Indeed, Israel, particularly under Netanyahu, has gone further and created heavily fortified (and illegal) Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The resistance has, therefore, shifted to the Gaza Strip where Hamas has secured total dominance and continues to defy Israel in sharp contrast to the bullied and cowed down Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank.

India took all this into account in determining its Palestine policy. Now, Modi has upset the apple cart, leaving a bewildered MEA to somehow pick up the pieces. Perhaps they should first begin by getting our leading West Asia expert, Talmiz Ahmed, ex-IFS, to tutor our prime minister in the rudiments of the region’s history in, perhaps, the vain hope that it will kindle a little compassion in Modi’s stony heart.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

learnings-from-nam-1983

Sat Oct 07 10:56:23 IST 2023

Readers might recall Rudyard Kipling’s famed poem Recessional that he wrote for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebrations: “The tumult and the shouting dies/the captains and the kings depart/still stands thine ancient sacrifice/a humble and a contrite heart.”

Now that “the tumult and the shouting” over the G20 summit has “died” down, and “the captains and the kings” have departed Delhi, it is time for the Modi government to show some signs of being “humble” and “contrite”. Yet, all we have seen is empty boasting and vain arrogance. I cannot but contrast the NAM summit of March 1983 and the G20 summit 40 years later.

Six months before the seventh non-aligned summit was due to be held in Baghdad, NAM member-countries decided against going to Baghdad and requested Delhi to host the summit. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi agreed. Natwar Singh was designated secretary-general and I was named the conference spokesman. Thus, I had a ringside seat to both the horrendous logistical problems to overcome in a mere 180 days, besides familiarising myself with all the controversies—particularly the Kampuchea question, which were dividing the movement—to conduct press briefings.

Whereas India that is Bharat had years and years to prepare for the G20 Summit, we had only six months for NAM in 1983. Moreover, against about 40 delegations who came in September 2023, arrangements had to be made 40 years ago within an extremely narrow time frame to accommodate and cater to the security and other requirements of 99 heads of state/government, and 40 guests and observers. And whereas the Modi summit cost the nation over an estimated Rs4,000 crore, Hamid Ansari, as chief of protocol, spent a tenth of that amount looking after 100 more delegations and was awarded the Padma Bhushan for his outstanding performance. And as all of us know, went on to serve in two successive terms as vice-president of India (that is Bharat). And he got both distinctions without having to hide the shame of our poverty behind green draping. None of Modi’s guests were fooled.

As to the outcome, Ukraine was to the G20 summit what Kampuchea was to the NAM summit. And where Indira Gandhi secured the highest common factor for the conference consensus on Kampuchea, Modi only got way with the lowest common denominator on Ukraine. For whereas the Kampuchea paragraphs (112 and 113) in the final documents of the seventh NAM summit, set out all the main elements that eventually brought Cambodia back to civilisation from the barbarity of the worst genocide known to history (Pol Pot, backed by the US, massacred a third of the country’s population in his ‘killing fields’), the Modi-engineered consensus only left everything as it was with no setting out of any basis for an eventual pacific settlement of the war in Ukraine.

Consider that the NAM summit listed all the elements of the final Cambodia settlement: “reaffirmed their support for the principles of non-interference” and “inadmissibility of the use of force”; “a comprehensive solution” to provide for “the withdrawal of all foreign forces… thus ensuring full respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states in the region” and sought a “process of negotiations and mutual understanding” for the “people of Kampuchea” to “determine their own destiny”. That is exactly what came to pass and if Cambodia is one of the most peaceful countries in the world today, it is because the seventh NAM summit showed the way.

In contrast, the Modi ‘consensus’ on Ukraine (para 8) merely reiterates “national positions and resolutions” and does nothing to signal how the war may be ended.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

difference-between-islamisation-and-hindutva

Sat Sep 23 11:30:50 IST 2023

As I have described in my recently released Memoirs of a Maverick, I reached Karachi just a few weeks before President Zia ul-Haq declared the Nizam-e-Mustafa, the rule of the Prophet—the first step in what came to be called “Islamisation”. So, Karan Thapar, interviewing me on my Pakistan chapter, asked me against whom Islamisation was targeted. “The impious Muslim,” I replied. “Not,” I was asked, “against the Pakistani Hindu?” On reflection, I said the blasphemy laws have been used against Pakistan’s main minority, the Christians. But Hindus? No.

Later, thinking about this exchange, I wondered against whom hindutva was targeted. Clearly the Indian Muslim. On further reflection, I have come to the conclusion that hindutva has nothing against Islam per se nor against the global Muslim community. That is why Modi wanders the world hugging every passing Muslim leader—sheikhs, sultans and their ilk. Interestingly, he does not do the same with Indian Muslims. Why?

The answer perhaps lies in the contestation that took place about a century ago, in the 1920s and 1930s, between Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who virulently disagreed on everything but ardently agreed on one thing—that Hindus and Muslims belonged not to two religions within a common nation but constituted two incompatible nations. While this curious agreement-cum-disagreement had its roots in the post-1857 intellectual ferment, it did not acquire political traction till after the first elections held in 1937 under the British-sponsored Government of India Act, 1935, which provided for separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims.

The 1937 elections were a disaster for Jinnah’s Muslim League, which secured only 5 per cent of the Muslim vote in Muslim separate electorates. But in his role as the Quaid-e-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah succeeded in fuelling a separatist sentiment among his Muslim followers that, with British blessings, left a vivisected subcontinent as the last colonial legacy. That final contest was essentially led by Mahatma Gandhi, fighting for a united India, and Jinnah fighting for a separate nation.

It was an intriguing contest for Jinnah was so ignorant of Muslim ritual that he could not even say his namaz, while Gandhi was so steeped in religious discourse that readings from the Holy Quran and the Bible were integral to his daily prayer meetings: “Ishwar Allah tero naam, sabko sanmati de bhagwan.” In contrast, the advocates of hindutva from Savarkar to Modi know nothing about Islam and care little for it. This is not because hindutva has anything theological against Islam or against Muslims outside Bharat. It is because the presence of a 200-million strong Muslim minority in Bharat dilutes the exclusively Hindu identity of this country.

Thus, the key difference between the Islamisation of Pakistan by Zia and the ongoing project of hindutvising our country is not that of making better Hindus of 1.4 billion Indians but of showing the minorities their place in Hindu Bharat. As a truly believing Muslim, Zia was the most pious Muslim (arguably the only pious Muslim) that Islamic Pakistan has ever had at its head. Zia wanted to fashion his country, conceived and born in the name of Islam, into a truly Islamic nation (according to his lights) notwithstanding the country’s elite who wanted to dilute strict Islam with a few drops of the waters of Scotland and winking at Friday namaz and the rigours of fasting from dawn to dusk during Ramzan. Hindutva, on the other hand, has no agenda of further Hinduising Hindus but concentrates on diluting the Muslim presence in what they believe should be a pak (that is, pure) Hindu nation. That is the crux of the conundrum.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

modi-government-is-a-gross-failure-in-confronting-chinpak

Sat Sep 09 11:09:48 IST 2023

The Narendra Modi government’s gross failure in foreign policy is best illustrated by our being at loggerheads with our two biggest neighbours—China and Pakistan. They have actually merged into one ‘enemy’, Chinpak, for the Chinese are no longer behind the Himalayas but poised inside Pakistan on the banks of the Sindhu (Indus) river just about where Alexander was in 326 B.C.

How far we have drifted from the halcyon days of December, 1988, when, in quick succession and within the same month, Rajiv Gandhi became the first Indian prime minister to visit China and Pakistan in 32 and 28 years, respectively, to open new doors to good neighbourly relations with both. It may be contrasted with the continuing logjam in China-India relations and the total absence of any meaningful engagement with Pakistan since 2014.

Let us take China first. What Xi Jinping is showing his Indian counterpart is that you can’t hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at the same time. Do we believe with the Americans that China is a dangerous enemy whom we must confront in coalition with like-minded countries? And is that why we are so eagerly in the Quad? Or are we seeking a settlement of the border to resume cordial relations with our great civilisational neighbour? While nominally sharing a swing in Ahmedabad and photo-ops in gorgeous Xian and Wuhan, and swallowing idlis together in Mahabalipuram, Xi wanted to gauge whether what Modi was whispering to Xi squared with what he was vouchsafing Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. For with the US presidents, Modi was signalling his readiness to play footsie with an international ganging-up against China, while pretending to Xi that the days of renewed ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ were just around the corner. Xi was having none of this and moved his troops further forward along our northern border.

The foreign minister claims this is in line with our traditional non-alignment. It is not. For non-alignment was about not aligning with either. Our present stance, in contrast, is a saga of confusion, akin to a young woman alternately pulling out the petals of a flower asking, “Will he?”/“Won’t he?”. It would seem Modi wants to remain a “natural ally” of a west that is hostile to China while talking to China at the highest level even if they are in occupation of what we consider our own. What other explanation can we give for the Indian government spokesman describing as “pleasantries” what video clearly showed was Modi in Bali initiating, apparently without success, a conversation with Xi? And then in Johannesburg last month claiming through the foreign secretary that Modi and Xi had held an “informal conversation” during which both “had underlined that the maintenance of peace and tranquility in the border areas” required “observing and respecting the LAC” as “essential for the normalisation of the India-China relationship.” Egg was all over the Indian face when the Chinese spokesman riposted that Xi had only met Modi because India had asked for it while turning down a Chinese request for “a more structured dialogue”. The Chinese then rubbed it in saying “both sides should bear in mind the overall interests” of ties and “handle properly” the border issue.

As for Pakistan, the government has declared times without number that “talks and terror can’t go together”. Well, it has been nine years and if there is now no “terror”, then why can’t talks start? And if, despite this rhetoric, there is still “terror”, then is it not time to rethink this tired old cliche?

If “no dialogue” is the policy vis-a-vis Pakistan and “no structured dialogue” is the policy vis-a-vis China, then are you surprised at China roosting on the Indus?

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

nation-needs-more-compassion-and-less-hypocrisy

Sat Aug 26 11:25:18 IST 2023

The prime minister has done it again. Misusing the platform provided to him, he converted the grand celebratory occasion of Independence Day into an opportunity to score cheap political points against those banding together against him in the name of I.N.D.I.A. This column will restrict itself to challenging him on his charge of “tushtikaran”, which the sangh parivar translates into their English as “appeasement”.

In his renowned biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion: Alone, 1932-1940, the author, William Manchester at p.101 gives the dictionary meaning of appeasement as “to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions, usually at the sacrifice of principles” and cites F.E. Smith Lord Birkenhead as first using the expression in the House of Lords to condemn conciliatory tactics towards advocates of Indian independence, calling those who did so “appeasers of Gandhi”. The term was seized upon by Churchill to derogate the British policy of conciliating Hitler by forgiving him his successive invasions of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. “Appeasement” reverberated in the English language political vocabulary during Chamberlain’s handling of Hitler.

In other words, “appeasement” is used with respect to enemies. Are our Muslims “enemies”? Then what does it mean to accuse political opponents of tushtikaran? Does that not show that for all his citing diversity, the inflexible assumption of Modi’s policies is to regard non-Hindu minorities, especially Muslims, as “enemies” whose ancestors brought upon us “1,200 years of slavery”?

This is the proposition that has been peddled by Hindu extremists from the end of Mughal rule in India, and then through the writings and propaganda of V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, and constitute the core of the sangh parivar’s view of Indian’s nationhood. That is principally what hindutva is about. Hence the dog whistle “appeasement” to hint at the essential enemy—the poor, wretched Indian Muslim. From the allegation of tushtikaran spring ‘love jihad’, lynching, the ‘hijab’, azaan, and namaz controversies, the ‘bulldozer’ mentality, bullying non-Hindu victims to repeat ‘Jai, Shri Ram’ till they pass out, the fiddling with textbooks, the passing of laws with an evident communal bias, and all other acts of viciousness with which the history of the past nine years is littered.

The civility of a nation is measured by its treatment of its minorities. Gandhiji embodied this principle. So did Nehru. That is why the Mahatma insisted on the return of all occupied Islamic places of worship to Muslims at the time of Partition. And “appeasement” is indeed the rationale presented by Nathuram Godse for assassinating the father of the nation. Therefore, when the ‘Vishwaguru’ describes kindness and consideration to our minorities as “appeasement”, that is, “conciliation of the enemy”, it makes an enemy of our minorities. It derogates from our civilisational heritage. It also derogates from the constitutional duty to regard all sections of our composite nation as equal.

Do Muslims of India require special treatment? Yes, for their share in Parliament has fallen under the present dispensation to an abysmal 4 per cent, while they were assured of equitable representation through the goodwill of the majority in the constituent assembly. Do they need special privileges for their educational progress and economic emancipation? The Sachar committee returned a resounding verdict of “yes” to this question. And, yet, this is called tushtikaran even as Modi seeks a vote bank among poor Muslims (the ‘pasmanda’) by dividing the Muslim community. The nation needs more compassion and less hypocrisy.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

lies-damned-lies-and-statistics

Sat Aug 12 11:07:38 IST 2023

First things first. This column owes its all to two explanatory articles by Udit Mishra of The Indian Express published sequentially in the wake of Prime Minister Modi’s assertion before the US Congress that India was already at position five in the size of its GDP, and then after Modi assured the nation at the inauguration of the Bharat Mandapam in July that “during the third term of our government, India will be among the top three economies of the world”. Fair enough, even the IMF says so.

But what has been hidden by Modi is that the growth rate in India has dropped by one hundred percentage points between 2004-2014 and the nine years that Modi has been PM. For we grew under Dr Manmohan Singh by 183 per cent in the UPA decade and that decennial growth rate has fallen by exactly 100 percentage points to 83 per cent in the Modi years. Had the Manmohan rate of growth been maintained, we would have overtaken Germany and Japan, the current two and three, many years ago. Our present ranking is thus much more the contribution of Manmohanomics than Modinomics.

Second, it is not so much because India is growing but because of virtual stagnation or low growth rates in most of the other top 10, after the global financial crisis of 2008-09, that we have forged ahead in relative terms. But the gap between the top two and us is so wide, while the gap between each of the remaining eight is so narrow, that all eight of us are “also-rans” as compared with the US and China. We eight are overtaking each other not to get to the top but only to not be declared last!

Third, we may be fifth, and might even become third in GDP by 2027, but the gap in GDP between no.1 (the US) and no.2 (China) and India is at present so wide as to be nearly eight times lower than the US and nearly five times lower than China. We are bunched way below the two giants with a group of countries ranked three to ten whose combined GDP is US dollars two trillion less than the US, and fifth to tenth is three trillion lower than China.

It gets worse when we look at per capita figures. For the US per capita income at $80,000 is some 38 times higher than India’s ($2,600) and China at $13,700 is some six times higher than India. Indeed, Germany and Japan, who we will be overtaking shortly in absolute size, are, in per capita terms, 26 times and 17 times higher than India. What boots it to come third in overall production when Indians languish at below 100 in per capita ranking and continue to lie in the 130s on the UN’s human development index? While Modi’s business friends scale international heights in terms of their personal wealth and make India rich on the PM’s metric, PM seems to forget that Indians on every other metric are poor.

PM’s boast is also in derogation of our Constitution which clearly lays down in Article 39 (c) that “the State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing… that the operation of the economic system does not result in concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment” and in Article 39 (b) that “the ownership and control of the material resources of the country are so distributed as best to subserve the common good”.

It was another prime minister, [Benjamin] Disraeli, who denounced “lies, damned lies—and statistics”. Modi might want to lend him an ear.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

uniform-civil-code-and-the-rajiv-gandhi-precedent

Sat Jul 29 11:43:47 IST 2023

Prime Minister Narendra Modi raising the highly controversial issue of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is obviously a dog whistle aimed at rallying the faithful to his standard divisive agenda on the eve of the general elections scheduled for 2024, when the INDIA alliance threatens to derail his long run of electoral victories.

In doing this, he brings to mind the precedent of the Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case (1985), placing UCC in Article 44 of the directive principles of state policy on a higher level of imperative action than all other articles in the same part of the Constitution. Thus, while Article 39(c) directs that the state shall ensure that there is no “concentration of wealth”, Adani and Ambani have risen to the highest global levels on personal wealth scales while all indices indicate an obscene widening of income inequalities in India.

Faced with the fury of the minorities at the prospect of their personal laws being abrogated by a parliament in which they are woefully under-represented, Rajiv Gandhi found an ingenious way out of the conundrum. He reconciled the directive in Article 44 to “endeavour” to work towards a UCC and the requirement in Article 39 (a) to treat “men and women equally” with the continuation of community-based personal laws.

This was the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. The constitutional validity of the act was challenged by Danial Latifi, a highly respected jurist, through a writ petition filed in September 1986. A constitutional bench held, in a judgement delivered in November 2001, that far from “reversing” the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgement, the impugned act had actually “codified” that judgement. How?

Instead of denouncing Muslim divorce practice as seventh-century Arab “barbarism“, Rajiv Gandhi and his law minister, Ashoke Sen, actually took the trouble to carefully listen to and meticulously study what the shariat said on the subject. It was clear that Muslim personal law on divorce was actually highly enlightened in that provisions for monetary settlement were strictly laid down to ensure due compensation for divorce, and maintenance thereafter for the divorcee and her children was guaranteed by the male members of her family of birth, failing which the waqf was charged with taking care of the woman and her children. Complementing this was Muslim social practice that not only permitted but actually encouraged remarriage. (In consequence, a 2019 study by Abu Saleh and others found that 78 per cent of divorced Muslim women find another husband within two years of divorce).

The problem was the reactionary mullahs (clerics) who enforced the shariat in personal matters. To rectify this, Rajiv Gandhi’s 1986 act upheld the right of Muslims to their own personal law but brought its enforcement within the ambit of secular civil law by empowering magistrates to “order” state waqf boards to provide adequate maintenance to divorced Muslim women and their offspring, failing which the waqf authorities would be hauled before the magistrate.

For the past two decades, all Muslim divorce disputes are consolidated before the highest court of the land and even-handed justice dispensed to Muslim women who might otherwise have faced the most terrible gender discrimination. This shows the way forward. For instead of attacking the roots of ‘unity in diversity’ by calling out others as barbaric, which is what Modi’s dog whistle is all about, let our many different religious communities have their own personal laws but bring enforcement of gender equality within the civil jurisdiction of the courts.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

does-modi-really-care-for-pasmanda-muslims

Sat Jul 15 15:55:09 IST 2023

Since July 2022, PM Modi has been attempting to drive a wedge between the Muslim community by underlining that 85 per cent of Muslims are lowly “pasmanda” and only 15% are elite “ashrafs” whom earlier governments appeased.

Back in 1973, Prof Imtiaz Ahmed of JNU edited his monumental magnum opus, Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India (expanded second edition in 1978), where he and his co-authors pointed out that caste “exists and functions among Muslims” and there is a “hierarchy among the Muslims” based on “deference structures, emphasising inequality of social status” despite the strong Koranic injunction to treat all human beings as equal. They highlighted the ‘Lal Begi’ scavengers as the bottom of the Muslim social ladder, and also found that “higher Muslim castes refuse to eat” with or marry the lower orders. They also emphasised “regional variations” (as with Hindu caste practice). The persistence of caste among Muslim converts, was attributed by Imtiaz Ahmed to the “acculturative influence of Hinduism”.

Yet, because the Gandhi-Ambedkar pact was limited to retaining scheduled castes in the Hindu fold, the Presidential Order of 1950 listed only Hindus among the scheduled castes. Muslim SC remain excluded to this day. Later, after Mandal, when salami-slicing of the OBCs led to a long list of OBC castes, largely based on traditional occupations, Muslims in the same “polluting” occupations were excluded from OBC categorisation—the most egregious example of which is Gujarati Muslim Modis who do not enjoy the categorisation of ‘teli’ (oil-pressers).

These anomalies were emphasised by the Sachar Commission which made more widely known the Muslim social stratification of Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal (the latter two jointly called pasmanda). In consequence, Dr Manmohan Singh’s second UPA government prepared an ordinance that would have included a pasmanda Muslim sub-quota in the OBC list, but this was stayed by the Supreme Court. If PM Modi is really so concerned with pasmanda Muslims, why has his government not sought a vacation of the stay in the last nine years or amended the SC list to include Muslim SC?

Moreover, it is almost entirely Muslim pasmanda who are the victims of lynching, 97 per cent of which have taken place after the Modi became PM. Why are sangh parivar goons encouraged to shout slogans like “Jab mulle kate jayenge, ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chillayaenge” (when the mullahs are slaughtered, they’ll scream Jai Shri Ram)? With, as the PM emphasises, 85 per cent Muslims being pasmanda, it is this 85 per cent that has been targeted (along with the much-excoriated 15 per cent) by sangh parivar-inspired jibes to “go to Pakistan”; controversies on hijab, aazaan, love jihad and namaz in public places; brutal crimes in the name of cow protection; bulldozer politics; razing of mosques; economic boycotts; films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story; and the “exponential rise in hate speech” (Ziya us Salam in The Hindu of June 30).

The five main problems of the Muslim minority, including the 85 per cent pasmanda, are related to ‘identity’, ‘dignity, ‘security’, ‘agency’ and ‘representation’. There are only about 4 per cent Muslim Lok Sabha MPs now as against 8.3 per cent at Indira Gandhi’s second coming. Whatever the BJP may have done in fielding 61 Muslim candidates (out of thousands) in UP’s recent municipal elections, there is not a single Muslim Cabinet minister at the centre, no Muslim among the BJP’s 395 MPs in both Houses, and not a single Muslim candidate was even fielded by the BJP in recent state assembly elections to the 1,109 seats in UP, Gujarat and Karnataka! That is why Zia Us Salam decries the “invisibilisation of Muslims”, 85 per cent of whom are pasmanda.

Modi is ideologically opposed to recognising this despite the fact that he gives away gas cylinders for free without discrimination (while charging $1,195 for gas per cylinder—also without discrimination)!

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

kashmiris-want-elections

Sat Jul 01 12:53:10 IST 2023

I took one of the 41 daily flights to Srinagar, joining the 1.4 crore annual visitors to Jammu and Kashmir, which is the single most significant proof proffered by the Union government to proclaim the restoration of “normalcy” to the erstwhile state, now transformed into a Union Territory. There I met many Kashmiris, including sarpanches and activist politicians, teachers and students, sheep- and cattle-herders. The trip took me to the Daksum sanctuary, then over the snow-covered Margan Top at 14,000 feet, and across the breadth of the Warwan Valley that lies in the Chenab basin approximating the line that divides Jammu from Kashmir. The scenery was spectacular, but I was there also to gauge the general mood.

There was widespread agreement that there was peace in the air, the administration was functioning more smoothly than in the past, that government servants were much more regular in attendance instead of busying themselves with their private businesses, that teachers were coming to school on time and actually teaching, that development and infrastructure projects were being implemented, and that corruption was significantly reduced. Much like in Mussolini’s Italy where “the trains ran on time” but democracy was eschewed.

The single most important demand was that elections be held so that the UT is restored to statehood, and a representative state assembly could work towards the “restoration” of Articles 370 and 35A. When I retorted that this would also mean the restoration of past misgovernance, it was accepted with little demur that there would be several downsides to popular government but that they accepted, indeed desired this ardently, as the government would then be their government, not one imposed from Delhi; that government servants would not be Hindi-speaking outsiders but would be administering in their language and in accordance with their culture; that they would not be humiliated by being under alien domination; and that they would be equal citizens instead of being denied their democratic rights only because they were Kashmiri.

On being asked who would win the elections in view of the gerrymandering of constituencies that has been resorted to blatantly, none seemed to doubt that it would be the National Conference of Sheikh Abdullah and his current descendants. When asked whether the “good governance” provided by the lieutenant governor’s administration would not trump mere sentiment, the unanimous response was that it was only because the National Conference would be the big winner that the Union home ministry was dragging its feet on elections. No matter, they said, whenever the elections are held Kashmir will be restored to Kashmiris, our abject humiliation will end and we will be masters of our own house, whatever the faults of our governance and our politicians and leaders. “We do not want this beggars’ prosperity. We are quite capable of promoting our own welfare and prosperity. After all, even before Article 370 was abruptly removed without our consent, we ranked higher than most states in GDP growth and per capita income, and in health and education.” But what did the hollowed-out Article 370 contain for you personally? The answer invariably was: “Article 370 was the badge of our special identity. And it was from 370 that 35A flowed. It was our guarantee that prosperity in Kashmir would be for Kashmiris and not outsiders”.

As for Pakistan, they were all aware of conditions there and the growing gap between a flourishing India and its fast-collapsing neighbour. In any case, they said, the best guarantee against both accession to Pakistan and ‘azadi’ was the National Conference. And why was dissatisfaction not turning to ‘intifada’? Only because we don’t want to give any excuse to the Indian government to further postpone elections.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

narendra-modi-s-saarc-ploy

Sat Jun 17 11:16:17 IST 2023

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has done more than anyone else to destroy the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), chose his invitation to the Hiroshima G7 meeting to air his views on south Asian unity. The setting was somewhat appropriate because just as the atom bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima, his statement has nuked the idea of a south Asian union.

SAARC was first proposed in 1979 and initially received with considerable skepticism. Yet, by patient negotiation, the parameters were put together over the next five years for SAARC to be launched in Dhaka in December 1985. Although its achievements were modest, it provided a useful forum for SAARC leaders to get together for regular bilateral talks on the sidelines.

The main Indian reservation about SAARC was that it could provide a hostile platform for attacks on India, not only by Pakistan but even by monarchical Nepal and a Sri Lanka over-run with internal ethnic insurrections. The geographical asymmetry was duly noted: that India alone had common land or sea boundaries with the other members, none of the others having contiguous frontiers with each other. Therefore, the most fundamental parameter laid down was that bilateral issues, especially political differences, would not be on the multilateral table, where the focus would be on issues of regional development cooperation, especially where complementarities could be availed of for mutual benefit. Infrastructure and common public health issues were kept in the forefront and the cultural diversity of the association was highlighted and celebrated.
While sensitive bilateral political issues were off the SAARC agenda, the multiple days’ presence of the leaders afforded them opportunities for bilateral interaction, such as Modi’s own secret interaction with Nawaz Shariff organised at the Kathmandu summit in 2015 by a business intermediary (after Modi had publicly snubbed the Pakistan prime minister).

Having sabotaged SAARC by his refusal to attend the Islamabad summit, Modi, in Hiroshima, brought up a concept of a South Asian Democratic Union. “Democratic” effectively expels Taliban Afghanistan from the earlier SAARC grouping and provides the window through which the proposed new grouping could eliminate Pakistan. To be a grouping of “democracies” members would be subject to invasive external judgements on whether or not they complied with “democratic” norms. Indeed, authoritarian India, under the present regime, which has seen the country tumbling on all accepted international indices of democratic governance, would be under the microscope. SAARC had carefully excluded such unwarranted interference from near and far.

Worse, much worse than this, is Modi’s premise that the proposed South Asian Union must be among those who share a “common history and culture”. This is clearly designed to exclude Islamic countries, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even the Maldives, who proclaim the religious character of their states in their constitution and would hotly contest the suggestion that they share a “common” history and culture with India. Bangladesh would find itself in a pickle because although it is described as “secular” in its (amended) constitution, it is clearly Islamic in its overall nature. Modi’s formulation also unwittingly excludes Buddhist states like Sri Lanka and Bhutan who would reject the notion that their history or culture is indistinguishable from India’s. Perhaps when Nepal was a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, under the now deposed monarchy, it might have accepted the idea of a shared history and culture, but today’s fiercely independent, nationalistic and secular Nepal would certainly ferociously object to its history and culture being subordinated to India’s.

For that matter, does an India that is at war with itself over “Aurangzeb ki aulad”, have a common history or culture? We are united as a nation only because of our “unity in diversity”. That alone can be the basis of south Asian unity.

double-engine-sarkar-has-wreaked-havoc-in-manipur

Fri Jun 02 17:29:32 IST 2023

While Manipur is no stranger to violence and ethnic clashes, the communal rioting seen this year is essentially the consequence of the majoritarian authoritarianism that characterises the BJP’s approach to “forced assimilation”.

The largely Hindu Meitei population of the valley has lived in relative accord with their largely Christian tribal neighbours of the hill areas, owing to deep sensitivity to each other’s separate identity, reinforced by constitutional arrangements for a degree of autonomy through district councils and hill administration councils under Article 371 C, and political accommodation through reservations for ST in the assembly and including tribal representatives in the cabinet.

But ever since the BJP stole its way to power to overturn the outcome of the 2017 election, a strident majoritarianism has pitted the Vaishnavite Hindus of the valley against the Christian tribals of the hills leading to the present outbreak that has been simmering over the six years that N. Biren Singh has been chief minister.

A dissident Kuki MLA of the BJP, Paolienlal Haokip, has described the Biren Singh administration as “the best example of inept handling of everything”. Ineptness is evident in the BJP government’s drive against the cultivation of poppies, cannabis, and marijuana, launched in February this year, to clear reserved forest lands that, it was claimed, had been “encroached” upon by tribals in general and particularly by “illegal immigrants” from Myanmar across the border. This is a good illustration of the “double engine sarkar” at work, for it is the Central government that has looked askance at the Muslim Rohingya and Zo tribals fleeing Burmese junta persecution by refusing to grant them ‘refugee’ status and the local Manipuri BJP that has attempted to cow down the tribal minority instead of working towards their gradual emotional integration into a composite Manipuri identity.

While the origins of the problem may be traced to the British having been “insensitive to kinship ties” across the Manipur-Burma border, the current aggravation arises from the inhuman outlook of the Manipur government that has condemned the Zo tribals fleeing genocide as “illegal immigrants”; sought an NRC, as in Assam, to identify “foreigners” in the Kuki-dominated districts; and roughly handled delicate issues of land rights and cultural identity. Large swathes of Kuki-Zomi-Hmar lands have been declared reserved forests or otherwise put out of bounds to the locals without following “established procedures”, leading to severe economic disruption as the unyielding hills are more easily cultivated by slash-and-burn methods known as “subsistence swidden farming” than back-breaking terracing for settled farming.

As underlined by Kuki public intellectuals of repute, the police have been “deeply communalised”; the authorities, as a whole, have been “biased” rather than “equidistant”; and civil society organisations have been incentivised to “propagate a more radical brand of Meitei nationalism”. In consequence, a vicious spiral of mutual violence has been spun. The inbuilt majority of Meiteis in the assembly (39 of 60) has in March 2023 withdrawn the suspension of operations agreement with two major Kuki and Zomi armed entities. And into this cauldron, the Manipur High Court has directed the government to prepare the ground to declare Meiteis as Scheduled Tribes, thus removing the last safeguard of the existing hill ST. Such has been the loss of confidence in the fairness of the Biren Singh government that almost all BJP Kuki MLAs and opinion-makers of the Kuki and other minority tribal groupings have demanded a “separate administration” by placing the hills under the sixth schedule, as in neighbouring Mizoram.

Such is the outcome of substituting “unity in diversity” with BJP-style “unity through uniformity”. Manipur in microcosm is the fate awaiting the Indian Union if saffron rule is continued in 2024.

we-cannot-wish-pakistan-away-and-we-should-not

Sat May 20 11:19:51 IST 2023

The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude, that is, delighting in another’s troubles. In India, there is considerable schadenfreude over the mess in Pakistan, where everything—politically, economically and in foreign policy—seems to have gone wrong at the same time. The civil polity is hopelessly divided, with the army threatening to bring back order once again through the barrel of a gun. The economy is in the doldrums. Pakistan has ceased to be the springboard for determining the outcome in Afghanistan. The world has lost interest in Afghanistan but not the Taliban in wanting to dismantle the Durand Line. And India merely scoffs at Pakistan’s increasingly frenetic rhetoric that seeks to refocus world attention on Kashmir. The world is not listening. And might the Chinese (“the all-weather friend”) turn Gwadar into a Hambantota, effectively snatching the strategic port away from Pakistani sovereignty to get themselves reimbursed for their humongous investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor?

At just this juncture, our foreign minister has chosen to be rude to the point of crudeness to his Pakistani counterpart in the latest instalment of a personal quarrel that Jaishankar sparked in New York and got back as good as he gave. Is this in our long-term interest? What do we gain from Pakistan’s collapse? More, to the point, is Pakistan collapsing?

Pakistan came into being because the Muslim elite, in large measure, did not wish to become a minority in someone else’s dispensation. That sentiment constitutes the bonding adhesive of their nationhood. It makes Pakistanis more patriotic in times of crisis than when the going is good. In normal times, they enjoy mocking their leadership. But when the unity or integrity of their nation is threatened, they band together. We need to understand this.

We have seen in India, particularly in the ghastly era through which we are currently transiting, how “hurt religious sentiment” can be transmuted into political gain. Religion, the raison d’etre of the birth of Pakistan, can quickly and effectively be invoked if India is seen as taking advantage of Pakistan’s woes. The reaction in Pakistan to Jaishankar’s snarl at Bilawal in Goa only proves that the higher the level of India’s schadenfreude, the greater Pakistan is incentivised to come together. Of course, Jaishankar’s primary goal was to please his boss and establish his credentials as a true saffronite; but if he thought his huffing and his puffing is going to blow the Pakistan house down, his hopes will be belied for his rhetoric only solidifies Pakistan’s desire not to revert to being India. This in turn means that a turbulent Pakistan remains a neighbour of India and an indivisible part of our shared subcontinent. We cannot wish them way—and, therefore, should not.

Moreover, while Pakistan is no longer a key ally of the US and is being increasingly displaced by Joe Biden’s outreach to Modi, it is difficult to imagine the US looking away when the eighth largest country in the global community—Pakistan—is being dismantled against the will of Pakistanis. So, as in the past, so in the future, the Americans will grudgingly bail out their former partner, if only to stop China from becoming their sole benefactor. Hence, Pakistan will be helped to weather out this crisis.

Given that Pakistan is here to stay and has the potential to restore its broken polity and economy, what we have to decide is whether to continue our nearly decade-old disengagement with Pakistan. It is clear that if Modi wins in 2024, this disengagement will continue, but given the imperative necessity of uniting the opposition to forestall that outcome, at the appropriate time Pakistan policy has to be inserted consensually into the joint opposition agenda.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

diminishing-the-mughal-period

Fri May 05 16:46:12 IST 2023

The National Council of Educational Research and Training claims to have “balanced” the burden on 12th class school children by substantially reducing their learning and understanding of the Mughal legacy. In fact, they are only playing ‘Their Master’s Voice’ by carrying through the ideological obfuscation of the ruling saffron establishment. They claim to have given the vacated “space” to regional histories of Hindu dynasties but have, in fact, only added a few pages about the Vijayanagar Empire, leaving out any substantial additions to the Pallava, the Chola, the Pandya, the Chera, the Rashtrakuta, the Chalukya, the Sena, the Pala, the Ahom, and a host of others.

There was a reason the earlier texts gave more pages to the Mughals. These reasons were basically the same that covered the findings of the pre-Aryan Harappan heritage, the Vedic Age, the Buddha and Mahavira, the Asokan Empire, the Guptas and Adi Sankara, namely, that these were more nation-wide and had a longer cultural and civilisational impact on the nation’s memory of itself. But the Mughals have been downgraded precisely because their empire stretched all the way to the deep south and the east/north-east. The Mughal empire in the north extended to Kashmir and northwest to Pakistan, and even most of Afghanistan. This cannot be said of any of the regional kingdoms. I could, therefore, have understood a separate paper on our regional kingdoms, which are taught in colleges, but the pretence that the Mughals are given too much prominence is a political prejudice that should have no place in the formation of young minds.

Indeed, the cultural contribution of the Mughal period to our syncretic civilisation is far more significant than its political boundaries. For, it was during the rule of the Delhi Sultanate (1192-1526), predecessors to the Mughals (1526-1858), that the Hindawi language was developed (largely by Amir Khusrow in Delhi’s Nizamuddin Auliya) and has now become the Hindi of our times. It was also during the late Mughal period that Urdu arose and became one of the constitutionally recognised languages of independent India. Music and dance, painting, sculpture and poetry became at the time, under royal patronage, a precious national treasure rather than a sectional legacy. The architectural inheritance remains a proud part of our national pride. It was also during the Mughal period that the Ramayan and the Mahabharat, the Upanishads and the other masterpieces were translated into Persian for wider acquaintance to the non-Hindu minorities of India. It was a period of intense inter-religious interaction, for the Sufi and Bhakti movement, which underly almost all of contemporary Hindu belief and practice, unfolded during these centuries of Mughal rule in all their syncretic brilliance. Indeed, the origins of Bhakti movement may be dated from Saint Ramanuja who reigned spiritually from the Tamil country, synthesising the bitterly opposed Saivite and Vaishnavite traditions, when the Tughlaqs were on their thrones in far-away Delhi, but really flourished when Swami Ramanand, Tukaram, Chaitanya, Sankardev, Ravidas, Kabir and Mirabai spread their universal message of divine love under the benevolent gaze of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal emperors. It is indeed little recalled that Tulsidas wrote his Ramayan even as the Babri Masjid loomed over Ayodhya. And the apogee of the Bhakti movement under the ten Sikh Gurus came to final bloom when there were Muslim rulers on the Delhi throne.

While there might be merit in strengthening text book passages that highlight the civilisational consequences of Sultanate and Mughal rule, at the expense of political and military history, there is none in making little Jinnahs of our children by filling their minds with tendentious two-nation theories.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

can-a-govt-appointed-fact-check-body-be-effective

Sat Apr 22 20:51:05 IST 2023

Union IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar must consider the Indian public to be most gullible if he thinks his argument for a governmental fact-finding body will wash. He argues that a wholly government-appointed fact-finding body without any countervailing authority to check its actions before it takes them within minutes in real time, is justified because government is the target of “most misinformation attacks” and “only the government has access to government data and so it is impossible for any non-government entity to effectively fact check content about the government”. And, so, he wishes to put in place a system where the government becomes the judge in its own cause! And the way is thus opened to removing all checks and balances on government evaluations and actions since in every case government would be entitled to claim that it alone is capable of determining what is what as it alone has all the required “facts”.

We are treading dangerous constitutional ground here, threatening the very basis of our Constitution where justice is open and transparent, and no one, not even the government, is allowed to hide from the court’s stern view of all the germane facts and alternative perspectives on these facts. For, after all “Facts are sacred; opinion is free” as the famous Guardian editor, C.P. Scott, remarked and raised to the basic credo of frank, free, and fearless journalism.

The press note issued along with the minister’s decision claims it seeks an “open, safe and trusted and accountable Internet”. It does nothing of the sort. It just seeks to control public access to significant facts and governmental interpretation of these since, according to Chandrashekhar, government is “the target” of “most misinformation operations”. But what of situations, increasingly frequent, of others being the target of government-inspired “misinformation” and “no information”—such as the genuineness of the prime minister’s educational qualifications, as declared to the Election Commission of India at the time of his filing his nomination papers, and the refusal of the prime minister to answer or clarify any of the questions raised by the (former) leader of the opposition on the floor of the house regarding his relationship with the discredited business baron, Gautam Adani? Not to mention scores of other issues pending under the Right to Information Act and the manifest illegality of detentions in J&K? When innocents are as much the target of government “misinformation”, how on earth can it be assumed that the government is the only ‘target’ in need of protection? Why not rely instead on the courts that are open to all citizens as much as to government departments and personalities and the existing mechanisms of “a grievance office” and “GAC framework appellate” that the honourable minister invokes?

He claims that government actions in this regard will always faithfully take account of the fundamental rights prescribed in the Constitution, but surely it is not for government to determine whether its own actions are ultra vires the “basic structure” and fundamental rights of individuals. Misinformation is best tackled in the open, not by hiding behind governmental access to “facts”.

There are facts that governments hide and facts that are revealed only to the benefit of governments. The job of a free media (including social media) is to wheedle out “facts” inconvenient to the government in an atmosphere free of hatred, fear, and bile. And for government to respond, transparently and openly, if it has in its possession other facts or considerations on which it determines its approach.

It is this freedom to offer an alternative view that enabled the BJP to access two terms in power. It now seems to think its predominance is final. That is the kind of hubris that overtakes most authoritarians.

its-uk-indian-origin-pm-versus-scotlands-pak-origin-leader-mani-shankar-aiyar

Sun Apr 09 07:33:15 IST 2023

There is a delightful irony to Humza Haroon Yousaf, the 37-year-old son of Pakistani immigrants, having been elected the head of the Scottish National Party, and thus emerging as first minister of Scotland. For he now comes in direct confrontation with the Indian-origin PM of the United Kingdom in determining whether the UK will remain a united kingdom or split into two sovereign countries: Britain and Scotland. Partition was the price the Brits gouged out of us to grant us our independence. Now an ethnic Pakistani and an ethnic Indian will determine whether the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, twins joined at the hip in 1707, will remain twinned or be severed from one another. And even as the princely states hoped the departing Britons would succeed in carving out for them a separate Princestan, Wales and Northern Ireland also wait with bated breath to see whether the country to which they belong will be Balkanised, as India almost was, or survive as the rump Great Britain.

Yousaf’s clarion call has been “Stronger for Scotland”, and he has reiterated that his “would be the generation that delivers independence for Scotland”. To this end, he has declared that he seeks a second referendum to retest the outcome of the last referendum in 2014 that delivered a marginal verdict in favour of Scotland remaining in the UK. Yousaf insists that he is not looking for a marginal but decisive victory in a second referendum. Rishi Sunak has countered that a referendum would “distract” from “delivering on the things that are top of the priority list for people across Scotland”.

But the hard fact is that it is “independence” that is at the top of Scotland’s priority list. For in the Brexit referendum, Scotland voted to remain in the European Union while the UK as a whole marginally voted in favour of leaving. What Scotland now seeks is not only the dissolution of the Act of Union of 1707 but also the opportunity of rejoining the European Union from which, in the Scottish perception, Scotland gained a lot, reflecting Ireland’s view that EU membership grants a net reaping of benefits. Thus, a second referendum would be held in an overall scenario that is radically different to 2014.

On the other hand, polls suggest that support for secession from the UK has dropped in Scotland to 39 per cent, well below the 44.7 per cent who voted to quit the United Kingdom in 2014. Yet, the situation remains volatile as 58 per cent polled in favour of separating when Scotland’s pandemic performance proved far superior to England’s. Significantly, Yousaf was the celebrated Scottish minister who engineered Scotland’s impressive Covid-19 response.

Thus, for all his brave words, the Punjabi Indian British PM has his work cut out in his forthcoming battle with the Punjabi Pakistani first minister of Scotland. The last card up Sunak’s sleeve is that even a decisive referendum in favour of vivisecting the UK would not be the end of the matter. Westminster, where the UK parliament sits, has, according to the law, the final word. Unless the House of Commons accepts the outcome of any Scottish referendum, the partition of the UK cannot legally take place. Therefore, the ultimate irony would be if the British government were to set up a Cabinet Mission to negotiate their way out of the tangled mess that would be created by a successful Scottish referendum. It would parallel the imbroglio caused by the Indian elections in 1945-46 that required the despatch of the Cabinet Mission, whose leader, Pethick Lawrence came to be called “Pathetic Lawrence”!

the-three-women-who-helped-mrs-chatterjee

Sat Mar 25 11:33:46 IST 2023

The Rani Mukerji starrer Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway was released throughout India and worldwide on March 17. In Norway itself, tickets were sold out four days before the first screening. This shows that the issues raised by the film are not of concern only to Indians but also to Norwegians who suffer the heavy hand of the Barnevernet, the Norwegian Child Protection Service (CPS). The CPS has been empowered by a draconian law to protect child rights but, on the ground, acts without adequate institutional checks or balances, thus causing needless and sometimes endless suffering to parents who are deprived of their infants and children without any discoverable reason. Reasons are not discoverable because the right to privacy of the abducted child is heavily protected in the law itself, leaving the victim parents often quite bewildered as to why their children are being taken from them. While CPS is free to enter what evidence it wishes in Norwegian courts of law, defendants are simply not allowed to examine much of this “evidence” kept under wraps. Inevitably, the judge is obliged to list in the direction of the prosecution. And there is virtually no recourse to the executive because, it is claimed, the Norwegian system does not permit intervention by any ministry or minister.

This confers such arbitrary powers of immunity and impunity on CPS that the moot question is whether in protecting the child’s right to privacy the human rights of the deprived parent and the child are not being brutally violated.

The film is based on the real-life story of a young Indian woman, Sagarika Chakraborty Bhattacharjee, whose infants were snatched from her.

Among the allegations made against her was the accusation that she fed her children with her hand; that she smeared her daughter’s forehead; that the kids slept in the same bed as the parents. The social worker assigned to them was a young English woman, who mocked Sagarika that Indians were “running around naked” until the British “civilised” them, and that she knew how Indian parents brought up their children because she had seen Slumdog Millionaire! Sagarika was also charged with mental illness and instability for having fiercely resisted the attempt to take away her children. Besides, foster parents are so handsomely compensated that exploitation of child protection laws for pecuniary gain is an ever-present threat.

While the children were eventually repatriated to India through the intervention of foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj—at the instance of Brinda Karat, the fiery CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP at the time—it was only the dogged persistence of a pro bono Indian lawyer, my daughter Suranya Aiyar, that eventually reunited Sagarika with her children. They are both growing up happy and normal in the loving care of their mother who has had the grit to train herself in software engineering and give her children a good living by working in a multi-national company. The current state of the mother and children is the best proof that in stealing away her infants the Barnevernet had gravely erred. It also showed that if the Norwegian government puts its mind to it, successful executive intervention is possible, whatever the theology of the law.

What lesson does all this hold for India? Only one. That with millions of NRIs travelling abroad and facing the rigours of child protection laws in all of the western world, MEA must become pro-active in helping Indian parents deal with such cases that are rife in the western world. To this end, perhaps a law needs to be enacted by Parliament to secure a binding commitment from the government to do so through its diplomatic and consular offices abroad.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

why-we-secularists-must-fight-on-mani-shankar-aiyar

Fri Mar 10 15:08:30 IST 2023

The basic structure of our nation is the source of the basic structure of our Constitution. So, in protecting the basic structure of our Constitution, the Supreme Court is protecting the very basis of our nationhood, which is “unity in diversity”. Delivering their judgement, rejecting a petition moved by a hindutivist, Justice K.M. Joseph and Justice B.V. Nagarathna have stamped their judicial imprimatur on the idea of India that for the past nine years has been under its most serious challenge ever. As the honourable justices aver, “There is no space for bigotry in Hinduism.”

Yet, the forces who do not represent the Hindu religion but a political perversion of it, are symbols of bigotry seeking to lump all non-Hindus, especially Muslims, as “barbaric invaders”. The court rightly asserts the “golden principle of fraternity”, which is “enshrined in the Preamble”. The petitioner who decried “foreign invaders” as “looters” was rhetorically asked, “Can you wish away invasions from history? What are you trying to achieve?” It was unambiguously affirmed, “India that is Bharat is a secular country… wedded to the rule of law, secularism, constitutionalism of which Article 14 stands out as the grand guarantee of both equality and fairness in state action.” No politician has put it more clearly than that.

Underlining that, “India is a secular state, this is a secular forum,” Justice Nagarathna pleaded, “let us not break society with such kinds of petitions, please have the country in mind, not any religion.” And Justice Joseph added, “I am a Christian, but I can say I am equally fond of Hinduism… Try and understand its greatness.” Saying that, “History cannot haunt present and future generations,” the bench warned against our becoming “prisoners of the past” and underlined that “this court should not become an instrument to create havoc”. And Justice Joseph concluded, “We have to understand our own greatness. Our greatness should lead us to be magnanimous.”

In addressing these words to the petitioner, the bench had much more than the petitioner in mind. The audience Justice Joseph and Justice Nagarathna were addressing was much wider extending to the nation as a whole and including all those who have been undermining our fraternity as a nation. The audience would include the ruling dispensation. While Rahul Gandhi’s plea to “open in the bazaar of hatred the store of love” might be construed as a partisan political jibe, when a similar view is expressed by a bench of the highest court in the land, it is imperative that the powers-that-be absorb the judicial message.

There is no place in our nationhood for the targeting of minorities with lynchings or ‘love jihad’, or bulldozing the very modest homes of blameless Muslims, or holding them to be “Babar ki aulad”―expressions that are freely bruited about without a word of reprimand from their leaders, indeed with encouragement of one minister demanding “goli maro saalon ko”. It is, thus, that the ground is prepared for calls to genocide that go unpunished. The nation has been brought to a very dangerous place. The court has rightly warned against invoking history “selectively” to “create schisms in society”. Yet, this is the precise stock-in-trade of those who have risen on the ladder of the pogrom in 2002 and abuse of the civic and human rights of a section of our society. In the words of an earlier judgment of the Supreme Court, the “egregious violence” that went into the brick-by-brick demolition of the Babri Masjid is to be deplored.

The court is, in effect, warning against the stoking of religious vengeance-seeking. It is for the sangh parivar in both its avatars as the RSS and the BJP to heed the call of the court. I have no expectation they will. Which is why we secularists must fight on, confident that the Supreme Court is behind us.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.

why-congress-should-stoop-to-conquer-mani-shankar-aiyar

Thu Mar 02 14:45:11 IST 2023

When the Bharat Jodo Yatra climaxed at Lal Chowk, Srinagar, with Rahul Gandhi raising the national flag at this historic spot, I remarked to some newspersons who had gathered around me that this was the “inflexion point” at which a moral crusade would turn into a political campaign. Having roused the conscience of the nation against the hatred being spewed, and having galvanised the party through the length of the country, the moment had arrived when our thoughts would have to seriously turn to defeating the source of the divisiveness that has overtaken us as a people. That opportunity would come at the general elections scheduled for a year hence.

By the time this column is in your hands, a giant step towards that end would have been taken at the plenary session of the All India Congress Committee in Raipur over the weekend of February 25-26. This is being written in anticipation of that event. What must the Congress do now to politically capitalise on Rahul Gandhi’s long march?

The agenda would be complex, and there are many issues to tackle. But attention would be focused on the grand strategy for the general elections. Would the Congress be going it alone as the only party in the opposition with a national presence? Or will it do so in alliance with only those regional parties who concede in advance the premier position to the Congress? Or taking on board all regional parties in recognition of their regional hold while leaving it till after the elections to determine who will lead the coalition government if the grand alliance prevails at the polls?

I think the party should hark back to the Chintan Shivir at Pachmarhi in 1998 where the consensus was that the Congress should go it alone. Then the Congress mind should turn to how events actually played out. After reverses in 1999, the Congress started seeing merit in allying with at least some regional parties to take on the formidable Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2004. Vajpayee, for his part, was so convinced of his invincibility that he brought forward the 2004 elections by almost six months. As we now know, that proved to be misplaced confidence, and, instead of the BJP, it was the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that took the reins of government for 10 long years.

What is often forgotten is that the UPA did not exist before the elections. The UPA coalition was put together and named as such after the results were out, not before. Who would be prime minister was also determined after, and not before, the election outcome. Later, when the Left parties baulked at Dr Manmohan Singh’s civil nuclear cooperation deal with the US and the Samajwadi Party stepped into the breach to secure parliamentary endorsement of the agreement, SP became part of the UPA.

It is this history that suggests itself as the answer for 2024. The Congress on its own cannot take on the saffron forces. But it need not be on its own. Most meaningful opposition parties, including Akhilesh Yadav and Nitish Kumar in the two most populous states of the Union, are as dedicated to the principle of ridding India of the last decade of hindutva rule as any Congressman or woman. Therefore, it would be advisable for the Congress to “stoop to conquer” by not asserting its primacy as a national party so as to facilitate a gravitation towards a mahagathbandhan. The election results would then show, as they did in 2004, which of the parties of the alliance has how many seats. And, accordingly, the question of leadership can be evolved by consensus.

Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.