Ravi Shankar (Columns, Opinions)https://www.newindianexpress.comen-usFri, 29 Mar 2024 04:54:28 +0000CAA is a historical rebound, not a political ployhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Mar/16/caa-is-a-historical-rebound-not-a-political-ployhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Mar/16/caa-is-a-historical-rebound-not-a-political-ploy#comments68375e9e-e73a-46d1-a543-87ed20e5ee61Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-03-17T04:15:56.440ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Ravi ShankarThe classical Greeks were obsessed with identity. They called themselves civilised and others ‘barbarians’. Identity is the monochrome membership that shapes society. India has Aryans and Dravidians. America has natives and settlers. The ‘othering’ that secular intelligentsia frets about after Narendra Modi came to power, and the Sangh’s attempts to decolonise and de-culturise all non-Hindu influences irrespective of merit, is a social identity movement powered by politics. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, is a response to India’s post-Independence secular identity crisis.

New India wants a new identity that leaves the old liberal order behind. The BJP defines India as a Hindu nation, and that’s not going to change. The secularists who governed India until 2014 never tapped into the fear of Hindus; they tapped into the fear they themselves created among Muslims about the hovering Hindu threat. India’s Partition politics gave equal weight to both communities, which was seen as a travesty by Indians who were driven out of their homes, lynched, raped and slaughtered. Identity erases individuality, which is the tragedy of all women who were gang raped during the Partition riots, not because who they were as individuals but what they represented.

Social identity is a conflict zone without winners; a Ukraine of the mind and an Auschwitz of the heart. MK Gandhi’s political ambition to promote Nehru, and his sabotage of Jinnah contributed to the creation of Pakistan; it also formalised the ‘other’ trope in modern India. Howling against the CAA and posting chronology memes disguise the larger issue of national identity. India is a majority Hindu nation. It was before, and after, and during Islamic and British conquests.

The Christian missionary calling to convert poor tribals, the Saudi money that poured into building mosques and madarasas, the jetsetting, money-grabbing NGOs promoting their interests and the governments that supported them were the paradoxical gardeners of the great banyan tree of Hindu nationalism whose fruits are the anti-illegal immigrant legislations of today.

The CAA cannot be confined to the Indian context, however. It echoes an universal mood that outsiders are unwelcome, since they corrupt local culture. Liberal prime ministers and presidents of the UK, US and Europe have allowed hate-spewing mosques, defacing of synagogues and pro-Palestinian lynch mobs in their cities. This has placed the migrant Muslim in the nationalist crosshairs. Both in White countries and in India, the Muslim crossing the border is the invader, not just an immigrant. The Right everywhere owes its rise to this new fearsome distinction.

The Social Identity Theory formulated by Henri Tajfel and John Turner notes that an individual’s self-image derives from the social categories to which they perceive themselves as “belonging”: family, clan, sport, musical world, religion, caste, etc. The social psychologists pointed out that personal identity is determined by an individual’s personal goals and achievements, while social identity is based on the goals and achievements of the groups they belong to.

Add the social cognitive theory to the volatile mix, and you have people processing information and internalising responses “to situations based on observations, even when they do not experience them firsthand, and adapt them to their own contexts”. Deportation of Rohingyas is one such example of ‘other’-isation—a historical backlash of community protectiveness which had been consciously or subconsciously suppressed so far. Immigrants arrive seeking a better life, also bring supplanting cultures. The ‘other’ is history’s heckler of identity in the theatre of the favoured. This election is just the matinee show.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The flood metaphor is sinking the Oppositionhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Mar/02/the-flood-metaphor-is-sinking-the-oppositionhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Mar/02/the-flood-metaphor-is-sinking-the-opposition#comments5891f67c-ad2a-49cd-905f-268ff21b6d96Sat, 02 Mar 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-03-02T23:30:00.000ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Narendra Modi,Amit Shah,manvantara-sandhyaRavi ShankarChaps who run big enterprises like empires, mega corporations and religions truly believe in their own greatness. The misquoted declaration of the French king, Louis IV, ‘Après moi, le déluge’—translated as ‘After me, the flood’—to his friend and mistress Madame de Pompadour, was interpreted by British lexicographer Ebenezer Cobham Brewer as “Go to be ruined, if you like, when we are dead and gone.”

Myths of divine floods destroying civilisation exist in many cultures, such as the Hindu manvantara-sandhya, Greek stories of Deucalion and Pyrrha and the Bible. The ongoing political flood in Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and a few more expected states can be summed up best by Opposition leaders as ‘Pendant moi le déluge’—‘the flood is happening when I’m around’.

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are determined that the BJP get a majority in both Houses of Parliament this time, a mission that’s been alive since 2014. The BJP is the Ark, and Modi is Noah who never says “No ah!” Their ship is taking new passengers not because the BJP needs them; in its ruthless election calculus, every MP is a bonus. Hence the panic about Kamal Nath joining the BJP so that Chhindwara becomes a saffron bastion. In Jharkhand, Geeta Koda, the only Congress MP after the saffron flood of 2019, has crossed over to the BJP.

Last month, Milind Deora, more of a guitar player than a politician, was nominated by the saffron monolith to the Rajya Sabha. Ashok Chavan of Adarsh scam fame painted himself saffron and got into the Upper House. In Assam, Himanta Biswas Sharma, who was humiliated by the Gandhis and joined the BJP, has cleaned out the Congress in the state even as Rahul keeps sacking popular and experienced leaders. Punjab, where the Congress had a good chance of winning in 2023 under Amarinder Singh, lost both the election and the Captain, who went to the BJP; Rahul’s Punjabi Svengali and election spoiler Navjot Singh Sidhu may be joining the BJP soon. Deserters have become vanilla news, and the Rajya Sabha elections are good weathercocks.

Seven MLAs from Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party cross-voted last week, after which five went off to meet Yogi Adityanath. It was a bad week for Yadav: his party’s chief whip Manoj Kumar Pandey quit, and could soon be seen chanting “Jai Shri Ram!” Many Congress MLAs in Himachal Pradesh cross-voted for BJP, and Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu is a lost cause. The party doesn’t even seem serious about winning; a wag smirked that the RS candidate for the single Himachal Pradesh seat Abhishek Manu Singhvi didn’t leave Delhi to canvass support with MLAs to avoid losing his daily hefty legal fees. His opponent Harsh Mahajan, a former three-time Congress MLA and minister, had joined the BJP in 2022. Cross-voting and floor-crossing go hand in hand since power is the only candy in the shop: the tedium was broken when a BJP MLA from Karnataka crossed over to Congress!

Getting back to Louis IV, his ‘Après moi, le déluge’ remark made in 1757 was actually an expression of despondency than arrogance because the Prussians thumped his army at the Battle of Rossbach and the king was almost assassinated. By ‘déluge’ Louis meant Halley’s Comet, which was predicted to reappear in 1757; the Christians then attributed the Genesis flood to the comet and believed a new flood will occur when the comet is back. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Right now for the leading men in the Opposition, their careers resemble the comet’s tail end.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Political biographies for curious soulshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/24/political-biographies-for-curious-soulshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/24/political-biographies-for-curious-souls#comments6a0211d0-524b-4320-852c-957b6a0f16d4Sat, 24 Feb 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-02-25T05:13:45.901ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Ravi ShankarVoicesAfter hundreds of years, fiction seems to be inching close to its sell-by date, pun intended, except for Chick Lit and Amitava Ghosh. Autobiographies work as long as they’re written or ghostwritten by Steve Jobs or Michelle Obama. Self-help books do as much good as a protein shake for a dead man. The new oeuvre getting cash registers singing is biography. All it takes are Google and the cheugy chutzpah of an amateur historian to churn out a successful saga.

Writing a biography of Narendra Modi is the fave attention-seeking scheme of all saffron balladeers, with Yogi Adityanath biogs coming second. With Hindutva bibliophilism in vogue, Veer Savarkar is the royalty route for self-invented Google historians. In every ethos, lauding the king has been the ticket to riches and rewards. But beware, biographies can get more yawns than yeahs; the trick is to pitch the guy and his gall in racy prose faster than Picasso can say “Guernica”.

Rahul Gandhi, The Ghost Who Walks: First, no publisher wants to publish his story because it won’t sell, unless it’s a jokebook. A keek at how a man, once considered India’s most eligible bachelor with dimples, became India’s most undesired politician is worth a try. Mama’s boy is a good place to start.

Shashi Tharoor, The Sexy Sesquipedalianist: A sureshot bestseller. The rizz of India’s most flamboyant politician who exemplifies power is the ultimate aphrodisiac trope: his irresistibility to women voters and sensuous socialites is his political weapon. How did he finesse the art of tossing his hair back so stylishly? What defines the true mojo of the diplomat-writer-MP-social lion; a Hindu who can recite the scriptures better than any saffron savant and knock back a malt as smoothly as a Scotsman? Beware of the word play though, he could give our Shankaracharyas a new Sanskrit word longer than Gadkari’s highways.

Nitin Gadkari, The Road-Roller: The Man from Maharashtra is as big a Sangh heavyweight as one of his road-rollers. Modi’s bête noire, he exemplifies Charles Darwin’s comrade in arms, Herbert Spencer’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ theory. Of late he is keeping schtum, flinging no more veiled barbs against the BJP superpowers. Modi-haters wish the enigmatic roadie will be PM, but he refuses to do a pran pratistha in Lok Kalyan Marg.

Lalu Yadav, The Buffalo Soldier: A venal veterinary voyage through fodder warehouses packed with money blacker than a buffalo. Nehru wrote Glimpses of World History in jail, but Glimpses of Scams and Slammer by Lalu Yadav could do the trick. And why family planning flopped in Bihar.

Nitish Kumar, The Cross-Breed: The man who crosses floors as shamelessly as a snake oil salesman will do anything to become prime minister. An expert at hybrid ideologies, he picked up a halo quitting his job as railway minister after a train accident in 1999, but lost it somewhere along the way, saying hello too many times to the BJP and RJD.

Mamata Banerjee, Bengal’s Belle of the Ball: If Girish Chandra Ghosh is the father of the golden age of Bengali theatre, Didi can easily be its most popular actor now. Her appearance on the poll stage in a wheelchair with a bandaged leg did more to get her a landslide than the BJP’s boo-boos. Able to switch to poor man’s patois with the ease of a Bengali picking on hilsa bones, she is the only woman politician who keeps Opposition oracles guessing.

Note to publishers: Politicians make good subjects as long as they are objects in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by JK Rowling.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Hornet’s nest of advisors is Rahul’s cursehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/17/hornets-nest-of-advisors-is-rahuls-cursehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/17/hornets-nest-of-advisors-is-rahuls-curse#comments685a5532-a473-4415-9f94-84222d6fdaf2Sat, 17 Feb 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-02-17T23:30:00.000ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Rahul Gandhi,CongressRavi ShankarMagazineVoicesIdeas and personalities occur twice in history. The first time as comedy and the second as farce. The comedy of the first Bharat Jodo Yatra, a celebrity-studded event with photo ops galore, didn’t leave footprints in the shifting sands of the December state elections. Inserting ‘nyay’ after jodo, defines the farce of his second yatra, which has met its premature end. Obviously another idea whose time came and left.

What is wrong with the ill-fated Hamlet of the Congress party? Hamlet asks his close friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.” The prince of Denmark is betrayed by them, and Rahul has enough Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns to depend on for political advice.

Sam Pitroda: Tech administrator, businessman, food security expert and policy guru is familiar to Rahul since childhood as his father’s close friend. The president of the Indian Overseas Congress is as clued into grassroots politics as a vegetarian is into Chettinad chicken, having announced that Ram Mandir is not the most important issue in India. Great with a modem, but has lousy connectivity to New India’s poll mood.

Jairam Ramesh: He is Rahul’s Jai Ram Mandir where he is worshipped as the battering ram of intellectual ingenuity. Erudite, witty, charming and ever-smiling with a dramatic drawing room silver mane, Ramesh is often seen sitting next to his boss in Parliament, whispering into his ear. We don’t know what he is saying, but it sounds pretty important since Rahul laughs: must be some dad joke about Lalu.

Ramesh has never contested a Lok Sabha election, and basks in permanent Rajya Sabha bliss. A distinguished academic with an MIT stint and many lofty government positions, his pristine white kurta has never soiled a tea shop bench in Amethi. One of Rahul’s main strategists, he mainly gets memes made for the Congress when he isn’t advising his boss on Cambridge speeches in the Congress war room.

Randeep Surjewala: He is Rahul’s mouth and has to eat crow often. He is another fave family retainer who has never won a Lok Sabha election, and is another one of Congress party’s Rajya Sabha refugees. The man who supposedly coined the disastrous ‘chowkidar chor hai’ slogan is a clever backroom mover and shaker, but a dud in the front office.

KC Venugopal: Another Rajya Sabha Zorro, this Malayali politician is besties with Surjewala, and both were given the responsibility for handing out election tickets for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls while the boss was stumping across India. Venu is a member of the Coordination Committee of the INDIA Alliance which is already on ventilator. Will he give tickets to Congress candidates from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar this time is anyone’s guess. The Congress is like a lobster in a boiling pot in a Chinese restaurant, but Venugopal rarely gets into hot water because of his boss.

Jitendra Singh: This Alwar royal is often seen motorcycling in Mussoorie and at Dehradun parties when he isn’t recycling ideas for his party. Consistency is his virtue: he manages to lose elections in his charge: UP, Assam and Odisha. Guess what, he was also the last word in candidate selection in the Madhya Pradesh elections.

That nobody listens to Rahul Gandhi is bad news for the Congress. But whom Rahul listens to is worse.

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Modi fragmenting opposition unityhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/03/modi-fragmenting-opposition-unityhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Feb/03/modi-fragmenting-opposition-unity#commentsb91ef35b-dde7-4564-bc35-372c9a4378a5Sat, 03 Feb 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-02-03T23:30:00.000ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Narendra Modi,Nitish Kumar,INDIA blocRavi ShankarShould there be a political IPL, Captain Narendra Modi would be hailed for his masterstroke on the Patna pitch. Bowled over and caught behind the sticky wicket is the Jumping Jack of Bihar, Nitish Kumar. Modi has managed to not only expose the brittle marriage called the INDIA alliance, but also thrown shade on the credibility of the ragtag bunch of regional rajas and ranis.

The truth is that the Opposition has nothing to offer. Words without context are as real as bread pakodas in a Michelin restaurant. Rahul Gandhi was on steroids after the Congress won the Karnataka Assembly polls; a victory attributed to the Bharat Jodo Yatra. But karma is a bitch; his party was eviscerated in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The Yatra’s message was that India is broken and Rahul will glue it back.

He is yet to credibly explain where India is broken. What’s his panacea? Love? The meaning is as clear as a Delhi airport runway in January. His new yatra tagline is Nyay. Justice, for who? The Modi government has redesigned India as a welfare state that works; in the words of Benjamin Disraeli, “Power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE”.

Government funds being spent on health, insurance, education, direct transfers of dole, schemes and loans for hawkers and domestic help could not get more socialist. The difference: Modivaad ensures last-mile delivery unlike Rajiv Gandhi’s admission in 1986 that out of every government rupee spent on welfare, only 25 paise reaches the average Joe. Even when he was PM, Rajiv couldn’t get the people their 75 paise. Modi did.

If the Congress is serious about its survival—my bet is Modi’s BJP will cross the 320-350 mark if elections were held today—it should minimise Rahul’s decision-making and forget about the 2024 polls. Concentrate on rebuilding the party in states; Uttar Pradesh is its crematorium. Modi ain’t going anywhere, his genius for calculated reinvention—Balakot, CAA, Triple Talaq, Kashmir, Ram Mandir—will keep the woefully inadequate Rahul on his toes. He should call off his yatra. Even considering Rahul an alternative to Modi is laughable: blowing kisses works for Netflix, not at a pilgrim queue in Ayodhya.

In 1976, during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi amended the Constitution to add ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ in the Preamble using the 42nd Amendment. Removing Emergency patois from India’s sacred book is indeed a national emergency. The Congress is running on grouses: the new copies of the Constitution given to MPs don’t include ‘socialist’ and ‘secular.’

This is the 21st century, folks, socialism is as relevant as a circus clown at a funeral. It is a tired trope that insists on the separation of religion and politics. In India, religion is and was politics. Indira Gandhi was advised by Dhirendra Brahmachari and conducted a mahamritunjaya paath at home before Operation Blue Star.

This was not soft Hindutva, but the real thing. The Bhagalpur riots of October 1989 in Bihar killed 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, when her son was in power: Manipur’s Biren Singh could take heart that Rajiv blocked the transfer of Bhagalpur SP KS Dwivedi who had taken the Hindu side. The INDIA alliance is yet to formulate the meaning of its message. For this, it needs a unified message that makes sense succinctly. Modi’s message is always clear: janta, bhagwan, desh.

Modi is the man whose hour keeps coming. Rahul may be counting the minutes to his coronation, but his timing, as usual, is wrong again. Nitish, the master of timing and the leader of Janata Dal (U)-turns may have a word or two to say about that.

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Modi is converting all Hindus to Hinduismhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/27/modi-is-converting-all-hindus-to-hinduismhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/27/modi-is-converting-all-hindus-to-hinduism#comments6eae3e78-27f9-4abc-b730-726f543ef26fSat, 27 Jan 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-01-27T23:30:00.000ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Narendra Modi,HinduRavi ShankarVoicesWhataboutery’ is the Wordle solution in India’s ideological puzzle. The noun debuted in The Irish Times sometime in the 1970s when Northern Ireland was in bloody turmoil; a letter to the editor bemoaned the fact that “We have a bellyful of Whataboutery in these killing days and the one clear fact to emerge is that people, Orange and Green, are dying as a result of it…” Add a bit of Pantone dark to the Orange, and you get saffron. The Ram Mandir of Ayodhya is the BJP’s retort to whataboutery; for the word is bandied about as freely by liberals, all the while throwing shade as the political patois of the Right.

It goes something like this: “Why blame the Mughals alone for demolishing temples? Hindu rulers did it too. Didn’t King Indra III demolish the temple of Kalapriya who his arch foes, the Pratiharas, worshipped in 10 AD? Besides, more recently, didn’t Narendra Modi demolish ancient temples while developing Varanasi?”

“Why give Mahmud of Ghazni a bollocking for looting the Somnath temple? Didn’t the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I steal the Vatapi Ganapati idol from the Chalukiyas after desecrating their mandir?”

“Why blame only Mughals of massacring Hindus? Didn’t the Pandavas, helped by Lord Krishna, a Hindu god, kill their own brothers, the Kauravas, who were all Hindus?”

A professional Anglophile academic who is just a featherweight on her own campus, but lauded as a liberal icon busy defending Indian syncretism at various Lit Fests, ventures that Aurangzeb demolished temples because they were war rooms of Brahmins where funds to foment rebellion were stored. It was a law and order problem, she says, not sacrilege. In other words, the Hindus invited Mughal wrath on themselves.

And so on and so forth. However, the Left’s whataboutery versions have vanished like the Babri Masjid from the philosophical skyline. The new mass acceptability of the Right wing Hindu and their idea of Hinduism is enjoying an India moment. The Idea of Hindusim and the Idea of India have been sublimated by Narendra Modi, who has stamped his immortal imprimatur on India’s history with the Ram Mandir’s consecration.

The future and past came together inside the sanctum sanctorum on January 22, when an OBC Indian consecrated the most powerful symbol of faith and politics in modern India. In doing so, Modi has given Ram to the ordinary Indian, and institutionalised his right to worship beyond the restrictions of caste. It is a masterstroke—the term is unavoidable here—of social engineering.

The Idea of India as a Nehruvian concept belonged to another age when political correctness had not been invented, politicians smoked pipes, prime ministers spoke French, ministers toasted foreign counterparts with Merlot and malt, and journalists were respected for their work, not for studio makeup and their hectoring decibels. Oxford-educated ministers drove around in non-AC Ambassadors while today, semi-literate MPs with criminal records travel to Parliament in bulletproof Audis and Mercs.

India, with its non-linear history, is a construct of contradictions which have to be understood and streamlined by negotiating its political pitfalls. Modi himself is a contradiction: a solitary seeker who belongs to the masses. It is this singularity that makes him invincible and transcend this antinomy, and why even those who question his actions in private believe in him.

Muslim invaders converted Hindus into Islam using force and bribes. Modi’s mission is to convert all Hindus into Hinduism. What kind of whataboutery is that?

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Thus begins the age of Ram https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/21/thus-begins-the-age-of-ramhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/21/thus-begins-the-age-of-ram#comments4c764da0-e579-44df-bd48-20e6e12f9761Sun, 21 Jan 2024 01:52:55 +00002024-01-21T01:52:55.009ZRavi Shankar/api/author/1878295Ram temple,AyodhyaRavi ShankarThat morning was cold and bright like invader’s steel. December cold. December 6, 1992, cold. Terraced buildings surrounded the crowded, barricaded square below the elevation upon which squatted Babur’s bloody legacy; its yellowed walls invaded by insolent vegetation, its three domes blackened and age-spotted. The terrace of the building facing it brimmed with a restless crowd; men, old and young, wearing saffron headbands, jostling for a glimpse of the domes of atavistic hatred. It was D-Day. Demolition Day.

The air was charged with the static of history. As the slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ reached a pitch the crowd became one, in body and spirit. The excitement was infectious. A young man, wearing a saffron headband and a saffron gamcha around his shoulders raised his fists to the sky. Suddenly, there was no stopping the crowd. It surged uphill, scaled the walls and clambered on to the domes. Young men planted saffron pennants on all three cupolas, and the assault began. An old man, with his grandson on his shoulders, did a little jig on the terrace.

Pointing at Babur’s mosque which crouched above holy Ayodhya like an ancient insult, he cried out, “Look beta, Ram Lalla is being freed.” Tears streamed down his wrinkled cheeks. The boy did not understand his grandfather but clapped his little hands nevertheless. I grabbed a saffron gamcha from the teenager next to me. I wound it around my head and rushed down to join the wave of kar sevaks scaling the rise. I was participating in unprecedented history.

Inside, the domes wept dust. The air was thick with pulverized debris and falling mortar.

Yogi Adityanath performs a puja

A sadhu’s figure emerged in the smoky haze, hair wild and untied, beard fanned out like white fire as he struck at an already crumbling wall with a gleaming trident. His eyes were fiery with triumph. He thrust the trident forward and screamed, “Come on son, grab this! Strike! Strike, in the name of Ram!” The blows struck then; tridents, pick-axes, hammers and even bare fists brought down a hated symbol of Islamic conquest. The domes were gone. The sky was clear. Ayodhya lay spread below, dreaming of resurgence.

Three decades and a change later, a grand, sprawling edifice of pink Bansi Paharpur stone is rising up to erase old memories of shame and redeem the past. A group of sadhus wandering on a gigantic maidan on which makeshift yagyashalas of various ashrams stood, looks happy like children unexpectedly given candy.

One of them, gap-toothed, a smile showing through a thick confusion of white moustache and beard, declares grandly, “The Ram temple is the victory of Hinduism. What we began that day has borne fruit.” He had participated in the demolition when young. The group had come to Ayodhya from various parts of Uttar Pradesh: Gorakhpur, Chitrakoot, Shahjahanpur—Ayodhya unites people. “Anyone who comes here on these days are blessed, they must have done a lot of punya in their past life,” is another’s opinion.

The portly Lallu Singh, the government contractor-turned MP from Faizabad squats on a charpoy in a shed of his godown and echoes their sentiment. “Prabhu Shri Ram is the embodiment of Hindutva, which is now gaining significance in the country. Bharat used to be the jagat guru of the world, it was a ‘sone ki chidiya’. The upcoming temple is a step towards reiteration of that age-old ethos,” he said. His workers, busy attaching saffron pennants to iron rods for the occasion, nod in agreement.

The city is a canvas of colours. Yellow kites emblazoned with Ram’s weapons frolic in the crisp air. Schoolchildren draw rangolis on the pavements. The hawks observe it all, riding the thermals far above, and the memory of Jatayu comes unbidden to the mind. January 22 is Hinduism’s biggest day of the century. All of Hindutva’s main organizations are on sacred steroids, preparing Ayodhya for its holy hour. Up to four lakh pilgrims are expected by the weekend and all arrangements have been made for their stay. Numerous bhandaras have been set up; food and drink is free. The Sundar Kand is being recited continuously at all holy sites. The RSS has deployed hundreds of its cadres to ensure all arrangements go without a hitch. The VHP is present in force, both symbolically and literally.

At Karsevakpuram, the outfit’s Ayodhya HQ—a poster of Ashok Singhal greets you with folded hands at its entrance. The great bells—made of ashtadhatu, an alloy of eight metals—to be installed inside the Ram temple await their hour. The largest bell weighs 2,400 kg and the seven others weigh 51 kg each. Observing the ongoing frenetic work to finish the Singh Dwar where the red carpet to receive Ayodhya’s exalted visitors starts, it becomes obvious that Uttar Pradesh’s austere chief minister Yogi Adityanath—he still sleeps on the floor—means business.

Special DG (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar elaborates on the immense security challenge which is being handled effectively. “There is round-the-clock security in Ayodhya on January 22. All the roads from Lucknow, Varanasi, Prayagraj, Gorakhpur and Gonda will be sealed, creating a ‘green corridor’,” he says.

Yogi has razed all previous reminders of history’s toxic memories in Ayodhya. Instead of the slaves of Babur’s commander Mir Baqi, the temple is being erected by a legion of workers in crash helmets and windproof jackets. Gigantic iron scaffolds dominate the skyline and massive earthmovers and bulldozers rumble about raising dust. The temple itself is vast, occupying all of 2.77 acres.

It is not only the politicians or itinerant sadhus who are satisfied about the final outcome of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement which the VHP began in the 1980s, and Advani’s Rath Yatra imprinted on the national consciousness. The organisation’s soft-spoken, iron-willed international president Alok Kumar who has refashioned its unruly image into a Hindutva political force, is jubilant—on December 21, 1992, in Faizabad, Advani had expressed the opinion that the VHP was a fringe outfit. Kumar exclaims, “It isn’t only the VHP which is celebrating. All Hindus are. Most important is the fact that Lord Ram has been installed in every Hindu’s heart.”

Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh which is the heart of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, is the first introduction to Ayodhya. The city is in celebration mode. Its streets are festive with colourful illumination; every wall and bunting bears images of Ram, Modi and Yogi. Ram is everywhere, both as a godly warrior slaying evil and a serene king protecting the idealistic nation. Saffron pennants imprinted with his image and the salutary slogan flutter in the wind.

Meanwhile, a random poster welcoming Bhupendra Modi—a local wit suggested he put them up himself—the man who filed the petition to get Rahul Gandhi disqualified from the Lok Sabha provides some comic relief. At the entrance to new Ayodhya on Ram Path, stand two large back-to-back statues of Hinduism’s most worshipped warrior god, welcoming and bidding a safe journey to visitors. Dharma Path sports all the signs of a New Age metropolis: 470 massive solar streetlights shaped like yellow suns and straddling tall, engraved columns look futuristic in this timeless town. “The CM’s intention is to make Ayodhya a global city,” reveals Kumar.

The Ramayana is a recurrent theme that runs through the capital of Ram Rajya. Scenes from the epic depicting various adventures of its divine hero are displayed in murals along the highway and the town: Ram consecrating a Shivalinga by the sea for it to part; the slaying of Shurpanakha in her demonic form; Jatayu’s last stand. Billboards advertise Ram Kathas by many veterans and ashram heads. One was going on to the rapt attention of a large group seated in an expansive, newly-erected auditorium at Bhaktmall ji ki Bagiya.

Despite the Shankaracharya controversy, Modi is seen by Ayodhyaites as a yogi adept at performing the arcane rituals of Hinduism and yoga. “Never in the history of Ayodhya has a king consecrated a temple as was the custom in the old days,” observes Vimalendra Tiwari, a shopkeeper who plies his trade by the Naya Ghat on the Saryu River. “Now that too will be completed in Ayodhya,” he says referring to the prime minister.

On January 22, Narendra Modi, the mascot of new Ayodhya, marks a new milestone in his journey as the torchbearer of global Hinduism. The Ram temple is guaranteed to bear his imprimatur as god’s supreme warrior in the Modiayana of the future. Since Modi’s visit to Ayodhya just over three years ago, work to transform the town into a modern city is proceeding at manic pace in three 24/7 shifts. Supercop Prashant Kumar, who is part of the committee that oversees the reconstruction, says, “Ayodhya was a sleepy little town. The government has made it vibrant, by widening roads and scaling up infrastructure. The public is participating in the effort. Ayodhya looks after its wellbeing.”

The streets of Ayodhya

Before 2019, Ayodhya was just a small town which occupied a mere four sq km of land; now it has spread to 63 sq km. The city plan of modern Ayodhya is based on the proto-structure of the ancient town and is constructed along the line defined in the Atharva Veda. Interestingly, no street, building or public place will be named after any character from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, but are being taken from the Vedas.

Central Ayodhya, which is seeing most of the reconstruction is choked with traffic, though surprisingly well managed in the face of the ordinary Indian’s disrespect for road rules. SDG Kumar explains that he is expecting more than one lakh pilgrims on January 22 alone, which is expected to grow exponentially afterwards. Says Praveen Kumar, IG, Ayodhya, “We have ramped up personnel and intelligence, and allotted more police vehicles. About 400 CCTVs of the total 10,000 in the district have AI capabilities.” River security on the Saryu has been boosted with more patrol boats and guards. The police have also conducted a survey of all the residents of the temple neighbourhood to prevent unexpected disruptions.

The revival of Ayodhya’s ancient glory is expected to help the BJP politically and electorally but is by no means the first attempt. The Raghuvansham by Kalidas refers to Kush, Ram and Sita’s son, arriving in Ayodhya on a mission of restoration.

The Gupta emperors had promoted the city in the 5th century AD and changed its name from Saketa to ‘Ayodhya of Lord Ram’.

The Ram aesthetic pervades the town; his flags adorn rooftops, the Jai Siya Ram slogans pierce the winter air, bow and arrow motifs adorn pillars in glowing shades of sacred neon. Despite the ongoing work, worship at the janmabhoomi hasn’t stopped. Long lines of pilgrims snake through the exterior site—the temple construction can be glimpsed through the barricades—to reach the makeshift temple for a darshan of Ram Lalla and his three brothers, and Hanuman paying obeisance to them. The idols were installed in the bulletproof, fibre glass, makeshift temple on August 5, 2020, when Prime Minister Modi performed the bhoomi pujan for the temple. The temple, when finished will have 13 smaller temples. Finally, after centuries of neglect, Lord Ram officially gets his pantheon.

Narendra Modi, his modern general, is the leitmotif of Ayodhya, as its restorer and political high priest. His visage is ubiquitous from Lucknow to Ayodhya, from the walls to the posters to the hoardings. So is Yogi, the supreme mahant of Gorakhnath Math which has been at the forefront of the struggle to establish the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. It was his guru Mahant Avaidyanath who had led the VHP’s Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti Yatra; his guru Yogi Digvijayanath had played a significant role in the nascent movement which began in 1949.

The involvement of the Gorakhnath Math in the Janmabhoomi agitation is a long story. The ‘Gaddi Nasheen’—the Urdu name given to the high priest of the Hanuman Garhi temple—had led Avaidyanath’s Yatra. Tradition forbids him from leaving the temple premises, and the fact he did to participate in Advaidyanath’s Yatra shows how deeply Ram is imbedded in Ayodhya’s multicultural language of accord. “There is no need for fear in Ayodhya now. Instead of the sound of gunfire, there will be the voices of people singing praises to Lord Ram,” is Yogi Adityanath’s take. Now that the temple objective has been achieved, Yogi’s serious mien occasionally gives way to a smile of satisfaction. He choppers to Ayodhya regularly to oversee preparations. On Makar Sankranti, he braved the fog and landed on the temple premises, freshly groomed in his trademark saffron clothes to conduct Swachchhta Abhiyan by cleaning the premises.

Where Ram is, can Sita be far behind? Sita’s dowry—actually two of them—arrived in Ayodhya with great clamour and rejoicing early last week. There is a long-standing tussle between Janakpur in Nepal and Sitamarhi in Bihar; both claim she was born in their town. The competition between them is about who brought the biggest number of gifts for the royal daughter-in-law. The winner this time seems to be Sitamarhi, which has sent at least five trucks loaded with fine garments, gold and jewellery, grain and other household items to fill Sita’s marital homesite, while her holy husband is consecrated in a permanent abode after a wait of five centuries.

But if Ayodhya is blessed by Ram, it is cursed by Sita. Before the agnipariksha forced on her by accusations of a laundryman in the town was to begin, she had cursed that the town would always remain poor and that Goddess Lakshmi will abandon it, never to return. Parts of the old town still bear the stains of her fury. The twisting warrens of its inner streets, flanked by repainted buildings are interrupted by flaking facades of fossilised houses. Winding lanes as narrow as a bigot’s mind, and thin, bumpy roads, the women squatting on the threshold of their tiny homes to gaze at the passing show of the day, the malnourished children playing in the streets, the shikhars of temples new and old pointing to the sky in supplication to the divine, Hanuman’s chattering army racing down the tree trunks and squatting on rooftops with twitching tails; all reflect the truth that little has changed. Old Ayodhya remains pretty much the same as when the masjid still stood, perhaps, going back even centuries.

But is the curse being lifted and the goddess of prosperity back to smile on Ayodhya again? Going by the frantic construction, the widening of streets, a swanky new airport and railway station, electric buses emblazoned with Modi and Yogi portraits and newly constructed houses and buildings, Ayodhya has finally stepped smack into the 21st century at last. To lure the goddess of prosperity back, Swamy Raghavacharya is conducting a round-the-clock yagna on the banks of Saryu.

Ayodhya has become a town of holy fires. In another massive makeshift yogshala, one of the many set up by various Hindu organisations advertising their spiritual heads on large billboards, countless havan kunds have been laid out in long neat rows. Endless amounts of ghee have been brought to light homa fires in the city of 4,000 temples. Groups of young acolytes—both children and teenagers—dressed in saffron dhoti-kurtas, socks and matching caps are conducting the pujas and reciting the incantations specific to each deity each row is allotted; 25,000 temporary yagna sites have been erected across Ayodhya.

Some acolytes are from a Rajasthan gurukul. What do they want to be when they grow up? Doctors? IT engineers?

A bright boy with a shaven head nods a negative. “I will continue in this Order. I will become a teacher myself,” he elaborates.

The timeless Saryu, which has claimed and rebirthed Rama’s city for millennia flows serenely beside Guptar Ghat where Ram is believed to have taken jal samadhi by walking into its timeless waters to embrace his immortal destiny. Where forests once stood, now TV crews have set up cameras and kitsch is splashed on the walls. Lord Ram’s vanvaas is finally over. Modi has declared pran pratishtha day as a second Deepawali, asking all Indians to light lamps on that day.

The rebuilt ghats which are illuminated by lakhs of clay lamps every Diwali, will dispel darkness on the new, sacred night. The age of Ram dawns.

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There’s more to Modi’s photo Ops than Narcissismhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/13/theres-more-to-modis-photo-ops-than-narcissism-2650117.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/13/theres-more-to-modis-photo-ops-than-narcissism-2650117.html#comments0e71d8a9-dcf8-4f0e-b033-35bd0fa8148eSat, 13 Jan 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-01-11T17:34:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Ravi ShankarAnother sheesh column praising Modi? Can’t help it. The guy manages to pull it off, Assembly elections or Maldives. There is no doubt that our beloved Prime Minister loves photo ops. Exquisitely groomed, walking upon the silver sands of Lakshadweep while the Arabian Sea chants its timeless mantra around him, projects a man deep in contemplation of his and his nation’s destiny. The snorkelling adventure sportsman wearing a life jacket (some landlubber at the PMO messed up flotation physics) signals a leader with rizz; can you imagine Manmohan scuba diving?

The four Maldives ministers and their big mouths proved costly for their little country’s economy, which survives on Indian tourism rupees. They probably hoped to please their new anti-India, Chinese puppet boss, President Mohamed Muizzu, who vowed to expel Indian troops from the island. The ministers were given marching orders, not the Indian Army.

Maldives is being cancelled online by millions of Indian tourists who are calling off their beach holidays. There was a 3,400 per cent rise in Google searches for Lakshadweep when the week began. After the holy Himalayas, now Modi ‘owns’ the Indian Ocean. To paraphrase William Cowper: “He is the monarch of all he surveys; His right there is none to dispute; From the centre all round to the sea, he is lord of the fowl and the brute.”

To read Modi’s photo ops as narcissistic nonsense is politically suicidal. The CEO of viral tweets is the master of social media, which makes him the most followed leader on X and YouTube. The resolute pilot in combat gear in the cockpit of a Tejas fighter jet is meant to evoke aerial vengeance of the Balakot kind. Modi boating on a tranquil Dal Lake signals that terrorism won’t win in Kashmir after Article 370 was binned. The viral photo of Modi busy at work on board Air India One, on his way to meet Joe Biden pictures the Man Who Never Sleeps in service of India.

Modi performing rituals in Kedarnath makes him the ultimate Hindu poster boy: a yogi whose deep spiritualism overshadows the brutal banalities of politics. The famous Modi hug is to signal his intimacy with world leaders. The Prime Minister, dressed in a grey waistcoat and matching trousers to meet and greet injured soldiers who clashed with Chinese troops in Galwan Valley represents a General Who Cares for His Men, while the Opposition launches rhetoric-rockets about Xi’s PLA occupying Indian land. The maestro of the visual message is unmatched in crafted communication. Slogans like ‘Modi Hai to Mumkin Hai’ and ‘Modi ki Guarantee’, in tandem with curated camera charisma have just one memo: Trust Modi.

This is why Rahul Gandhi and other Opposition stalwarts fail to weaken Modi’s mass might. The Modi syndrome is more than a perception battle. It is an inexplicable personal covenant with people only he has. Indians trust him. Life is expensive. The rupee keeps tanking against the dollar. It is raining corporate scandals. ED raids on political rivals are as common as Opposition MPs getting blackballed in Parliament. Still Modi is the only trusted politician where it matters.

To the Indian electorate, especially in states that have the most Lok Sabha seats, this trust is Modi’s ‘armour’, as he has often claimed in Parliament. The Congress’s first task to regain the people’s trust is to shed its corruption tag and Rahul’s dorky image. It is too late to achieve this in five months. There are not enough cameras for that.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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No political free pass to striking truckershttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/06/no-political-free-passto-striking-truckers-2647902.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2024/Jan/06/no-political-free-passto-striking-truckers-2647902.html#comments67752039-e4eb-4ea2-9736-1f7b7a673196Sat, 06 Jan 2024 23:30:00 +00002024-01-06T06:05:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182truck,Truckers,Bharatiya Nyaya SanhitaRavi ShankarShe, like millions of girls her age, liked to shoot Instagram reels. One she will never make is that of her death. The night this year opened, she was riding her scooter when a car hit her; but kept running for kilometres, dragging her body along on the road for about half an hour. Fatherless, her mother ill, she was the only one the family depended on for their daily bread. They didn’t even have the money for her last rites. Her story, like that of thousands of youth, is not special. But the media, with little to froth at the mouth except on Rahul Gandhi’s marmalade-making eccentricities, found it special on a dull news day. The nation wanted to know more.

What the nation must really know is that India is being held to ransom by unions. Truckers called for a strike, paralysing fuel supplies and inducing scare shopping. The new hit-and-run law passed under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita imposes a fine of Rs 7 lakh on the driver who flees the scene after a hit-and-run accident, and 10 years in jail; previous jail time was just two years. The statistics are frightful. The annual ‘Road Accidents in India’ report in 2022 noted 67,387 incidents of hit-and-run. 30,486 people were killed; nearly 85 victims a day or four people died per hour.

However, the new law applies not just to truck drivers, but to all drivers. However the truckers argue that only a small percentage of hit-and-run accidents are caused by them. The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. How many more statistics must die bleeding and abandoned on the road? Why did the Centre, which stood resolute on CAA reportedly put a hold on the law, and said ‘Uncle’ to truckers? It is optics, stupid. Elections are just a few months away. Panic buying erodes confidence in governance.

Strike funk is India’s favourite pandemic. Any psychologist will tell you that today's mass hysteria is affecting consumers, truckers, bank employees, farmers and politicians with fat to fry. Psychologists define two distinct kinds of hysteria: mass anxiety hysteria and mass motor hysteria, pun unintended. The fuel of successful protest is mass hysteria. The striking truckers were perhaps infected by groupthink: mass hysteria caused by their leaders, which resulted in a shared fury; in this case against the new law. For three days, the victimised public was possessed by epidemic hysteria, which grips normal people in the face of any stress. For three days, people filled their fuel tanks, stocked vegetables and provisions and put travel plans on hold.

India exults in having a mutinous society. Labour strikes once plagued pre-liberalisation India. Then Manmohan Singh opened up a myriad of new employment avenues, which caused a decline in union power. However, kvetching unions still have the power to jolt the economy and spread mass insecurity. Banks still go on strike, forcing customers to rush to ATMs in droves. The farmers’ stir cordoned off New Delhi until the government promised a solution in the face of state elections. Frequent bus, taxi and autorickshaw strikes leave millions stranded. Water strikes compel people to stand in line at public taps to hoard water beforehand. Power strikes, now considerably reduced by privatisation, mean long blackouts in summer which require a beleaguered middle class to stretch the home budget to buy inverters.

Worker’s Rights was the clarion call of Socialism when incomes were low, and before consumerism and EMIs went shopping hand in hand. Unions are on a downward trajectory, but protest is a fundamental right. The right to harass the public is not. The law must apply equally to all offenders. That is justice.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The year of polls will change the modern world orderhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/30/the-year-of-polls-will-change-the-modern-world-order-2645753.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/30/the-year-of-polls-will-change-the-modern-world-order-2645753.html#comments70ba25e7-8397-4b9f-9b31-f75342af93baSat, 30 Dec 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-12-30T11:11:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Ravi ShankarSix hundred years before the birth of Christ, the world’s first democracy was born in Athens to challenge aristocracy. A new system, called demokratia gave political power to male Athenians, read male  landowners, to select their Assembly. To get Athenian citizenship and pass judgments in criminal and civil matters, a jury comprising 200 to 5,000 citizens headed by a randomly chosen judge, held a secret ballot. Each juror got two small stones, one whole for ‘Yes’, and with a hole through its middle for ‘No’. Two urns were kept in the room. Each juror would drop his stone in either urn depending on his choice. The word ‘psephology’, the statistical study of elections and voting patterns, owes its origin to the Greek word psephos, for ‘stone’. However, current psephologists seem to be stoned. Perhaps, their statistical models are too hazy to comprehend the change in voting attitudes.

It would be safe to say that 2024 is the Year of Elections. The largest democracy on earth—94.50 crore voters as on January 1, 2023—will crowd polling booths across India. They are likely to gift Narendra Modi a third contiguous term: the only premier who holds that record is Jawaharlal Nehru. American voters will choose their 47th president: public opinion favours Donald Trump. Mexico will make its choice this year amid a raging immigration crisis.

The year will see 40 national elections, in which 41 per cent of the world’s population will take their pick in Europe, France, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine and Finland, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana, Rwanda, Namibia, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo and South Sudan and more. The Paradox of Democracy 2 024 is that while the number of voters is up, the people will not have much of a say in autocracies. Elections due this year in Russia and Iran are a guaranteed hoax: Putin controls both the polls and the results, while Iran’s murderous Ayatollah regime has already disqualified 25 per cent of opposition candidates. Defiant little Taiwan votes, standing up to the looming shadow of avaricious China. Earlier this month Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi barred the Leftist politician Ahmed Tantawy, his only plausible challenger, from contesting for the presidency. Voters in many such ‘democracies’ are disheartened—turnout is likely to be low, since they know the results are preordained. Pakistan’s national election will test its fragile democracy and failed economy to the limits. 

In most of these countries, pure ideology will be replaced by empirical concerns. The Outsider or the Other will be the common enemy; the main threat to indigenous culture, historical accreditation and economic growth. The generic sentiment is against Islam, the self-ghettoisation of Muslims in Europe and the UK, and their attempts to police citizens through Sharia and a refusal to adapt to the values of the nations of their refuge.

This is compounded by racism, since the majority of immigrants are Muslims from dark-skinned lands. By the time 2024 is on its way out, geopolitics and social structure will have changed definitively. Voters will redefine the meaning of democracy and decide the course of the clash of civilisations, which erupted to the fore on the morning of September 11, 2001 when 19 terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon. In India, it was on December 6, 1992, when Babur’s Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished by Ram’s legion, which won a war lost centuries ago. The 20th-century elections were about nations and decolonisation. This century belongs to nationalists and nationalism.

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Global feminism is being Enslaved by violent menhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/16/global-feminism-is-being-enslaved-by-violent-men-2641540.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/16/global-feminism-is-being-enslaved-by-violent-men-2641540.html#comments7983eb3c-11d3-45ec-b76f-1b97080357d9Sat, 16 Dec 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-12-17T03:01:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182women's rights,global feminismRavi ShankarA wave of blind partisanship is dividing global feminism. The caucus of causes are in a huddle, having lost the plot. Since 2016, Iranian women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi has been in and out of prison, because the Ayatollahs hate her hair. Last week, it was left to her two twins Ali and Kiana, to receive the Nobel peace prize on her behalf; Ali quoted his mother, while speaking to reporters in Stockholm, “Victory is not easy, but it is certain.” Mohammadi is a driving force behind the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, which calls for the right of Iranian women to discard the hated headscarf.

Why are there no ‘Free Narges!’ mass processions blocking the Brooklyn Bridge? Hundreds of women and girls have been tortured, raped and murdered by the Islamic Republic’s Morality Police; in police vans, cop stations and jails, for not wearing the hijab. Why is it so unpalatable for woke activists in the West to equate the sadism endured by these women with Hamas’s rape and mutilation of Jewish women and girls? Many of them were gangraped until they couldn’t walk, and then shot by the monsters. Their pelvises and legs broke while being ravaged. 

Is the sorority of pain compromised? Why are no burqa-clad protestors rocking the Arab street against the mass rapes and detention of their Uighur sisters in China; or of Baloch women kidnapped, violated and murdered by Pakistani soldiers and cops? There is no Brinda Karat to lament the defilement of Ukrainian women. No strident words from Michelle Obama against the October 7 Hamas atrocities, though she condemned Boko Haram’s kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. No women in keffiyeh marching in London against sexual violence in Haiti. And no follow-up of the Hathras rape by the NCW and Indian feminists. A crisis of contradiction has risen between the liberating ideals of women power and support for violent Islamist nationalism, which has selectively paralysed the soapbox liberals on the Palestine cause celebre. It is time to redefine feminism to save its true purpose: recognising equality of female trauma.

The great feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, espouses the concept that woman has been held in a relationship of age-old oppression to man through marginalisation, as his ‘Other’. Now the Other has been co-opted by Hamas rapists to make the ‘River to the Sea’ their cause celebre. Irony of ironies, it’s women who are tearing down posters of Jewish hostages and babies. It is women who are kicking and punching Jewish women. It is women leaders of elite universities who are ‘contextualising’ terrorist rape. The ideological de-hyphenation of feminism and parti pris politics is over; the current gender trope being Woman vs Woman for crimes committed by men against women. Book II of The Second Sex illustrates Beauvoir’s seminal belief, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The prevalent sectarian ethos of race politics sees the Left liberal feminist ‘becoming’ a woman only in warped circumstances.

Modern feminism stands at the crossroads of conscience. Violent men have weaponised misogyny to enslave the psychology of feminism. Sorry, Ali, victory for the world’s wronged women; abused, violated, tortured, ostracised and discriminated against looks uncertain, since their champions are synthetic sopranos of the odious opera of gender hypocrisy. Beauvoir commented that if a free woman doesn’t actively try to help women who are not free, she is implicated in their oppression. Who will tell the raucous spitballs of ‘Free Palestine’ that?

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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How dole destroyed imperial stabilityhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/09/how-dole-destroyed-imperial-stability-2639479.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/09/how-dole-destroyed-imperial-stability-2639479.html#commentsb7b4e5a6-88b9-4b06-bdb5-311128293435Sat, 09 Dec 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-12-10T06:14:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Demonetisation,reservation,welfare schemes,dole,Modi’s GuaranteeRavi ShankarThere is little that is original in history. Most rulers are singularly unimaginative. But the abiding principles of social responsibility have remained the same: equality for all, freedom from hunger, disease and poverty. In an ideal world, a government’s role is to ensure these for its citizens.

In the political world, not so much. India’s food subsidy bill, which was Rs 2.87 lakh crore in FY23, will be Rs 1.97 lakh crore this fiscal. Its overall subsidy bill could be Rs 50,000 crore, to be paid largely from middle-class pockets. The Politics of Dole has been the election-winning ticket since Independence. The BJP, which has taken many a leaf from the Congress playbook, has made welfare a bedrock of its election strategy.

Go back a few centuries; the pattern is the same. Between 146 BC and 31 BC, the Roman Republic started the Grain Dole; the state gave citizens grain at a marginal cost or for free. This burdened the exchequer, as Rome’s population burgeoned. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar rationalised the number of recipients. The needy got more grain, and he received mass support. Emperor Augustus institutionalised the Grain Dole. State welfare subsidised Rome’s urban migrants who played a crucial role, both in politics and the economy. This made them dependent on state benefits, thereby diluting core Roman values of hard work and self-reliance. In the long run, the financial burden became crippling, but the emperors couldn’t do much: food riots would have toppled them.    

The welfare trap is such that the promiser’s credibility must be trusted by the promisee. The fact that guarantees come from Narendra Modi, a force of nature in the heartland—with the winning number of Lok Sabha seats—beat the Congress pledges. People believe him because last-mile delivery, where the money actually reaches people’s pockets, is successful. Farmers get the promised cash in their accounts.

Housewives are provided free LPG cylinders. BPL families receive the full amount for constructing pucca homes. MSMEs get the promised credit. Roads are being built. So on and so forth. The likely slogan for 2024 could be “Modi’s Guarantee”. This is not to say Congress governments did nothing. Manmohan Singh’s liberalisation programme put India on the global economic map. Its annual growth rate for 2004-21, according to World Bank data for 2004-14, averaged about 7.5-8 percent a year, under the Congress.

Demonetisation hurt growth in 2016, and Covid-19 shrunk it by 7.3 percent in 2020-21. But in 2021, the economy grew around 8.9 percent. The Congress had finessed subsidy and reservation: there was even a Haj subsidy. While in the West, affirmative action for jobs and education is based on race, the Indian equivalent is caste. In some states, quotas exceed 80 percent. Regional castes have become power blocs in politics using reservation demands.

Of all the colonial hangovers nationalists forget to mention, or know about, is Reservation. The Indian Councils Act, 1909, enacted by the British was the first step. At the Round Table Conference of June 1932, Ramsay Macdonald, the British prime minister, mooted the Communal Award. It assured separate representation for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians and Anglo-Indians. Reserved constituencies were formed, although SC, STs could vote in other constituencies. This enraged Mahatma Gandhi, who wanted a single Hindu electorate, with seats reserved for Dalits. Was Gandhi the true Hindu icon, whose image was diluted by Nehruvian socialism? That’s a debate for another day. 

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Hinduism’s Himalayan Dilemmahttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/02/hinduisms-himalayandilemma-2637603.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Dec/02/hinduisms-himalayandilemma-2637603.html#commentscafd20d3-eee6-446a-9ad9-ecb88d974e6fSat, 02 Dec 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-12-01T09:11:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Himalayas,Hinduism,Ancient HindusRavi Shankaryasyeme himavanto mahitvā yasya samudram rasayā sahāhuh|   

“His, through his might, are these snow-covered mountains, and men call sea and Rasā his possession: His arms are these, his are these heavenly regions. What God shall we adore with our oblation?”—Rig Veda

Ancient Hindus believed that the Himalayas were the abode of the gods and holy men. Here, the sages sat for millennia, pondering over the mysteries of the Universe and its creator. Here, the ancient Hindus believed lies Gyanganj, a secret kingdom of enlightened and immortal beings, free from karmic burdens.

Reaching the Himalayas, however, now are not yogis, but mortals with greed in their hearts and ignorance in their minds; who call themselves Hindus, simply because they may be visiting temples, and fasting on holy days. Is the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel collapse a warning to man from Nature, to desist from violating the sacred mountainsides?

Reuters cited the member of an environmental panel, who placed the responsibility for the cave-in on government engineers digging through a ‘shear zone’—a vulnerable part of the Earth’s crust. Ecologists have identified more than 200 likely landslide points, forming as a result of excavations and choked water flow during tunnel construction. Development requires the sacrifice of unsuspecting victims: in February 2021, a glacial lake burst almost submerged the Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric project, killing more than 200 people. The bodies of drowned labourers remain uncollected till today because the debris choking the destroyed tunnel mouth is preventing entry.

To meet the pressure of India’s mammoth population, governments are expanding roads, blasting new ones, boring tunnels and dynamiting mountains. Progress in Himalayan towns means building multi-storeyed hotels and apartment high-rises, which destabilise the terrain. Forgotten is the brutal lesson of Joshimath, which once teemed with illegal buildings and rampant tunnelling. Drainage systems were ignored in a frenzy of unabated construction—data tabled in Parliament in 2019 noted that more than two-thirds of the total waste from 10 Himalayan states of India goes unprocessed, and are discarded in landfills and garbage pits.

Many scientists and environmentalists have warned of inadequate planning and insufficient ground surveys harming Himalayan ecology. The walls of homes in many mountain villages are cracking. One such village, beneath which a railway tunnel has been built, trembles and shakes whenever a train passes. India’s hill stations, once idyllic retreats from the blazing plains in summer, have become toxic cankers infected with slums, bumper to bumper traffic, water queues and pollution. The Himalayan heaven is now a mountainous nightmare of pecuniary and political ambitions. The mountains are shedding their man-made burdens. The rivers are claiming their primeval courses. Retribution has begun.

Many religions predict that the world will be destroyed by natural disasters incurred by man’s travesties, which have invited the wrath of God. The Agni Purana describes the end of mankind in a global drought after man has depleted the earth’s resources. In Hindu cosmology, prakritipralay (flood) happens, caused by divine rain, after Agni consumes the world and the ashes of civilisations have been dispersed.

When Shiva opens his tresses and unleashes the primordial waters, the fury of the Himalayas will wreak destruction. Only Gyanganj will remain untouched. Pilgrim, look for it, not by making a booking on Airbnb, but by travelling within, to touch the essential Hindu within us all.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Recognise Hitler clones who hide among ushttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Nov/25/recognise-hitler-clones-who-hide-among-us-2635609.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Nov/25/recognise-hitler-clones-who-hide-among-us-2635609.html#comments9234e24e-a317-4a22-80f5-3934fae12450Sat, 25 Nov 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-11-26T05:29:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Hitler,HamasRavi ShankarThe world is currently having a Hitler moment. The monster who let loose the dogs of war into the killing fields of Europe and Russia, authored the torture, rape and genocide of over 6 million Jews, and is responsible for the deaths of about 75 million people, before blowing his brains out deep inside a bunker under the bomb-ravaged streets of Berlin is back in the conversation of conscience, thanks to Palestine.

The streets and bridges in Britain and America resound with chants of “Death to the Jews!’’ A US Congresswoman echoed the Palestinian war cry, ‘From the river to the sea’ which is hate code for effacing Israel from the map, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While Hitler wanted to wipe every non-Aryan from the face of the earth, Hamas aims to erase every non-Muslim—including the maladjusted morons in anti-Israel marches who remove posters of kidnapped Israeli children—and convert the leftover non-Muslims to their faith.

From November 9 to 10, 1938, Nazis smashed Jewish shops, businesses and synagogues during Kristallnacht (‘Crystal Night’); millions of pieces of broken glass of windows of Jewish-owned buildings littered the streets. Evoking memories of Kristallnacht, British Police stood by as Palestinian immigrants and domiciles roared for the murder of Jews. Neo-Nazis bearing Nazi flags called for a Jewish genocide. Swastikas painted on the doors of American Jewish homes are a chilling reminder that Hitler’s ideology of hate has risen from history’s murky bog.

Israeli soldiers recovered a copy of Mein Kampf on a Hamas terrorist’s body. However, most of Europe, which wants to live down memories of collusion with the Nazis, has rallied behind Israel. Austria, a fervent Nazi partner in the 1930s finds itself in a quandary. What to do with the elegant house in Braunau am Inn where Hitler was born? The Nazis turned it into an art gallery and library during the World War; symbolic, since they looted millions of artworks from Jewish homes, and burned books by Hemingway, HG Wells and Franz Kafka. The building was also a Nazi pilgrimage spot.

After the war ended, it hosted a bank, and later a school. Before the Austrian government bought it in 2016, Hitler’s birthplace ironically served as a centre for people with special needs: about 2,00,000 persons with mental or physical disabilities were murdered in the Nazi “Aktion T-4,” or Euthanasia programme, between 1940 and 1945. These unfortunates were gassed in specially built chambers, while the babies and small children were starved to death or injected with lethal drugs; their bodies were burned in large ovens. Now, Braunau am Inn is being rebuilt as a centre for human rights training of police officers which will open by 2026: Nazi paradoxes never end. Controversy is rife in Austria on what should be done with the place; tearing it down would mean denying Austria’s role in the Holocaust, but keeping it could turn it into a neo-Nazi shrine.

Hamas or Hizbul, Iran’s Ali Khamenei or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, India’s PFI or Pakistan’s Teherik-e-Taliban, all are clones of the Nazis and their demonic captain, who have cast their immortal shadow on the world. Wolves in sheep’s clothing are hiding in universities, schools and offices as liberal peaceniks, marketing persuasive conscience. Denial won’t bring the world its peace. Only accepting the banality of evil will remind us what we should never be. Never again.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Israel-Hamas war: The face of evilhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Nov/25/israel-hamas-war-the-face-of-evil-2635603.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Nov/25/israel-hamas-war-the-face-of-evil-2635603.html#commentscdef754f-0de2-43ea-830e-1eee29c49c02Sat, 25 Nov 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-11-25T06:55:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Israel,Hamas,Israel-Hamas warRavi ShankarThe story goes that in the year 1092, three men waited in the craggy shadow of the Alamut Castle, an impregnable mountain fastness high in the Alborz range of Persia, to witness an ultimate test of loyalty. One of them, older, with deep-set eyes in a bearded, angular face nodded a signal, and the man next to him in a white tunic and a red sash, leapt off the cliff to his death into the void below. The man who gave the command was Hasan-e Sabbah, grand master of the religious Order of Assassins, or Hashashins as they were known. The jumper was his follower: one of the 70,000 killers, who would die for their master, and kill at his bidding. They had no fear, thanks to the hashish they were fed before going on missions to assassinate sultans, lords and crusaders. 

Their reward was Paradise, brimming with rivers of milk and honey, and a thousand hours waiting to give them eternal pleasure—the same as promised to the terrorists and suicide bombers of today by their handlers. Kings feared for their lives from Hasan’s Order and the Seljuk envoy was there to plead for protection. Hasan, whose deceptively harmless sobriquet was the Old Man of the Mountain, murdered anyone opposed to his beliefs. Today’s Islamic terrorists are inspired by his erotic-reward-for-death formula, which glamourises the barren desert of twisted faith.

Hasan was the world’s first Islamic terrorist leader. Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, his group’s bomb-maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, and Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are all ghoulish Xerox copies, obsessed with imposing Sharia on the world. So are Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, who leads the terror organisation on the ground in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh, who ordered, planned and executed the October 7 carnage, rape and kidnapping of men, women and children from Israeli kibbutzim.

Their violent tactics have put Tel Aviv in a spot: the hostage release agreement brokered by the US and Qatar has deadly precedents. In 2011, Israel released Sinwar, along with 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners, from jail in exchange for a single IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit. Subsequently, Sinwar went on to build Hamas into a fearsome terrorist outfit, which not only specialised in killing Israelis, but also in ruling Gaza by the gun, and intimidating and torturing any Palestinian who resisted them.

The similarity between Sinwar and Mohammad Masood Azhar Alvi, founder and leader of Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, is striking: Azhar and two comrades were released in exchange for 155 passengers and crew of hijacked Indian Airlines flight 814, at Kandahar in 1999. Sinwar orchestrated the October 7 carnage, and Azhar was behind the 2001 Parliament attack and the Pathankot and Pulwama terror incidents. The Israel-Hamas hostage deal looks like terrorism has won psychological territory in the battle of perception.

An injured child in Gaza. The toll has exceeded 14,000 since the war began.

The numbers, like in 2011, seem disproportionate, although the logic is concealed by diplomatic secrecy: 50 Israeli women and children were hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners, in the first batch. Israel’s war objective in Gaza is far from complete; only 10 out of 24 enemy battalions have suffered any significant damage. The top terror leadership is still at large. Hamas, which succeeded in turning the war into a global Jew-versus-Islam conflict, has scored a significant victory by gaining time to rebuild itself. History is repeating itself in the terrorverse: the Taliban came back to power in Kabul more than two decades after 9/11. The Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are regrouping and recruiting in Africa and South Asia. Just like Hasan-e Sabbah, militant Islam is implacable. While today’s democracies are horrified by civilian deaths, terrorists have no qualms about blowing themselves up to kill thousands in souks, malls, airports, pavements and offices. They believe that death in their holy war is martyrdom and hatred is their redemption.

THE BEGINNING OF TERROR

Unlike early Christianity, Islam was forged by war. After Prophet Mohammed’s death on June 8, 632, his companion Abu Bakr was elected by a majority of Muslims as the Caliph—the historical leader of all Muslims except Shiites—until the caliphate perished along with the Ottoman Empire in 1927. In 1928, distressed by the fall of the caliphate, Egyptian cleric Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the parent of Hamas. The Brotherhood’s aim was to cleanse the Muslim society of Western values, which Hassan saw as destructive of Islam.

As MB’s popularity grew in Egypt, Hassan was assassinated. State repression grew as did the MB. The Brotherhood spread its tentacles over Jordan, Syria and Palestine. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s suppression of MB and the loss of Palestine to Israel gave it popularity and credibility in the Muslim world. After Hassan’s death, appeared the radical MB leader Sayyid Qutb, who plotted to replace un-Islamic governments and rulers with purist Islam. His influence would shape future Islamic terrorist movements. Qutb’s target was to create an Islamic state through a bloody revolution. He, too, was killed, but it was too late by then. The djinn of terror he released from the bottle of hate is wreaking bloody havoc across the world. The current radical Islamist revival in the Middle East owes much to Qutb, the father of political Islam.

Israeli hostage being taken away to
Gaza by Hamas terrorists on October 7

Islamic terrorism has proved to be adaptable in both ideas and ideology. It manipulates the faith’s inherent dualities to its advantage. Norwegian academic and Middle East expert Bjørn Olav Utvik defines the phenomenon with binary clarity: Islamists embrace ‘modernity’ (advanced technology, industries etc.), but reject ‘modernism’ and its foundations of science and reason. Most Arab nations, which are attempting to modernise their societies are adopting mild modernism (allowing women to drive) to fit the New World Order better.

The rhetoric of Arab governments against Israel after its anti-Hamas campaign in Gaza is muted. With Saudi Arabia unwilling to back terrorists anymore, Qatar is the only prominent Middle East kingdom, which has given Hamas commanders refuge. The ceasefire it has brokered has burnished Doha’s image among the global Left while co-opting Biden. The reason Arab states led by Saudi Arabia’s modernist prince Mohammad bin Salman have softened towards Israel is Iran’s expansionist ambitions. Teheran is the common enemy of Israel and the Saudi-UAE bloc, which recognises Tel Aviv’s military power, including its nuclear arsenal, as a deterrent. They depend on Israeli technology for sophisticated surveillance systems like Pegasus, to monitor domestic dissidents. The Saudi-US ties had become rocky following 9/11; Salman has moved quickly to mitigate the past by intending to proceed with the US-backed normalisation negotiations with Israel while paying lip service to the Palestinian cause.

The Arab Axis sees Israel as a useful ally in America’s Middle East policy, to ensure it remains a dependable business and security partner. Omar Rahman, a former Brookings expert suggests that “by positioning themselves as a partner of Israel, the Gulf states are likely hoping to mitigate the opposition in Washington, while reaffirming the US security commitment by linking Israel’s security with their own”. The US knows well that Arab governments play to the “street”, while viewing Palestinians as 
a nuisance. In 1952, former head of UNRWA Sir Alexander Galloway had said, “The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore… as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.” The Arab countries want to keep Palestinians away from their soil: a recent example is Egypt’s refusal to allow them in from Gaza.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees are banned from 39 professions, including medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and law. Many Arab governments deny Palestinians citizenship and basic rights. The problem is that historically, Arabs consider Palestinians a menace to their host countries. Jordan suppressed the Palestinian Black September revolt (1970-1971), which tried to depose the government; the Jordanian Army killed about 15,000 Palestinians and expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Although Jordan’s Queen Rania is of Palestinian descent, her husband King Abdullah II declared, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.” Palestinians aren’t trusted; the PLO supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Kuwait expelled 2,00,000 Palestinians. No Arab state, including Qatar, has opened its arms to Palestinians caught in the war in Gaza.

Israeli Defence Forces in action

INDIA’S QUANDARY 

Gaza and the Palestinian crusade have become propaganda metaphors for Pakistan, to raise the Kashmir issue. Last week, during a UN Security Council meeting, Pakistan did it again. India dismissed Islamabad’s rhetoric “with contempt” and called it “a remark of habitual nature”. The Narendra Modi government has put in place measures like the National Register of Citizens to curb illegal immigration through porous borders. 

“The situation in India is totally different from that of Palestine and Israel. India is not segregating a particular community or seizing a community’s land, property, or assets... Where there is a commonality is extra-territorial loyalty. So long as Muslims in India think like Indians there is no problem. But that is not always the case. Some live here, and get all the facilities here, yet they do things that go against the integrity, safety, and security of the national interest. This is the core of the problem. So long as we agree that Palestinians have a right to live in an independent state is fine, but to get that state through terrorist means is not acceptable,” says Amar Bhushan, former special secretary, of the Research and Analysis Wing.

India has been deporting Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar. As New Delhi is recognised as an important ally by the West, which regards Israel as its regional partner in West Asia, Modi’s muscular nationalism is reaping political benefits for his party. The long-festering Kashmir issue found a political solution—however contentious—through the abolishment of Article 370. Even anti-Modi Kashmiri activist Shehla Rashid praised the Centre and Manoj Sinha, the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, for improving the human rights situation in the Valley. Gunfights with terrorists do continue with the Indian Army incurring casualties, but these have substantially reduced; government data marked 417 terror incidents in Kashmir in 2018 which was down to 200 by November 2021. Says Shiv Sahai, former Additional Secretary NSCS who served in Kashmir at the height of terrorism: “Political solutions do work. In J&K’s case, after the perceived rigged elections that triggered the militancy again, the 2002 elections were free and fair, and did much to dilute support to the militancy.”

Anti-India insurgency in Kashmir has an external patron in Pakistan, much like Hamas and Hezbollah are funded and trained by Iran. One of India’s successes in fighting insurgency is in the Northeast, which was plagued by secessionism. Indian forces ruthlessly put down the Naga, Mizo and Assamese separatist movements. Says Col. Hunny Bakshi, who served in the region at the height of militancy: “The secessionist elements enjoy the support of local populations. They act like self-styled governments by issuing political appointments, unlike Hamas which was elected. But given the chance, the NE outfits would force a vote under the power of the gun.” The power of the gun and its fear is the true force behind organisations like Hamas, which is just another head of the terror snake. Israel has vowed to eliminate Sinwar and his comrades in terror. But as long as Hasan-e Sabbah’s ghost prowls the dark back alleys of a deadly ideology, the world will never be safe from terror.

Lebanese Hezbollah: Brotherhood of Blood

Hamas is down, but not out. In spite of the hostage deal, Israel is still at war, with an even bigger enemy, the Lebanese Hezbollah. The powerful Iran-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon has been firing more than 1,000 munitions at Israel. Hassan Nasrallah its leader and Secretary-General since 1992, whom Bilal Y Saab Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme calls “the most powerful non-state actor in the world” recently denied that he doesn’t want to escalate the war in Gaza by joining Hamas. In spite of Iranian funding, Nasrallah is not a puppet. It has no desire to impose an Iran-like theocratic state and wants a political role in Lebanon.

Supporters hold up a picture of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah

This will give it both access to the resources of the Lebanese state and to have a de facto veto over government policy. With Lebanon’s currency losing a staggering 95 per cent of its value, Hezbollah is under pressure and its electoral position has slipped. The rocket assault against Israel could be to shore up its fortunes at home by acting tough. In the May 2022 Lebanese parliament elections, Hezbollah lost support among Christian and Sunni Muslim allies. Hezbollah, however, retains its ability to block Lebanon’s next president, if the candidate is not to its liking. It has not hesitated to intimidate and even assassinate political opponents and critics in Lebanon. Its Goldilocks approach to political participation in Lebanon, claiming to be above the political fray while benefiting from the system, is wearing thin

Israel’s Thorn 
Hezbollah had a dedicated unit to train Iraqi radicals against US-led coalition forces. After 2014, Hezbollah helped Iraqi groups to fight IS and defend shrines in Iraq. Iran also uses Hezbollah to train Houthi recruits in Yemen. Tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters fought in Syria. Its primary target, however, has always been Israel. Like Hamas, Hezbollah has a vast tunnel network where it stores weapons and fighters. Though Hezbollah’s relationship with Hamas is uneven, it teaches fighters suicide-bombing techniques and rocket-making. In July 2022, the Lebanese Hezbollah sent unmanned drones to threaten Israel. However, the threat did not stop Israel and Lebanon from negotiating a deal to begin production at Karish gas field. A week ago, the US deployed an aircraft carrier, warships, a nuclear-powered vessel, attack helicopters, fighter jets, and 5,000 sailors to the region to deter Hezbollah attacks in Northern Israel.

Iran Conundrum
Hezbollah’s armed forces, independent of the Lebanese Armed Forces, have ultra-sophisticated weapons including anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and anti-armour systems, all supplied by Iran. Hezbollah is Iran’s weapon to become the leading power in the Muslim world. Hence, it is a low-cost way for Iran to project power and build allies in other countries

The US Angle
The US can exert financial pressure on Hezbollah and attempt to weaken it, but the group’s supremacy depends on Lebanese and regional dynamics. Hezbollah has been cautious regarding strikes on US soil. The US has tried to strengthen the Lebanese army and police, while its ally, Saudi Arabia, is bolstering Hezbollah’s rivals in Lebanon, but these efforts have floundered. In Europe, Hezbollah has worked with Iran and killed or tried to kill dissidents in France, Austria, Denmark and other countries. Hezbollah has also conducted surveillance of US and Israeli targets in Latin America

(Sourced from Daniel L Byman’s November 2022 research paper published in Brookings.edu)

Tycoons of Terror

While the citizens of Gaza die in the thousands from air strikes and failed missiles, the top Hamas leadership lounge in luxury

The Hamas leadership that controls Gaza, one of the poorest regions in West Asia, is composed of millionaires and billionaires. The 18-year-old Israeli-Egyptian blockade, which restricts the movement of goods to and from the Gaza Strip, is mostly responsible for its poverty. The vast underground tunnel network, which Hamas has built made many terror leaders immensely rich; Hamas imposes a 20 per cent tax on all smuggled goods. In 2012, 600 smuggler-millionaires reportedly lived in Gaza before the war; Professor Ahmed Karima of Al-Azhar University in Egypt counts 1,200 Hamas millionaires. The Times of Israel reported that high-profile Hamas officials left Gaza by end-2022 to stay in luxury hotels in Beirut, Doha and Istanbul. “It is tragic that Hamas’s leaders cynically use their own people as pawns in their deadly game of terror,” says the Israeli Embassy spokesman in India, Guy Nir. 

Khaled Mashal, who heads Hamas’s political wing, works out at the gym

Ismail Haniyeh, the 61-year-old current chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, who leads an opulent life in Doha, is on Tel Aviv’s hit list. In a video released after the kibbutzim massacre, Haniyeh and Hamas officials were seen cheering and prostrating on the carpeted floor in a lushly appointed room. Gazans sarcastically refer to one of his sons, Maaz, as Abu al-Akerat, or “father of real estate”. In 2010, Haniyeh reportedly bought a 2,500 sqm plot of land in Rimal, Gaza’s posh beachfront neighbourhood, for $4 million: it is close to the Al-Shati refugee camp where he grew up. Egyptian magazine Rose al-Yusuf reported that the terrorist registered the land in his son-in-law’s name. Since then, Haniyeh has been on a property-buying spree in Gaza, purchasing more houses, which he registered in the names of some of his 13 children. Abu al-Akerat, who holds a Turkish passport, has bought properties in Egypt and Turkey, apart from Qatar. Haniyeh operates a private electricity enterprise; his children own generators and sell power to consumers in Gaza at high prices. The subsidised fuel Cairo sent for Gazans was appropriated by Hamas who sold it to needy citizens for eight times the price. 

Another ace terrorist in Israel’s gun-fights is 58-year-old Deif aka Mohammed al-Masri, whom the Palestinians call ‘The Brain’ and the Israelis ‘The Cat with Nine Lives’—he escaped seven Mossad assassination attempts. The Israelis are aware that he and Haniyeh engineered the October attack. Media sources reported on June 1, 2023, that Deif’s estimated net worth was approximately $5 million; peanuts compared to the net worth of 72-year-old Mousa Abu Marzouk, head of Hamas’s “international relations office”, which is $3 billion. Marzouk got rich with money solicited from rich Muslims in America; in no time he was running a consortium of 10 financial operations “that give loans and conduct investments”. In 1995, Marzouk was imprisoned for two years on terrorism charges, and deported without trial. But the money remained in his pocket. The paper reported that US authorities discovered his ties with Al-Qaeda, including money transfers made to the 9/11 terrorists, but he was let off.

His luxury yacht

Dr Moshe Elad, a Middle East expert from the Western Galilee Academic College told the Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner that most Hamas founders were born of intermarriages between Egyptians and Gazans, with no money at all “fed off the Israeli military establishment, which funded Islamic associations in Gaza in an effort to counterbalance Fatah”. On the day Hamas cut ties with Israel and sought funding elsewhere, their phenomenal wealth started growing.

The paper cited Elad telling Israeli financial newspaper Globes that the money comes from “donations by the families of people who die, charity money, called ‘zakala’ in Arabic and the donations of various countries. It started with Syria, Saudi Arabia, then Iran, one of the main sponsors, and ended with Qatar, which has today taken Iran’s place.” 

Khaled Mashal, 67, is another top Hamas official living in Doha. He is part of the core leadership and is known for his financial savviness. His investments in Egyptian banks and real estate projects in the Gulf countries have brought him immense wealth: his personal worth, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is currently estimated at about $5 billion. He owns a luxury yacht and expansive properties. The Algemeiner quoted Arab sources saying senior-official-turned-terror-tycoon Khaled Mashaal, who heads Hamas’s political wing is worth between $ 2 - 5 billion, which is “invested in Egyptian banks and Gulf countries, some in real estate projects”. Israeli news website Ynetnews reported that a construction project by Fadil, a Qatari real estate firm, is linked to Mashal, his son and daughter-in-law. Fadil is building four glitzy towers of more than 27,000 sqm, which have offices, commercial spaces and a mall spread over 10,000 sqm in Doha. The source of its funding is opaque, leading investigators to believe these are funds stolen from Islamic charities.

According to Ynetnews, the business partners of Hamas chiefs are mostly Muslim Brotherhood officials, with whom the deals are made in cash. Their broker, until his death in 2014, was Ayman Taha, a Hamas founder and former spokesman. In 2011, Taha bought a luxury three-floor villa in central Gaza for $7,00,000. Reuters cited American counter-terrorism expert Matthew Levitt saying that most of Hamas’s budget, which comes to over $300 million, is from taxes levied on businesses in Gaza, Islamic charities and funds from Iran and Qatar. After being sanctioned as a terrorist organisation by the US and UK, Hamas has unsuccessfully taken the crypto way to elude international monitoring.

Haniyeh’s son Abu al-Akerat lounges in a luxury hotel suite in Qatar

Hamas itself is filthy rich; its annual budget in Gaza is $2-2.5 billion, according to Yitzhak Gal, an expert on Middle East economic issues. In 2007, Hamas was elected to power in the Gaza Strip by deposing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and became popular with the people. It established a bank, hired staff and became a Palestinian government by definition, a rival to the PA, which jointly governs, with Israel, Judea and Samaria. Hamas diverted public funds to finance its military systems. It has thousands of senior managers to oversee its economic matters. Hamas's money channels to the Gaza Strip are five:

1. the PA budget 

2. foreign aid, which now is largely limited to Qatar

3. Turkey-based Hamas Charity Coalition

4. local tax collection

5. Iranian funding.

Israel has been seizing and destroying property of Hamas leaders, and confiscating terror funds, including crypto. In Kashmir, Indian agencies have seized properties worth crores belonging to the Kashmiri separatist leadership, including the late Syed Shah Geelani and Shabbir Shah. Shiv Sahai refutes the comparison. “Apart from using terror tactics and having been born out of a political question, there is hardly any similarity between them. Hamas controlled territory while no organisation in Kashmir does.” 

THE HAMAS CHRONICLES

Thirty-five years of unrelenting extremism

1987 Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, emerges from jail after serving two years of a 13-year term and founds Hamas

1987-1993 First intifada. Violent riots erupted in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel for an independent Palestinian state.

1988 Hamas Covenant was issued to explain its stand and goals

1989 Israel outlaws Hamas and jails Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

1992 Hamas created the military branch Izz ad-Din al-Qassam

1993 First Hamas suicide bombing

1996 Palestinian elections were announced, which Hamas boycotted. Fatah wins big.

1996 Yahya Ayyash, Hamas bomb-maker, was identified and killed

February-March, 1996 47 Israelis were killed in three different bombings

In October 1997 Sheikh Yassin was freed by Benjamin Netanyahu in a US-Jordan deal brokered by the US. Sheikh Yassin is back in Gaza.

March 1998 Death of Mohiyedine Sharif, senior Hamas bomb-maker

September 2000 The Al-Aqsa Intifada begins

January 6, 2004, Senior Hamas leadership offers a 10-year truce to Israel conditional for its complete withdrawal to 1967 borders

March 22, 2004, Sheikh Yassin was killed in an Israeli missile strike. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi takes over.

April 17, 2004, Rantissi was killed in an Israeli air strike, in revenge for a suicide bombing by Hamas 

April 18, 2004, Hamas secretly selects new leader in Gaza

September 26, 2004, Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil was killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria November 11, 2004, Yasser Arafat dies

In January 2005 Palestinian presidential election was declared, which Hamas boycotted. PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas was elected to replace Arafat. 

January-May, 2005 Palestinian municipal elections; Hamas takes control of a part of northern Gaza, the West Bank, and Rafah

March 2005 Hamas proclaims tahdiyah, a period of calm

January 25, 2006, Hamas won the legislative election decisively

March 2007 Palestinian Legislative Council establishes a national unity government

June 2007 Hamas takes over Gaza, violently subduing Fatah

2008-2014 Israel embroiled in a series of battles with Hamas. Terrorists retaliate with rockets and kidnappings. Egypt brokers a ceasefire.

2021 Violence breaks out in East Jerusalem and Gaza after Israel threatens to evict Palestinian families. Restrictions imposed around the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan. A ceasefire was brokered by Egypt and Qatar.

2023 Hamas terrorists enter Israel and wreak havoc, provoking Israel to invade Gaza  

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When freedom’s salesman in PoK turns the tidehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Sep/16/when-freedoms-salesman-in-pok-turns-the-tide-2614899.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Sep/16/when-freedoms-salesman-in-pok-turns-the-tide-2614899.html#commentsad704496-7728-40b9-9077-2e27f0f614c0Sat, 16 Sep 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-09-16T06:11:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,PartitionRavi ShankarThe many partitions of India and the unity of its historical character is the core plot of its travelogue through history. Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Europeans and the British have played snakes and ladders with the myriad borders of pre-Independence India. Now a new border wants a change. The residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) are clamouring to join its estranged parent. Massive anti-Pakistan protests are raging across PoK, asking India’s Narendra Modi to free them from Islamabad’s illegal occupation. Ironically, this is happening when their Indian brethren are protesting the removal of Article 370. 

At the peneytralia of both Kashmiri movements is freedom, one genuine and the other indoctrinated perversion. Kashmiris across the LoC seem to be betraying the ‘united’ Azadi concept of Kashmir as an independent Islamic nation living under Pakistan’s tyrannical thumb. One set of Kashmiris, funded and led by characters financed by ISI, are inflaming youth in the Valley to demand azadi from India, while another set of Kashmiris living under Pakistani occupation are demanding azadi because they are starving and being brutalised by the Pakistani Army. It is the end of irony.

The Partition of India was managed by the cynical British who feared the rise of this newly unchained beast, and mismanaged by the addictive pacifist Jawaharlal Nehru and his fanatic mentor Mahatma Gandhi. The Partition of Kashmir would not have happened had the Indian Army marched into now-PoK to eject Pak-backed Pashtoon invaders in 1947. On the advice of Sheikh Abdullah, Nehru ordered a ceasefire and Pakistan got PoK. In 2011, Duane R Clarridge, a former CIA agent, revealed that Sheikh knew of Pakistan’s 1965 war plans months in advance. For the Abdullahs and Pakistan, Kashmir is not a territory but an Islamic paradise once governed by sultans and Mughals as a symbol of religious imperialism. This legacy is what the Abdullahs have appropriated, exploited and defined as Kashmiriyat. But it’s the economy, stupid.

The Abdullahs, Yasin Maliks, Andrabis and Geelanis lived at both Indian and Pakistani expense while the prosperity of PoK steadily declined. Government stats say per person allocation for J&K has always been higher than the rest of India—in 2017-18, it was Rs 28,000 for J&K and Rs 8,000 for other states. It also gets 90 per cent of Central assistance as a grant and 10 per cent as a loan. For the rest of India, the loan part is 70 per cent. Government data shows that J&K’s revenue generation, post abrogation of Article 370, has started recovering; it crossed Rs 25,000 crore in 2022-23. PoK’s poverty rate in 2021 was 61 per cent, and 48 per cent of its population is jobless; J&K’s poverty and unemployment rates are 10.35 per cent and 5.2 per cent, respectively. The GSDP rate of J&K was 8.2 per cent compared to 1.3 per cent in PoK. 

The Opposition may deride Modi as the Great Divider, who stokes religious dissensions and irrigates the embedded roots of Hinduism to create divisions. He became a uniting factor after the abrogation of Article 370. Paradoxically, he is the uniting factor of the Opposition; there would be no I.N.D.I.A without him. In the likelihood of Pok breaking away for a homecoming—a tough proposition since it is Pakistan’s main motivation for jihad against India—Modi would be, by default, hailed as the Great Unifier. There is a tide in the affairs of nations, too, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune. India’s strategic moves in Balochistan and PoK are turning the tide of native freedom movements. Modi is freedom’s salesman in PoK. Hardsell has never been a problem for him.

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A Hindu for the White House? https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Sep/02/a-hindu-for-the-white-house-2610449.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Sep/02/a-hindu-for-the-white-house-2610449.html#comments0e3a466f-9407-48d0-b573-c3fbcca60e31Sat, 02 Sep 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-09-02T13:50:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Donald Trump,Republican,Vivek RamaswamyRavi ShankarLord Curzon, the father of the British Empire, would have choked. Or so says British High Commissioner to India, Alex Ellis. Reason? UK Prime Minister of Indian descent, Rishi Sunak, uttered “Jai Shri Ram” at a Ram katha held by Hindu preacher Morari Bapu at Cambridge University. History has a wicked sense of humour and maybe, just maybe, it will be George Washington’s turn to disturb the grave dirt. A new brown face has gate-crashed the 2024 American presidential party with gunpowder gumption of bravado, racism, climate denial, US isolationism, anti-LGBTQ schtick, nationalism, ersatz Obamaphilia and severe Sinophobia: self-made biotech millionaire Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy, who was the most Googled name after the first Republican presidential debate last week. A rank outsider, who doesn’t inhabit the Washington swamp, he came second in the polling for a brief while, after which Donald Trump’s main challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, pulled ahead again. Trump, who didn’t attend the primary debate, is still the frontrunner with 42 percent.

THE TRUMP SURROGATE

America, at least its television pundits, editorial writers, politicians, talking heads and intellectual busybodies, is in the grip of Vivek Mania. The 38-year-old ever-toothy Ramaswamy is probably the most-talked-about politician in the US right now. His rhetoric is clever and flashy, but how did this outlier businessman, who was derided by presidential competitor Chris Christie as “a guy who sounds like ChatGPT”, steal the limelight? Ramaswamy has cottoned on to what the Republicans think is their victory medicine and MAGA juice: Trumpism. Ramaswamy is being referred to in the media as Trump 2.0 which may not be far off the mark; a young Trump with all the jingoism which Republican voters love sans the scandals and tantrums.

While the former president has been indicted in a slew of cases involving paying off porn stars, lying in court, defamation, business fraud and trying to steal the election and encouraging insurrection, Vivek pulled a rabbit out of his hat: he became a mini-Trump. For a tenderfoot, he has picked up the cardinal rule of politics: win by stepping over the corpse of mentors. Ramaswamy first kissed up to Trump, anointing him “the best president of the 21st century”. The delighted former president posted a video of his neophyte bhakt on Truth Social with the words, “This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH. Thank you Vivek!” Ramaswamy ambitiously wants to be Trump 2.0 in 2024. He told The Atlantic, “I believe with a high degree of conviction that 
I will win this election.” He has promised that one of his first acts in the White House will be to issue a presidential pardon to Trump.

Ramaswamy’s populist genius lies in appropriating the Trump plank which other Republican contenders are wary about: 61 percent of Americans polled the CNBC All-America Economic Survey believe Trump should not run again for president (70 percent say Biden should not run for a second term). Ramaswamy is gambling on Trump’s endorsement if the former president goes to prison or is debarred from contesting election. After a rousing speech in Iowa recently, Ramaswamy and Trump had a cosy tête-à-tête backstage. “I told him not to be surprised and to expect more of it,” recalls Ramaswamy, who expects a political interloper—obviously himself—to win the primary. “One way or another, it’s going to be an outsider,” he was quoted in an interview informing Trump, who agreed.

But Ramaswamy’s previous record is coming back to bite his newfound loyalty. In Nation of Victims, authored by him and published in 2022, he admitted that although he voted for Trump in 2020, “what he delivered in the end was another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole” and that Trump’s claims of electoral fraud were “weak” and “weren’t grounded in fact”. But what is a successful politician without a bespoke turncoat? At Milwaukee late August, Ramaswamy declared that he would’ve certified 2020 election for Trump had he been VP, and that Pence missed a “historic opportunity”.

The Los Angeles Times summed up Ramaswamy’s opportunism saying, “He personifies the utter brashness and hubris of a high achiever who looks in the mirror and sees a president.” Ramaswamy has spoken of picking Elon Musk, a Trump enthusiast, as presidential advisor if he wins: Musk had restored Trump’s Twitter (now X) account, where the former president posted his mugshot after the recent arrest—his first post on the platform since he was banned in 2021. Trump ran and won on the ‘America First’ slogan, which Ramaswamy has appropriated. Yet, he is subtly displacing his icon from the platform. He told ABC TV, “it doesn’t belong to me... It belongs to the people of this country. I think we take that agenda even further…  And that’s what I’m bringing to this race.”

A TRUMPIST WORLD VIEW

 What Ramaswamy stands for exhilarates some Americans, especially in the far right, but worries others. Sensing the national mood, China is his primary foreign target, followed by Ukraine. He is the new disruptor in US politics, with radical views sans balancing apologies. He promises that the US will train and arm every household in Taiwan to protect against a Chinese invasion. At the same time he wants to reduce or stop aid to Taiwan, and Israel too. He wants to stop Ukraine’s entry to NATO and let Vladimir Putin keep the regions it occupies. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley smirked at Ramaswamy: “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”

Former US President Donald Trump.

He has a strong India angle: he wants to destroy the China-Russia Axis, and sees India as critical to this pivot. Ramaswamy shares common fears with India’s right wing. Like the BJP’s take on India, the presidential competitor believes that the US is undergoing a ‘national identity crisis’, which is caused not by economic and environmental problems, but by the replacement of traditional religion with “wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, Covidism, globalism”. America declared independence in 1776: Ramaswamy seeks a 1776 moment—read independence from the above.

“Ramaswamy advocating against wokeism and for lower taxes is in line with Trump’s approach and he has been careful not to criticise the former president. While Trump is the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, Ramasamy has the possibility to be his running mate.  It remains to be seen if mainstream America will vote for Trump,” says Meera Shankar, former Indian Ambassador to the US.
Ramaswamy thinks climate change is a hoax, in spite of the raging wildfires in Canada and Australia, and the heatwave in his own country and Europe. He supports rescinding birthright citizenship—a fave Trump theme, which liberals call altering the fundamental principle of the American Constitution. He wants to abolish the FBI and cut federal bureaucracy by 75 percent. His stance is anti-LGBTQ, a community which, according to him, wants to “create an us-versus-them destruction of modern order” by categorising incompatible ideas about sexual and gender minorities as a single entity.

It is an accepted maxim that politicians spit in the wind to gauge how it is blowing, with hyperbole and half-truths. Like Trump, Ramaswamy has accused the US governments of spending excessively on helping poor countries while foreign aid of all categories such as military, health, economic development or democratic governance is less than 1 percent of the total federal budget. His public philosophy too is coming under scrutiny. During the first Republican debate, he declared that “the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change”. Fact-checkers prove him wrong: the World Meteorological Organization reported that extreme weather events, incremented by climate change, caused about 12,000 natural disasters, which killed 
2 million people between 1970 and 2021.

Ramaswamy has insinuated that federal law-enforcement officers were the ones armed during the January 6 storming of the Capitol and that there is little evidence of armed protestors being arrested. In early August, the Justice Department charged 104 out of about 1,100 defendants with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.

Ramaswamy seems to be echoing the worst of the Trumpian ethos. The four years of Trump saw some of the worst racial violence in modern America: a 2019 Pew Center Poll noted that “58 percent Americans say race relations in the US are bad, and of those, few see it improving”. Not Ramaswamy. He has gone on record that white supremacists are bogeymen, and he has a better chance of meeting a unicorn than a white racist. For a brown man in a white country, he seems to identify with whites the most, perhaps because, like Indians in the US, they have more wealth than Blacks. Ramaswamy opposes affirmative action, saying that racism in America is  “manufactured in a way that creates more racism in this country”.  

His comments describing black Democratic politician Ayanna Pressley and activist author Ibram X Kendi “grand wizards of the KKK” was cringe: The Klu Klux Klan is  a historical hate group of white supremacist terrorists, which lynched, raped and murdered Black men and women after the American Civil War. The day Ramaswamy outpaced Trump by reviling black Americans was the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington, which marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. Later that evening in a Florida city, a white gunman killed three Black people: the cops said he was targeting African Americans. The gunman shot himself in the end. But the invective didn’t get him a free coupon in the conservative world. Racist author Ann Coulter called the arguments between Haley and Ramaswamy in Milwaukee a “Hindu business”. “Nikki and Vivek are involved in some Hindu business, it seems. Not our fight,” she wrote on X.

THE FAITH CATWALK 

Ramaswamy has two trump cards, pun intended: the surprise element, since he is unknown to most voters; and two, he is an Indian American bearing a white cause with Trump as Christ. Most Americans did not expect Barack Obama to become their president in 2008. In 2006, Obama travelled through many states talking to ordinary Americans: he later admitted that he wasn’t sure he would run for the White House. Then suddenly his mood changed; his doubt could have been Christian humility or just an act because he announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007, standing in front of a large gathering at the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois. The symbolism was significant: it was on that spot that Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “house divided” speech in 1858. And the White House 
got its first black president. Ramaswamy wants to be America’s first brown president—it is the great American Dream, a land of opportunity where anyone can be president.

The first words you read on ‘Truth’, Ramaswamy’s campaign website are, “God is real”. He knows that god is all powerful in American politics: no Republican can sit in the Oval Office unless he has support from the evangelical base. Ramaswamy also knows that he needs the powerful Indian American community behind him. The new demagogue of American political standup—“I’m a former aspiring standup comic. I’ll always forgive a bad joke”—wants to fill Trump’s shoes. He wants children to be banned from social media which, the Christian Right believes, is polluting young minds. His brass-bound views reflect the Southern white masculinity of where he grew up: he calls the Pride flag an example of “idolatry”. He is rooting for the voting age to be raised to 25. 

A 2021 Gallup poll revealed that church membership in the US fell below 50 percent for the first time: in 2020, about 64 percent of Americans, including children, were Christian. What may endear him to the evangelists is his family-oriented political beliefs. Ramaswamy is a fan of Hungary’s approach to family planning. Its authoritarian president Viktor Orban—whom Ramaswamy met in his entrepreneur avatar—encourages Hungarians to marry and have more children in return for tax benefits, low interest loans and housing. For example, women with four kids are exempt from paying income tax. A committed Hindu politician, more Moses than Jesus, Ramaswamy is strategising to part the waters of both faiths and walk the road to Pennsylvania Avenue. There is no denying his political smarts. He insists that Hinduism is not a threat to Christianity. Instead of dancing around his views on matters of faith, he has decided to take on the evangelical voters directly. “Am I religious? Yes, I am. I am Hindu. I am not Christian. And we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values,” he said in a recent TV interview. His words are designed to strike a chord with America’s white Christians who voted for Trump because they believed that traditional politicians had lost their moral compass and were corrupt and power hungry.

Ramaswamy attributes his ideology to the instructions of his conservative piano teacher at his Catholic school in Cincinnati, where he was born. He told his interviewer, “I’ve probably read the Bible more closely than many Christians that I know, and I can tell you that we share that same value set. And for a guy who is not running for pastor-in-chief, but commander-in-chief, that’s really what matters.” Ramaswamy, however, makes no excuses for being a staunch Hindu. His parents are Brahmins from South India. He visits temples consistently and pujas are held at home. He and his laryngologist wife Apoorva are raising their two sons as Hindus. Indian Americans, among whom Narendra Modi is a popular icon, are happy about Ramaswamy’s admiration for the Indian Prime Minister. In July, he told a reporter that “Modi has been building on that experience (of free-market capitalism) in India, lifting people up from poverty.

Regardless of their background and identity politics, India has prospered economically. GDP growth is up. I think that’s the ultimate metric of a truly successful unifying leader.” M Chuba Ao, BJP National Vice President, says Ramaswamy is a dramatic milestone for NRIs. “In the UK, we have Rishi Sunak, another Indian-origin Hindu leader, stewarding the erstwhile nerve centre of global power. The world is changing fast and in this scenario a lot is being counted on Indian diaspora. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a big difference in giving a neo-confidence to the NRI power,” he says.

Ramaswamy has been a keynote speaker at fundraisers linked to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, the US wing of VHP. Vinod Bansal, spokesperson of VHP in India, says, “Indians are doing well in nearly all spheres. Heads of major multinationals are now Indians. We wish that Vivek is nominated and makes us proud.’’ The difference between Ramaswamy and previous generations of Indian Americans is that he strongly asserts his identity while the others tried to be more American than Americans. The US media sneers at people like him, labelling them the “new Jews”: distinctive Americans who stand out as cultural tropes. Ramaswamy’s views on both faith and militarism will resonate with the Indian right. He told PTI, “The US is economically dependent on China today, but with a stronger relationship with India, it becomes easier to declare independence from that Chinese relationship.” Promising strategic ties with India, Ramaswamy doesn’t rule out a US-India military partnership in the Andaman Sea “knowing that India, if necessary, could block the Malacca Strait where actually China gets most of its Middle Eastern oil supplies”. 

SMELL OF MONEY

Ramaswamy is one of the politicians who have not pandered to Political Action Committees, thereby potentially boosting his credibility among voters. He is a high achiever who made his millions using ethical business tactics and intuitively picking lucrative and ignored segments. Unlike Trump, he is contesting on money he earned himself: as of August, nearly all of Trump’s big donors have refused to pony up. Ramaswamy announced, “I’m the only candidate on stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this.” His beliefs, however, didn’t stop him from raking in $450,000 in the first few hours after the Milwaukee debate ended. When an election race heats up, dirt flies. Another spanner in his presidential run is his ‘unaffiliated’ voter status since he had not cast his ballot in three elections—because “I was a jaded person in my 20s”—except for Trump. Moreover, his spotless white shirt got some mud on it when he was called out for receiving a $90,000 grant despite his existing wealth. Ramaswamy’s explanation was that he required the scholarship to cover fee at Yale. But his tax returns reported an income of $2,252,209 in 2011, the same year he got the grants. The three years before that, he was worth $1,173,690.

The fact remains that Ramaswamy doesn’t need to be bought; his wealth in August 2023, according to Forbes, was more than $950 million, which mainly comes from biotech and financial businesses. He bought drugs and companies that were overlooked or undervalued, which he leveraged as efficacious profit-spinners. After he took public his drug-development company Roivant Sciences, its stock rose by about 40 percent this year. Its founder’s 10 percent stake climbed to $600 million. Ramaswamy had founded Roivant after graduating from Yale and getting a hedge fund to finance it. The following year, he took a spinoff named Axovant to Wall Street. Its $2.2 billion valuation was based on Intepirdine, an Alzheimer’s drug candidate, which he had bought for $5 million. It allowed him to increase his income by $38 million. But Intepirdine failed clinical trials. In 2020, Ramaswamy renamed Roivant Sciences as Sio Gene Therapies whose current net worth is $30 million.

Intepirdine is not the only drug he owned: in 2020, Japanese pharma major Sumitomo Dainippon bought five drugs from him for $3 billion and a 10 percent stake in Roivant from Ramaswamy’s portfolio. His earning from the deal was $176 million. In 2021, he resigned as CEO of Roivant to join politics. He is currently facing a lawsuit by investment management firm Alpine Partners and other shareholders on whether they had been fairly compensated for their stock. Ramaswamy has begged out from testifying, explaining that he is busy with his campaign. ‘Woke, Inc.’, is his Manifesto for 2024: it blasts American companies for spending on conscience-driven causes such as social justice initiatives, environmental movements and governance campaigns.

In 2022, he even founded the ‘anti-woke’ asset management company Strive Asset Management, which is valued at over $300 million with Ramaswamy holding one-third of it, according to Forbes. “We stand for this movement that we call ‘excellence capitalism’, as a counterpart to stakeholder capitalism,” Ramaswamy declared on a podcast. Many billionaire investors bought into his conservative world view. Hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman, a big-time pharma investor, is Ramaswamy’s tennis partner. The young son of immigrant parents—an engineer-turned-patent attorney father and a psychiatrist mother—Ramaswamy is an example of the truth of the American Dream. In spite of all the wealth and spiel, he has a muted lifestyle, owning just two homes in Ohio, which are worth a combined $2.5 million—peanuts compared to the assets of other politicos and his super rich friends and colleagues.

TALENTED AMATEUR

In both adolescence and youth, Ramaswamy comes across as a regular guy interested in new projects and music. Though he studied biology in Harvard, his nose for business was sniffing dollars as a teen. In college, he co-founded StudentBusinesses.com, a website on which student founders pitch for funding. Money is not the only music Ramaswamy makes. It takes chutzpah to put oneself out there and going by his stump speeches, he has no problems with that. He is a long-standing rapper and performed often as ‘Da Vek’ at Harvard. The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, wrote that Ramaswamy “raps libertarian prose with utmost ease”. His varsity musical career started in 2004, when American rapper Busta Rhymes was to perform at Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion. The authorities open-called students to be warm-up performers. Ramaswamy rose to the occasion. Paul Davis, fellow student and age-old friend, told reporter Jennifer Sandlin, “That definitely got him notoriety with the class.” Ramaswamy became a college celebrity and was a fixture at Harvard open-mic nights, where he often rapped Lose Yourself. But Ramaswamy has no intention of losing himself, or losing. He is just finding himself and hopes America will find him good enough to become the Leader of the Free World. For now, that is a slim chance. Albeit, one he is willing to take, with all bets covered.  

THE RAMASWAMY CANON

God is real
There are two genders
Human flourishing 
requires fossil fuels
Reverse racism is racism
An open border is no border
Parents determine the education of their children
The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind
Capitalism lifts people up from poverty
There are three branches of the US government, not four
The US Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history

(With inputs from Yeshi Seli)
 

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High society rehabilitation of Indrani Mukerjeahttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/19/high-society-rehabilitation-of-indrani-mukerjea-2606242.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/19/high-society-rehabilitation-of-indrani-mukerjea-2606242.html#comments5ac3f738-7ca7-4511-b1e6-12a6b41a592dSat, 19 Aug 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-08-19T12:13:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Indrani Mukerjea,Sheena Bora murder case,Unbroken: The Untold StoryRavi ShankarUnless you live in Uttar Pradesh where Yogi Adityanath is the sheriff, criminals never had it so good. In the dark, twisted, celebrity-starved society we live in, it is easy-peasy for murderers and murderesses, alleged or caged, to thrive as celebrities. Indrani Mukerjea, former society queen and media maven, once member of the Bombay beau monde and cockatoo of cocktail culture, is having a comeback moment. She has written a memoir.

Being a former PR girl, she knows photo-ops matter; outside the prison, she showed off flowing white tresses as if tragedy had removed hair dye overnight. Now her glossy Photoshopped face, framed by black tresses, gazes down liquid-eyed from billboards in major metros. Readers are vicarious criminals; everyone loves a good murder. Whether they buy Indrani’s book, or buy her story, hardly matters. A profit-pushing publisher has amorally given her a forum and a massive promotion budget. There is no such thing as bad publicity.

Unbroken: The Untold Story is a celeb mom’s attempt to whitewash the murder of her daughter, Sheena Bora. Indrani spent about seven stormy years in prison—including participating in a riot—until she got bail last year. Now she is back home with a bang, as if murder is the new normal. She is learning ballroom dancing. She does yoga. Her morning begins with martial arts classes: her Instagram account has a picture of her in a kickboxer’s stance with gloves and all, ready to lash out.

Indrani writes that the suffocation of prison (CBI says Sheena was strangled by her driver, who confessed Indrani and he killed her) “is hell of a kind I wish upon nobody”. What the hell, the plot thickens. Indrani has maintained that Sheena is alive: first in the US and now in Guwahati, where she was conveniently spotted by a friend at the airport. The cops call her a liar. There is no better proof invented by science to establish identity than a DNA test—forensic scientists told the court that the DNA from Sheena’s remains was a 100 per cent match with Indrani’s and the bones belonged to “Indrani’s biological child”.

The infamous new author is perhaps betting on a sob story with royalties to make her society royalty again. Indrani cries out for rehabilitative sympathy, confessing that her father, his “eyes filled with lust”, raped her and that Sheena is both her kid and kid-sister. She admits she was sexually frustrated as a wife both times, having fake orgasms or none at all. But for all that humiliation, she and husband Peter were a feted power couple.

“I’m the real victim here, can’t you see it?” screams the metaphorical blurb. At glitzy high-society parties, it is standard to run into criminals like a real estate swindler on bail or a bar girl’s murderer. Social hypocrisy is de rigeur in the Crazy Rich Indians world of yacht parties, Dom Perignon and backroom deals. Indrani wants that life back even if it means using pulp fiction for a gilded invitation. She has been invited to speak at a YPO event in Mumbai. Her appearance at the next Jaipur Litfest cannot be ruled out. An OTT series is for certain. “I’m almost healed,” she writes. Poor Sheena, she didn’t have a chance to heal. What was left of her was found in a forest ditch near a Maharashtra village, burned and mutilated beyond recognition.

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Rahul’s bard moment: ‘Nothing can come of nothing’https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/12/rahuls-bard-momentnothing-can-comeof-nothing-2603984.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/12/rahuls-bard-momentnothing-can-comeof-nothing-2603984.html#commentsabcc435c-d736-40eb-970b-f0b32b4b472fSat, 12 Aug 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-08-11T10:32:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Rahul GandhiRavi ShankarConsider the immeasurable width and breadth of the Shakespearean domain, and mixed metaphors are an inevitability. The Bard’s immortal allure lies in the universality of his work—hopefully, he will soon be taught in Hindi and other regional languages. “Savaal hai hoga ya nahi hoga”, when applied to Indian politics, begs the question of whether Rahul Gandhi will succeed like King Henry IV, who boasts in Act 1 Scene 1, “Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds, To smother up his beauty from the world.” In the halcyon days of UPA I, Rahul, as a dimple-cheeked heir-in-waiting was Prince Hal, handsome and desirable: “Though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am king of courtesy.” BJP’s troll tactics made him a social media Feste—“better a witty fool than a foolish wit,” or a Caliban in a remote island of self-pity: “As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed. With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen. Drop on you both. 

A southwest blow on you, And blister you all o’er.” Is Modi Prospero and the BJP Miranda then? Let’s not quibble, folks; anything is possible if your Thesaurus of Allegories is the works of ol’ Bill from Stratford-upon-Avon. Rahul’s disqualification by a maximised Gujarat magistrate became much ado about nothing, at least for now. Now, a tempest is gonna blow.

In 2019, Rahul became Hamlet, a doomed prince betrayed by his own impetuous destiny as the prince of an intrigue-infested and slavishly subversive court, namely the Congress. Sound-and-fury anchors predicted his political demise from war wounds inflicted by a combative Modi. But Pericles does return home, “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, That would not let me sleep.” Fight on, Sire, would have quipped the irrepressible Jairam Ramesh, his bantering buddy and communications chief, who has turned the Gandhi outfit’s once-decrepit digital delivery domain into the Zomato of Zeitgeist: “Though this be madness, yet there is the method in’t.”

Rahul’s method of resurrection was the Bharat Jodo Yatra: “Listen to many, speak to a few.” Listen he did, and spoke to a few truck drivers on a midnight run through Punjab. Lo and behold! Hamlet transitions into Harun al-Rashid, the nocturnal Caliph of Baghdad (I warned you this is a monsoon of mixed metaphors) who travelled about his domain in disguise to know the woes of his people. The Congress PR spin is about the little man against powerful giants—Rahul chatting with farmers in wholesale markets while Modi holds talks with world leaders. Or he is really, as King Henry IV mocked, “as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded”?

The overarching themes of Shakespeare’s work are love and loyalty (Merchant of Venice), ambition and treachery (King Lear), prejudice and jealousy (Othello): all in the pursuit of power, individual or royal. These are the immutable characteristics of the human race; which is why they will forever be relevant as long as the last human walks the earth. In the end, arrive retribution and redemption at great cost (Macbeth). Hal vs Hotspur or Rahul vs Modi is just repeating tropes that mirror fiction and life. The true nature of politics is reflected in Banquo’s question, “What! Can the devil speak true?” The answer lies in Hamlet, of course. “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.” And something indeed was rotten there.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Believe in god, trust in science is new crisishttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/05/believe-in-god-trust-in-science-is-new-crisis-2601604.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Aug/05/believe-in-god-trust-in-science-is-new-crisis-2601604.html#commentsc41bef44-64a9-4916-8476-5a4bab2e8a6aSat, 05 Aug 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-08-04T09:25:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Science,MythologyRavi ShankarRemember the old movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which an African tribe worships a Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane as a gift from the gods because it fell out of the sky? This is how most mythology is born. Many claims, and not just BJP politicians, that Indians knew about airplanes because of the pushpak viman mentioned in the Ramayana. The ancient Greeks invented fire because Prometheus stole it from heaven. They knew how to fly since Icarus did. Early Romans had missiles since Jupiter hurled thunderbolts. The Mayans of antiquity conversed with aliens in UFOs, as ancient drawings show.

Sometime in the 13th century, a literary Scandinavian gentleman named Snorri Sturluson wrote Prose Edda, which exemplified euhemerisation: a system that projects gods and supernatural entities as authentic humans with superpowers. Mythology is the prodigal son of history; before writing, there existed heroes who attained mythical status through ancient oral tradition. For example, Hercules of Greek mythology was an actual man who was exceedingly strong and courageous and was given demi-god status in the epic, Aenid. Samson and Delilah were probably honest-to-god people living in 2nd-century Canaan.

There is archaeological evidence about the Mahabharata War. In a hyper-religious political environment, science is a false religion. While most Christians believe in Noah’s Ark, many Republicans deny the existence of climate change. Though ISRO has sent spacecraft to the moon, there are worthies who believe classical India had airports. The oldest stone tools in the world were invented by Africans who also obey witch doctors. Plant-based cures are a multibillion-dollar industry while once women healers and herbalists were burned or drowned as witches.

For centuries, science and superstition, which comprise the semantics of mythology, have led to a contradictory co-existence. Science is slowly losing trust as conservative politics supercharges education. People are turning to god to rediscover their identity in a bewildering new world of AI and crypto. Hence, education alone can’t restore faith. Good IQ and intellectual integrity perhaps will.

Science is not an easy sell: though everyone is familiar with a car, nobody knows the science behind propulsion is Δv=uln(mi/m), which essentially means that the total mass of a rocket goes from ‘mi’ down to ‘m’ when its velocity increases. We may write a thesis on ChatGPT, but we still think as a tribe: it is a primordial default mode that helped us outlive the dinosaurs. So the veracity of a scientific invention (like vaccines) will be distorted in challenging times to fit with the cultural values of the time.

A study by psychologists Nejc Plohl and Bojan Musil pointed out that education alone does not promote acceptance of science. “Scientific information can be difficult to swallow, and many individuals would sooner reject the evidence than accept information that suggests they might have been wrong,” said a 2022 study.  The world is dynamic and convictions change with fresh discoveries: people who change their beliefs are jeered at as switchers when it would have been stupid for a 16th-century Catholic priest to believe the sun revolved around the earth. People are wired to stick to their beliefs, and only what conforms to their worldview is credible. But the world is constantly changing. Science is spurring that change. Unless governments build trust between scientists and individuals, consoling yourself that the ancestors knew about splitting the atom millennia ago, when Kim Jong Un triggers a nuclear holocaust, is hardly comforting...

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Why oppenheimers failed, but Ayatollahs may winhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jul/22/why-oppenheimers-failed-but-ayatollahs-may-win-2596827.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jul/22/why-oppenheimers-failed-but-ayatollahs-may-win-2596827.html#commentse08234d4-c0b7-42bb-9d39-5d470c09a8ebSat, 22 Jul 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-07-22T06:33:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Oppenheimer,nuclear bomb,Red JoanRavi ShankarArt does not merely imitate life. It explains life. It questions life. It arrives at a conclusion, however hydra-headed, that reflects the complexities of truth, its historical context and lessons for the future. Picasso’s Guernica exposed Spanish dictator Franco’s savagery against his ideological enemies. George Orwell’s 1984 was a prophecy about state control of individual freedom through technology. 

OV Vijayan’s post-Emergency novel, The Saga of Dharmapuri, was scatological surgery on the perversion of power. Amanda Gorman recited The Hill We Climb at the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony as a healing ode to a country divided by hate, anger and lies. All these artists address a single issue, and perhaps the most important one: mankind’s survival in the age of war.

Two movies—the recently released Oppenheimer and Red Joan (2018)—explore the triumph of the human spirit and ethical dilemmas on saving the human future. Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb, which ended World War II, but started America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. Red Joan is the story of Melita Stedman Norwood, a British bureaucrat and KGB spy, who gave the Russians the nuclear formula because she believed a third world war could be averted because of a deterrent her treason created to balance the scales of power.

When Einstein learned from two fellow physicists and Hungarian refugees Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner that Germany was mining uranium in Congo to make a nuclear bomb, he wrote to President Roosevelt that a weapon of unprecedented force must be made immediately. Thus, three Jews ended a war that Hitler had unleashed to murder millions of Jews. Another Jew, J Robert Oppenheimer, headed the Manhattan Project and detonated the world’s first nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945. A student of Sanskrit, he said, “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita,” he said.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. The bombing of Japan devastated him: he reportedly told President Truman that both of them had “blood on our hands”. Like Red Joan, Oppenheimer was a Communist and was even suspected to be a Soviet spy. But unlike Melita, Oppenheimer was a patriot. In 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which investigated him, found no evidence of disloyalty or giving the Soviets US atomic secrets. He eventually became a recluse in academia, away from the new reality of a different world he had helped create.

The two films apply the equality principle of justice to explain that patriotism and non-partisan commitment to humanity have their merits. Both Oppenheimer and Melita erroneously believed that the Soviet model was a haven for socialism and equality, unaware that in reality it was a totalitarian state that shot its citizens on whim or sent them to the Gulag. In the age of nationalism today, such ambiguities don’t exist. It is heresy to question the transforming power of nationalism and zombie democracy.

The nuclear bomb reoriented the world. It also changed the security objectives of governments, which will use any means possible to get an N-bomb. Unfortunately, for countries like North Korea, the bomb is not a deterrent but an active threat. Perhaps, nuclear war would be initiated not by the superpowers, but a religious autocracy like Iran, which wants to annihilate Israel. Rogue states like Pakistan driven by geopolitical Islam and black market uranium are dangers that neither of the two Communist humanists had anticipated. Karma is a bitch; in this case, what goes around may never come around—to reason.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Rat race in a world without menhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jun/24/rat-race-in-a-world-without-men-2587569.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jun/24/rat-race-in-a-world-without-men-2587569.html#commentsb7f60ef5-452e-422f-9f88-ad408f197771Sat, 24 Jun 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-06-25T04:53:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Narendra Modi,Vladimir Putin,Volodymyr Zelenskyy,Philip Marlowe,Jason Stratham,Che Guevera Ravi ShankarMachismo is a deceitful devil. It is a disease of delusion like Vladimir Putin’s, to prove an image of him to himself and his adoring public: riding horses bare-chested, throwing judo opponents down on the mat and impregnating an Olympic gymnast until nemesis kicks ass in the form of Ukrainian hero-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Or it can be charisma on steroids, like Narendra Modi’s, whose muscular politics and unyielding nationalism has made him the most singular leader India and the world have ever seen, wooed 
by Western democracies and West Asian dictatorships alike. Heathcliff’s doomed sex appeal and Philip Marlowe’s tough-guy act exemplify literary masculinity while Dharmendra, Jason Stratham and Rock Hudson gave cinema cojones. Che Guevera and Simon Bolivar thrived on the bloodthirsty high of danger, liberation and power. Leonidas’s 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s war lust, the storming of Tiger Hill and Major Shaitan Singh’s last stand at Rezang La epitomise ballad-class heroism that romanticises the testosterone-laden chutzpah of last action heroes. Boys will be boys, it be true, but 
it’s men who make history.

There, however, seems to be a problem now.

Latest research is adding to mounting evidence that sperm count is declining the world over. Though all scientists don’t agree that it’s a global phenomenon, the fact is testosterone levels in men are dipping. Soon, anti-migration movements won’t be feasible in the West since over half of the world’s population live in countries whose fertility rate is below two children per woman. Freezing eggs and sperm banks may not be the solution since great swathes of the earth’s population have no access to such expensive technology.

For decades, researchers have been flagging the disappearing Y chromosome worldwide. In a global culture that worships virility—one in 200 men in the world are direct descendants of Genghis Khan—is the male species in danger of disappearing unless science comes up with a quick fix? For all the bra-burning fury of 20th century, feminists and Gal Gadot saving the world with a breaking heart and Wonder Woman skills, this isn’t good news for humanity. The gal who needs a man for an orgasm could soon be ghosted by the chromosome crisis.

For ages, it’s men who have been calling the shots. It is men who start wars, rape, pillage, loot and burn down cities and nations. It is men, as captains of industry, who pollute the earth and drain resources. It is men who have invented the glass ceiling. It is men who determine the fate of women in families. As women gained more social power in the late 1900s, they wanted more in a man than a provider and hunter-gatherer who clubbed them on the head and dragged them off to the marital cave.

The ideal male meant a hot honcho with finer feelings; someone who cooked, washed the dishes and changed diapers was both romantic and masterful. He listened to their mates with empathy while giving them a foot massage and took them for long drives. Sure, the caveman has his fan club, but it isn’t politically correct to question the sensitive side of Neanderthals. Apparently, nature has already stepped in to save the male from becoming a dead duck. Two kinds of rodents in Eastern Europe and Japan respectively, are flourishing without their male chromosome. Do men wish to be the rats on the sexually charged treadmill of post-history genetics? In the rat race of the sexes, the Y seems to be more important than the how and where.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Knowledge that enlightens and frightenshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jun/17/knowledge-that-enlightens-and-frightens-2585396.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jun/17/knowledge-that-enlightens-and-frightens-2585396.html#commentsdde1ebc3-216b-45b9-ab61-f66ee4ebe7ddSat, 17 Jun 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-06-18T04:46:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182evolutionRavi ShankarEvolution is the citadel that everyone from religious nuts, political carpetbaggers, serious scientists and the sci-fi crowd is ever eager to storm. It is also the stormy petrel of faith, an idea without which history would simply be a line in the sand. Living beings are wired to evolve as a species, individuals, nation and society until they are upgraded to First Class on their final journey from the place they occupied at their acme in history. If evolution is an unavoidable elitism, a civilisation’s smirk indicating that it has arrived, remember, the yang of arrival is departure. In between exists the great continent of complexity. 

Biologists say cranium size matters in successfully performing complex tasks; the more complex the job, the more evolved the performer. The more evolved the performer, the bigger the brain. Recently, a team of paleontologists discovered a number of prehistoric, covered-up holes in the Earth in the ‘Rising Star’ cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg. It turned out to be the oldest-known burial site in the world.

This discovery upended some known theories on human smarts. The 100-ft deep graveyard contained the remains of several Homo naledi, a species of Stone Age apes who could climb trees and lived in 200,000 BC thereabouts. The holes were intentionally dug as graves two lakh years ago, and then filled in to cover at least five corpses. Clearly, burial practices were not restricted to the social actions of humans or primates with large brain sizes who came later. Since small brains most likely have swollen heads, some Indian politicians will be unsettled by the fact that the Homo naledi is a crucial link in the chain connecting apes and people. The dead hominids had brains the size of oranges.

Discovering that fruit-sized brains countless millennia ago could perform complex social tasks is like suddenly being told that Zomato delivers on Mars. For god-fearing people who are certain that On the Origin of Species is a Left-liberal toolkit to discredit divinity, grave-digging monkey ancestors are baffling. A primeval deepfake, perhaps?

The South African graveyard shift is going to seriously upset some people; Rightwing textbook tamperers, Bible-thumping American Midwesterners and maniacal mullahs are guaranteed to go apeshit, pun intended, at the thought that social evolution is even more ancient than believed. The take of Agustín Fuentes, the Princeton anthropologist who co-authored the subsequent study, is that “burial, meaning-making, even ‘art’ could have a much more complicated, dynamic, non-human history than we previously thought”. Ignorance and bigotry have made landfall after two centuries of scientific discoveries corroded Conservative notions of social order, religion and economics. The world around, knowledge is being besieged everywhere. Science is being questioned, and centuries of research dismissed by demented demagogues. Their maxim is simple: ‘What can’t be seen doesn’t exist.’ Never mind electron microscopes, the Webb telescope or even X-rays.

Both faith and science pursue the same mystery: life. To give it meaning is the ritual of remembering our transient insignificance amid the vast swirling galaxies where shards of the Big Bang still spin somewhere, riding the cosmic chaos from which arises all order.  Meaning is what knowledge gives it. A long lost grave of an extinct species proves that the timeless voyage of discovery continues through storms big and small.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Non-BJP federalism and modified India for 2024https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/27/non-bjp-federalism-and-modified-india-for-2024-2578589.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/27/non-bjp-federalism-and-modified-india-for-2024-2578589.html#comments97479457-1de5-40b0-9baa-b8783ecc6a19Sat, 27 May 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-05-25T17:12:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Ravi ShankarThe downside of Indian federalism is multiple personality disorder. In a civic body election, voters high-five the local government’s ideology if it is development- and security-minded like Adityanath’s. In a state ballot, they assert their regional, cultural and caste chutzpah. The balloting bromide again changes at the national level, where people vote first as Indians, and since 2014, as Hindu Indians. Such a legislative quantum theory can be unsettling for a single personality order like the BJP, when it loses states. Going by 2023 voting trends, next year could be the year of federal fanboys and changing the settings on the dynasty remote control to a proxy political VPN.

Sticking the neck out is the collateral risk of being a political columnist. What better chopping block is there than elections? The political wind smells bad for the BJP in the upcoming battles for Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Its Karnataka debacle was because of abysmal governance, corruption and defection politics. Money is life oxygen for a party; therefore, control of states is imperative. Money is the reason why AAP honchos are in jail, and investigative agencies are digging up the political backyards of Opposition leaders.

The irony that corruption cases mysteriously do a Nirma, when one of them defect—or worse, that the ED or CBI will never go near a lord muck of the ruling party—is not lost on voters. In the marriage of voter and party, corruption is the jezebel. Indians accept corruption as a necessary evil, as they do GST and traffic lights, but politicians can ignore this nonchalance only at their peril: nobody likes a 40 percent dressed-up hussy in the family puja room. Hindtuva didn’t work in Karnataka in spite of the anti-cow slaughter bill and hijab ban.

Since Muslims comprise only 12.91 percent of the population, it can be safely assumed that most Hindus in 135 constituencies didn’t panic about love jihad. The Muslim and Christian population in Madhya Pradesh is just 6.57 percent and 0.29 percent respectively; before defectors toppled Kamal Nath, most Hindus had voted for the Congress. Similarly, in spite of Hindus constituting 70.54 percent of West Bengal’s population, Bengali sub-nationalism trumped Hindu nationalism last year.

In 2014, Modi used technology to change the election paradigm, but his party couldn’t catch up in the states. Sticking my neck out, I would wager the Congress will do creditably in the upcoming state polls, even in Rajasthan. A few inches further more of my neck, Modi will bring the BJP a third term in 2024 because Indians will vote as Indians, since they are convinced that he has done the country proud internationally and made their life more comfortable. Godi media or not, no major corruption scandal like 3G or CWC has broken in the last nine years.

Besides, Rahul Gandhi can’t stand for prime minister until the court says so. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution espouses the survival of the fittest, which is not about apes becoming men, but that only organisms that adapt successfully to their environment will survive and thrive. Charging in as the Vikas Purush, Modi changed the political environment with Mata and Mandir subsequently. Caught in the headlights, the Congress and its fellow travellers decided to become Modi wannabes. They invented soft Hindtuva as a discounted deal, since Hindus make up the majority of the electorate. By June 2024, a binary political structure could emerge with a strong federal and Central formation, which isn’t ideologically congruent. Soft Hindutva and responsible economic stewardship could be the double engine that takes Indian constitutional values forward. Just note that bandwagon has no reverse gear.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The invisible army: Understanding mercenaries and war of todayhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/13/the-invisible-army-understanding-mercenaries-and-war-of-today-2574233.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/13/the-invisible-army-understanding-mercenaries-and-war-of-today-2574233.html#comments9defbafd-33ca-4c44-bad0-5f3691cc8d47Sat, 13 May 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-05-13T04:28:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Ukraine-Russia war,private army,exposing Ukraine warRavi Shankar“There were 90 of us. Sixty died in that first assault, killed by mortar fire. A handful remained wounded. If one group is unsuccessful, another is sent right away.”

“The first steps into the forest were difficult because of all the landmines spread out. Out of 10 guys, seven were killed immediately. You can’t help the wounded. The Ukrainians were firing heavily on us, so even if their wounds were minor, you’ve got to keep going, otherwise, you’re the one getting hit by the fire.”

“Four hundred (Wagner fighters) were brought, and then more and more, all the time." 

Drowned in the din of artillery, gunfire and screams of dying men on the killing fields of Bakhmut, Ukraine, are the last cries of soldiers who will never be honoured with medals or obituaries. They are mercenaries of the Wagner Group, an infamous Russian PMC (private military company) owned by the shadowy Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ambitious crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His troops for hire are dying in thousands in the war, which started in February 2022. In March, the US government estimated that of the 50,000 Wagner mercenaries deployed, 30,000 are dead or wounded.

MERCHANTS OF DEATH
The Ukraine war has exposed the worst-kept dirty secret in global conflict: mercenaries. The Wagner Group, which comprises former Spetsnaz (Soviet Special Forces) soldiers, is employed by the governments of Syria, Libya and Venezuela to liquidate rebels, dissenters and Islamists. Its Africa operations include political activities in Madagascar, Mozambique, Congo, Angola, Senegal, Rwanda, South Sudan, Guinea, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Chad and South Africa. Referred to as ‘Putin’s shadow army’, the group is named after Richard Wagner, the führer’s favourite composer.

Vladimir Putin with Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin 

Lukas Aubin, research director at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, told France24 channel, “Besides Prigozhin, we also have the militia of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. These ‘entrepreneurs of influence’—politicians or oligarchs—spread their influence and that of Russia internationally.” While the downside is that there are no medals for valour, the upside is 
a fat paycheck and private loot: after Gaddafi fell, Wagner troops raped and murdered their way across Libya to secure its oil resources. They are assisting the Russian Army do the same in Syria on behalf of its president Bashar al-Assad. PMCs fulfil key political, economic and strategic requirements of the governments that hire them.

(1) The fewer dead soldiers of official armies sent back home, the lesser the political backlash 

(2) Plausible deniability for war crimes 

(3) Capture and control key resources like mining and petroleum products on behalf 
of autocratic regimes 

(4) Engineer coups and carry out assassinations since they aren’t bound by regular laws 

(5) Intelligence gathering, political strategising.

“Today’s mercenaries are technologically proficient and innovative as fighters of hybrid wars, but there is an increasing trend to employ them using conventional tactics and structures,” says Lt Gen. (retd) Syed Ata Hasnain, former Commander, Srinagar-based 15 Corps, now Chancellor, Central University. He adds that PMC’s potential to employ weapons of mass destruction will open a Pandora’s box and cause conflicts which will cross all lines of basic ethics, threatening humanity’s existence.

Private pacts and dirty deeds

The most infamous PMC is Blackwater USA (renamed Academi in 2011), which emerged as the face of private military action in the Middle East. Its marketing slogan was, ‘If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere.’ Founded by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, the PMC’s first major assignment was in December 2003 to protect Lewis Paul Bremer III, leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq.

Blackwater’s mettle was proved when terrorists attacked Bremer’s car. He recalled the strike to Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, “Our convoy, as usual, consisted of two ‘up-armoured’ Humvees sheathed in tan slabs of hardened steel, a lead-armoured Suburban, our Suburban, and another armoured Suburban following, and two or more Humvees. Overhead, we had a pair of buzzing Bell helicopters with two Blackwater snipers in each.”

Inside the SUV, Bremer was contemplating going skiing in Davos when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. “The Suburban’s armoured-glass rear window had been blown out by IED. And now AK-47 rounds were whipping through the open rectangle,” he says. The bravery of Blackwater troops consolidated its reputation. Prof. Ajay Darshan Behera of the Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, says,

“PMCs have functioned even in the Cold War years such as the MPRI, Keeny Meeny Services, etc., but the US has increasingly started outsourcing many aspects of war-fighting to them. Such operations include providing security and transportation.” In 2010, Prince left Blackwater. He has since become a Prigozhin doppelganger, doing dirty surveillance work for former US president Donald Trump such as sending agents to infiltrate the Democratic congressional campaigns and offering to subcontract for Wagner in Mozambique and Libya. Vanity Fair exposed that Prince covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and assassinations. Over and above providing security for CIA officers, Blackwater personnel participated to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Death pvt ltd
Private armies have most boots on the ground in many restive African regions. The first modern PMC appeared in post-apartheid South Africa after its government demobilised special forces, which tortured and murdered freedom fighters. Left powerless, its senior security officers created Executive Outcomes, a formidable private military force. Its clients included the governments of Angola and Sierra Lone who used them to fight insurgents. It even offered its skills to the UN to stop the Rwandan genocide of 1994, but Kofi Annan refused, claiming “the world may not be ready to privatise peace”. Annan’s was an expensive ideology, given that eight lakh Rwandans died.

In 2008, Hollywood actor Mia Farrow suggested hiring Blackwater to end the genocide in Darfur, West Sudan, where a Black African-Arab civil war had been raging since 2003. Called ‘the first genocide of the 21st century,’ more than three million Sudanese were murdered. Sudan is still unsafe; last week, India rescued 3,862 of its citizens from the civil war-torn nation. “Not only are PMCs cost-effective, but are sometimes also more efficient than state armies, flexibility and swiftness being their USP. Since they operate in the grey zone, they are effective tools for states to evade accountability, and also prop up offensives without relocating forces from other strategic fronts,” says Harsh V Pant, Vice-President, Studies and Foreign Policy, Observer Research Foundation.

The nationalities and skills of mercenaries are as varied as their reputation. US-owned PMCs like Triple Canopy employ mostly former Ugandan and Peruvian Special Forces soldiers while DynCorp troops are fighting local rebels and drug runners in Iraq, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The efficiency of British PMC Erinys in protecting Iraqi oil fields won it a similar contract from the Congolese government. The Australian-owned Unity Resources upped its numbers in Iraq and continues ops in Africa, Central and South America, Asia and Europe.

The London-headquartered G4S operates in over 125 countries, and is considered the second-largest employer on earth. Behera elaborates, “The trend of hiring PMCs is higher in countries with a higher per capita GDP like the US, UK and Russia. They’ve been facing problems in recruiting for their standing armies, and have been, for long, involved in conflicts across the world. War is big business and private players are eager to get a chunk of the share.” Russia’s monthly spending on Wagner operatives is $150 million. But high wages come at a price: by 2010, for the first time in US history, more private soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan than service personnel.

Continent of conspiracies
When and how did modern mercenary armies begin to proliferate? Part of the answer concerns the change in world politics, the rise of terrorism and drug cartels. In post-colonial Africa in the mid-20th century, tribal warfare engulfed many countries, creating a fertile ground for black market arms. The aftermath of World War II left the world awash in weapons and demobbed troops. Some soldiers of fortune even became cult figures. A group of mercenaries nicknamed Les Affreux (The Frightfuls), fought in Congo during the decolonisation crisis in the 60s; films like The Wild Geese and The Dogs of War were based on the exploits of star guns-for-hire, who included ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare and Bob Denard.  
Plagued by ethnic strife and assaults for custody of oil and mineral resources, many governments are forced to hire specialists to do what their poorly trained armies cannot: bring peace for a price. Nigeria’s military action, which emasculated Boko Haram, bore the fingerprints of its mercenaries. When the militants kidnapped 276 schoolgirls for “wives” in April 2014, a private army hired by Nigerian president Jonathan Goodluck, armed with Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships and South African Reva II troop carriers, put down the terrorists. But South African Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapise-Nqakula fumed, “They are mercenaries, whether they are training, skilling the Nigerian defence force, or scouting for them. The point is they have no business to be there.”

Contractors working for Blackwater USA take part in a firefight in the Iraqi city of Najaf

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY
Where business is—legit or not—private armies flourish. Africa, the Golden Triangle and Latin America together comprise the world’s largest narcotic territory. South America’s drug problem has turned the continent into a lucrative playground for PMCs. In 2011, the US Defence Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office (CNTPO) awarded $3 billion in contracts to Blackwater, DynCorp and Lockheed Martin. CNTPO, whose mandate covers Pakistan and trans-Saharan Africa, claims to take the lead “for developing technology for inter-agency and multinational operations to disrupt, deter and deny narco-terrorist activities to reduce trafficking in illegal narcotics and materials that support global terrorist activities”. Jayadeva Ranade, member, National Security Advisory Board, and president, Centre for China Analysis and Strategy, says the US has been using mercenaries to battle drug cartels and disrupt their supply channels in a manner law enforcement agencies could not.

“They are useful in side-stepping the laws of the client or target country while allowing efforts, often illegal, to degrade the drug lords and cartels,” he elaborates. Hundreds of former American soldiers are hired by South American governments to burn cocoa fields, fly surveillance missions on cartel activity, and train local police. “It’s like a replay of Air America. You have these expatriates, guys who are hard drinkers, hanging out in local cat houses, who were involved in Southeast Asia and supporting the contras in Nicaragua, now running around South America,” Wayne Madsen, a covert-ops expert, told New York Post. In response, the cartels hire mercenaries themselves—former Colombian and Mexican elite soldiers to protect their interests. But fighting capacity alone doesn’t ensure victory, says Maj. Gen. (retd) Dhruv Katoch, Director, India Foundation. “While former military personnel may be employed by PMCs, their war capabilities are constrained by factors such as group cohesion, leadership issues and motivational levels.”

Even the good guys hire mercenaries. NGOs and aid agencies like CARE, Save the Children, CARITAS, and World Vision, operating in volatile regions in Africa and West Asia, employ private soldiers. The clientele of PMCs also includes global corporations which do business in remote, resource-loaded zones vulnerable to local warlords. Mining multinational Freeport-McMoRan used Triple Canopy soldiers to protect its properties in terrorist-infested Papua, Indonesia. DeWe Security personnel guard China’s National Petroleum Corporation in South Sudan.

Beijing has banned PMCs, but reports estimate 20 to 40 Private Security Companies (PSCs) are operating in 40 countries, and 7,000 PSCs are active domestically. PSCs project Chinese power overseas while protecting its infrastructure and nationals working in projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, and in Africa, Central Asia and Pakistan. “China is slow to use PMCs because of domestic security concerns. The regime is apprehensive of the Chinese people learning and using weapons since that could threaten it,” says Ranade, adding that Chinese security companies are unlike the PMCs elsewhere since their leadership comprise former security personnel and embedded CCP cells.

Mayday, Payday 
The global private military services market was worth $258.11 billion in 2022, and is projected to grow to $446.81 billion by 2030. Most contractors are paid an estimated $9,000 to $22,500 per month, depending on their experience and nationality. British mercenary Dave Tomkins was offered $1 million by drug cartel Cali to kill Pablo Escobar. The daily pay of Silent Professionals’ maritime officers in Africa ranges between $700 and $800. The US government is the best customer of PMCs: a 2011 study found that up to half of the $14-trillion spent by Pentagon since 9/11 went to them. Though Scotland-based Aegis Defence Services shot Iraqi civilians in 2005, Western oil companies hired 5,000 of its soldiers for security operations. “While the lethality of missions determines pay checks, most engagements of mercenaries are short-term because it demands extreme physical fitness. As PMCs proliferate, the scope for effective Staff Officers and Senior Commanders with ability to strategise will increase. This is a domain with unlimited scope for expansion,” says Gen. Hasnain.  

Today’s PMC scene is a United Nations of Death: former law enforcement officers of Colombia, Panama, El Salvador and Chile, who are experienced in fighting cartels and contras, find both adrenaline rush and money in the Middle East conflicts. Private soldiers are present in Kurdistan, hired by the militia to fight Syrian and Turk troops. Arab mercenaries from the UAE Special Forces are helping the Saudis counter Teheran-supported Houthis in Yemen. So are African mercenaries from Sudan, Chad and Eritrea. Even terrorists are hiring mercenaries. The Uzbekistan-based Malhama Tactical group only works for jihadi groups like Nusra Front in Syria, Turkistan Islamic Party and the Syrian branch of the Uighur group. 

South America’s drug problem has turned the continent into a lucrative playground for PMCs (below)

Mercenary might

Today’s mercenaries are no amateurs, gung-ho about defending democracy like the ex-soldiers from Britain, the US and Australia fighting the Russians in Ukraine. Proficient in modern warfare, experienced private soldiers have access to top-line war machines. The legendary firefight for the Syrian Conoco gas plant between American soldiers and Wagner mercenaries in 2018 is a case in point. On February 7, 40 US soldiers countered an assault by 500 Wagner militias who, along with Syrian government forces, attacked with Russian-made T-72 tanks. Documents obtained by The New York Times estimated 200 to 300 attackers dead. No US soldier was hurt. “It took America’s most elite troops and advanced aircraft four hours to repel 500 mercenaries. What happens when they have to face 1,000? 5,000? More?” asks former US Army officer Sean McFate in Mercenaries and War: Understanding Private Armies Today.  

The nature of war is changing with new fronts opening up, new alliances forming and new tactics being formulated. A scenario in which armies fight for money, like the feared mercenary armies of Europe did during the Middle Ages, cannot be ruled out. It is one thing to unleash the dogs of war; it’s another to stop them from running wild. 

The nationalities and skills of mercenaries are as varied as their reputation. US-owned PMCs like Triple Canopy employ mostly former Ugandan and Peruvian soldiers, while DynCorp troops are fighting rebels and drug runners in Iraq, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Soldiers for Sale: A Brief History
The word ‘mercenary’ sums up the purpose: the Latin merces means wages or pay. Until 1648, when the Thirty Years War ended in Europe, very few countries had standing armies. Feudal lords supplied kings with men in times of war. Hannibal crossed the Alps in 2018 BC with his 60,000-strong army that included mercenaries to attack Rome. The Ten Thousand was the army of Greek mercenaries employed by King Xenophon in 400 BC. The men who rent their swords are loyal only to their hirers: standing against Alexander’s invading force, which had 5,000 foreign mercenaries, were 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the Persian army. For 1,000 years, mercenaries fought for the Roman Empire. William the Conqueror couldn’t have conquered England without hired soldiers. Mercs dominated warfare: the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors, the Italian condottieri, the German landsknechts and Swiss, Bretons, Gascons, Picards all fought for different masters. The condottieri were the most notorious—they would switch sides in an instant if the price was raised.

After the Industrial Revolution, wars became larger and more expensive. This prompted the rise of an unconventional startup: the military entrepreneur. They built and maintained private armies to be rented out at exorbitant prices to any king who needed their services. Count Albrecht von Wallenstein outfitted an army for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II to become Europe’s richest man: ironically he was killed by his client. Bernard von Weimar provided armies for Sweden and France. Military enterprises were the first PPP model in warfare which ensured a mutually beneficial relationship. In 1659, Louis IV formed France’s first standing army of six infantry units.

More countries followed suit with larger armies. The 18th-century Prussian statesman, Friedrich von Schrötter, remarked famously: “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.” Then states became military entrepreneurs themselves. Queen Elizabeth outfitted private warships to plunder enemy ships. The East India Company had its own army. The British Empire hired about 30,000 Hessians from Germany to fight the American Independence movement. In India, from the Bunts of Karnataka to the Purbiyas of Bihar, hired soldiers were a common feature of local kingdoms during the medieval period. Thousands of European and African mercenaries too, came here during the 16th and 17th centuries to fight for local rulers. One of the earliest accounts is by Vasco Da Gama, who wrote about Italian mercenaries on the Malabar coast during his journey in 1498. 

The Ukraine War has attracted many former soldiers to fight; some of them out of a sense of duty. Their predecessors were The Flying Tigers, American ex-fighter pilots who attacked Japanese occupiers in China in 1940-41 even before the declaration of war. The pogrom in the African wars was the reason why the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions banned mercenaries. But the definition of a mercenary is so vague that companies like Wagner can act without fear of reprisal.

with Anika Mohla

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Only HRD ministry has all the answershttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/06/only-hrd-ministry-has-all-the-answers-2572091.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/May/06/only-hrd-ministry-has-all-the-answers-2572091.html#comments626e35c9-b1de-424a-9e45-785f8d076fe4Sat, 06 May 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-05-06T07:40:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182HRD Minister,Indian Education,NCERTRavi ShankarThe kilogram lives in France. Cast in platinum and iridium over 120 years ago, it is a shiny cylinder named the International Prototype Kilogram, which stays hermetically sealed inside a triple-locked underground vault outside Paris. Nicknamed Le Grand K, it is the last word, or more precisely last thing, in measuring mass.

But what if it falls? Or is stolen? Poof! would go the ultimate benchmark for all measurements of weight and mass in every country on Earth. Needed was a replacement—not an object, but an equation based on the immutable constants of the universe; like ‘h’, the Planck constant. So a bunch of young American scientists decided to define the hyper-accurate value for ‘h’: they had to link it with Einstein’s E=mc2 on creating mass from energy and so on and so forth. To cut a long story short, the final number for ‘h’ is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000006626069934 kg.m2.s−1.

Now, what would NCERT make of this? Or an HRD minister worth his weight in kilos? Or a hapless academic on a government salary with pension and benefits? Of course, everyone knows ‘h’. It is just a letter. What does a damn letter have to do with a kilogram, which is even spelt without it? Just like nobody has seen a monkey become a man (in politics, it is often the other way around), nobody has actually ‘seen’ energy. Now the Einstein chap came up with, E=mc2, which says mass can be converted to pure energy and energy can create brand new huge objects. What we do know is that anti-conversion law energises masses, but that ain’t science; it is politics.

Our poor NCERT ideologues have much to challenge in order to make Indian education conform to the ancient wisdom of rishis and sages. There seems to be a Western conspiracy afoot as nearly every scientific theory taught to our students is not from India. Since nobody has seen an ape become a chap, nobody has seen Earth move around the sun either.

It’s the sun that rises and sets. We don’t need damn textbooks to tell us. Wasn’t an FIR filed in 1615 by a priest against Galileo, the chap who supported the Copernican theory that Earth revolves around the sun? Subsequently, the Roman Catholic Church declared that Galileo’s theory is contrary to scripture (Joshua 10:12-13) and, therefore, is fake news.

We’re also teaching kids that the moon revolves around Earth, which revolves around the sun. It’s enough to make one’s head spin. And the ridiculous idea that the moon doesn’t fall on Earth is because the planet’s gravitational pull keeps it on its path. Just because Newton saw an apple fall, he concluded there is a theory of gravity. Are there apples on the moon, huh? Then why doesn’t an apple that falls from a tree on Earth not land on the moon? Has anyone ‘seen’ gravity?

You fall because you are pushed or miss a step, right, NCERT? Put that in your next textbook: an apple a day keeps Western toolkits away. A mad Greek named Archimedes jumps out naked from his bath and discovers a theory about the displacement of matter. Is such vulgarity to be taught to our students? The path to true scholarship is to possess a questioning mind. Only, remember, the HRD ministry has the right answers.

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‘We’re determined to destroy the entire mafia and their economic empires’: UP top cophttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/29/were-determined-to-destroy-the-entire-mafia-and-their-economic-empiresuptop-cop-2570015.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/29/were-determined-to-destroy-the-entire-mafia-and-their-economic-empiresuptop-cop-2570015.html#commentsd6605829-2697-43d2-9a5b-aabaa1949f08Sat, 29 Apr 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-04-28T06:52:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Uttar Pradesh,UP Police,Prashant Kumar,mafiaRavi ShankarHuman rights activists allege that the UP police have been acting outside the law after the encounter with Atiq’s gang and subsequent killings.

The killing of Atiq and Ashraf was unfortunate, but the police acted quickly. We apprehended all three persons involved, alive. A special SIT has been formed to look into it. For the first time, a three-member judicial commission has been formed under the chairmanship of a retired high court judge and includes a retired ADG-level officer and a retired district judge.

There is no partiality in our actions against criminals. Some people allege that a particular community is being targeted. This isn’t true. If you see the list of criminals in the public domain, it is caste-neutral, religion-neutral, and region-neutral.

Would you consider the elimination of Atiq’s gang a warning to other gangs?

Of course. Most dreaded criminals are in jail. They don’t even want to come out on bail.

Any further developments in the case?

We have to account for each and everyone who has committed the crime. There are still criminals at large who killed our policemen. There is a reward of `5 lakh on each.

Atiq Ahmed’s son, Ali, is lodged in Naini Central Jail.

If somebody is in jail we will interrogate them.

Al-Qaeda has threatened revenge for Atiq’s death.

A letter has surfaced on social media alleging that Muslims are persecuted in some states. The agencies are looking into it.

What do you know about Atiq’s letter in a closed envelope his lawyer gave to the CM and CJI?

Any document which has not been routed through jail authorities is of questionable value.

In terms of interference in the working of the police regarding criminals with political connections, what has changed between previous governments and now?

Under this government, there is no protection for any criminal. Our slogan is zero tolerance against crime and corruption. We’re determined to destroy the mafia. We’ve formed an anti-mafia task force that has identified important criminals. Their gang members are being monitored at the highest level. You must have seen that their properties worth crores have either been confiscated or demolished. They had encroached on both government land and private land.

There is a perception that there is widespread corruption in the UP police.

Like we have zero tolerance for criminals, we have zero tolerance for corruption among our own staff. All complaints against policemen are verified to see if they are motivated, and if they are found to be true, immediate action is taken. We have also acted against government officials who have been colluding with criminals by favouring them with tenders, mining permissions, etc. We had 150,000 vacancies in the police and 16,000 fresh recruits have been inducted in a transparent and impartial process. Unlike in previous cases, there has been no court intervention or complaints about recruitment.

In Punjab, connections between the international drug mafia and terrorists have surfaced. Does UP have similar problems?

There are no such specific inputs, but we are vigilant along our 550-odd km long international border, which is porous. We have taken action against drug trafficking and human trafficking across the border. Punjab’s case is different from Uttar Pradesh’s.

UP CM Yogi Adityanath has expressed his intention to make the state a top business destination. Previously, after instances of crimes, kidnappings and murders, there has been fear among businessmen. Has the atmosphere changed to make UP business-friendly in terms of law and order?

A lot of effective action has been taken against the mafia. Now, big investments and systematic government action have created a business-friendly atmosphere in the state.

How are the police managing the communal situation in a sensitive state like Uttar Pradesh?

In the last six years, no communal riot has taken place in the state. We have a system that has over 18 lakh digital volunteers in every ward and mohalla, who constantly keep us informed. For the first time in history, no cognisable case was registered during the Kumbh mela. This was due to the training in soft skills imparted to the police force. We use AI and technological intervention.

Does the CM directly monitor the law and order situation?

He gives broad directions, which we follow. There is no impartiality. We take immediate action against provocative speeches and anyone trying to vitiate the atmosphere.

In spite of surveys that UP is the safest state for women, many incidents of brutal crimes against women, like setting fire to a rape victim, have happened.

Sometimes it depends on how such cases are portrayed. In the Unnao case, the uncle set the house on fire. It is fashionable to show the police in a negative light. Some regions are caste-sensitive and accrue a different colour. We have brought about many changes. The number of women cops has increased threefold.

About 27 departments are working in tandem on Mission Shakti which concerns women’s safety and empowerment. We have created about 10,000 women police beats where policewomen go to villages, listen to the problems of the women and sort them out. Each and every police station has a woman counselling centre and welfare centre.

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Rewriting history has geographical perilshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/15/rewriting-history-has-geographical-perils-2565644.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/15/rewriting-history-has-geographical-perils-2565644.html#commentsd78ab696-b274-4c03-8862-881a254fbd77Sat, 15 Apr 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-04-16T04:57:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Soviet Union,Rewriting historyRavi ShankarErasure of history is as old as history. According to Roman historian Tacitus, “The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified, during their lifetime, out of dread—then, after their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering hatreds.”

The History of the United States by Noah Webster published in 1832 gets Alzheimer’s when it comes to mentioning slavery. Many textbooks in the White-dominated, monocultural American South carry no references to the lynching of Blacks, which continued well into the 1960s.

Though the South lost the Civil War, schools in Bible Belt America taught sanitised history in ‘mint julep’ textbooks published by Confederate historians, who contradict true accounts of the American Civil War. These books even ignored Abraham Lincoln’s assassination altogether, since defeated Northerners saw the killer John Wilkes Booth as part of a larger White majority conspiracy. School authorities in Texas have dropped words like ‘nigger’ from American classics such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to cauterise old biases.

The Soviet Union adopted forceful forgetting by ideologically interpreting its past to suit its present, using the Secret Police. Both Lenin and Stalin rewrote history by downplaying the number of Russians they had ordered murdered: at the height of ‘purification,’ 1,500 individuals were being shot dead daily by KGB execution squads. Stalin had even established a quota for commissars to turn in imagined ‘enemies of the state’ or face death themselves—it condemned millions of innocent people to death or prison. He standardised Russian history; only the government had the authority to publish anything.

“History has ever been a harbour for dishonest writing—a home for forgers, the insane or even ‘history-killers’ who write so dully they neutralise their subjects,” writes Richard Cohen in his Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. Vladimir Putin, whose papa was a cook for both Lenin and Stalin, continued the tradition of lies by whitewashing Russia’s peace deal with the Nazis in schoolbooks, which also deny the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

The Nazis created the myth of an Aryan Jesus and a Bible sans the Old Testament to obliterate Christ’s Jewish origins. China’s Mao eliminated the intellectual and academic class with the Cultural Revolution, which was a spree of state-sponsored mass murders; he destroyed all monuments and textbooks mentioning anything about pre-Communist China. An entire generation of Chinese grew up without learning about Mao’s bloodbaths. In some towns and cities, however, old names of streets and gates persist as baffling tokens of a lost geography.

Students aren’t taught about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. But many young Chinese, eager to know more about their past, are learning about the country’s erased past online. Recently one such young man protested at Tiananmen Square alone, but was soon joined by others like him. All were jailed. In an Orwellian twist of fate, they found that their arrests too were deleted from official records. Robbing a generation of memory is robbing a country of its identity.

In spite of the best intentions of Right-wing scholars, however, Indian history cannot be erased nationwide. In federal India, which teems with opposing ideologies, different castes and religions, and eclectic educational systems, state governments like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Odisha etc. abjure teaching partial versions of history. A crisis of confusion will arise when the two worlds collide: a generation that knows and one that is in the dark.

Democracy encourages multiple knowledge streams. It thrives on an argumentative ethos of doubting and questioning. A youth robbed of knowledge is a youth without memory. When the blinkers fall, they may not be as unforgiving as the editors and authors of reimagined history.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Trump ensures American civilisation is a dudhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/08/trump-ensures-american-civilisation-is-a-dud-2563371.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/08/trump-ensures-american-civilisation-is-a-dud-2563371.html#comments28f0efa7-e551-45fd-bbf7-3ea77af4ae05Sat, 08 Apr 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-04-10T03:03:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Donald Trump,Bollywood,American cultureRavi ShankarThe journey of a nation to empire status and coming of age as a civilisation is an arduous passage. Not all make it. The doings and causes of its heroes and prophets, real and false, make up its folklore. It has taken America centuries since the first Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620 to become the world’s most powerful empire today. American culture has spread its influence across the world in many vital areas like finance, cinema, food, language and clothes—even anti-US protestors wear jeans and order burgers. America’s great heroes such as George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr championed ideas like individual liberty and creative freedom. According to sociologist Harvey Rich, “An American hero is someone who has made a major impact on the country, with lasting cultural implications.” By that definition, Donald Trump is today’s American hero, whose criminal indictment—and subsequent arrest—has made him a bigger star not just to his supporters, but also to the Republican Party. The appalling cultural implications expose the change in mores that govern American society and politics.

The ugly truth about heroes is that they have much to hide. The fundamentals of American equality were built on slave labour; early American presidents owned Black slaves. The dirty side of Hollywood is sexploitation and the protection of predators. The Great American Capitalist Dream is marred by Ponzi schemers like Bernie Madoff. The success of Silicon Valley is tainted by the unscrupulousness of its tech moguls. Public opinion, however, demanded a probity from the White House until Trump happened. Richard Nixon was forced out of office after the Watergate Scandal. America hasn’t had a more divisive, uncouth and immoral leader than Trump.

What has changed in America since the days when Bill Clinton almost lost his job after a sex scandal? Trump is indicted for paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels with whom he had a wild affair when his wife Melania was nursing their newborn baby, while simultaneously carrying on with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal. He is being sued for rape by another woman. Yet, why do Republicans, who banned abortion in states they control, champion a philanderer and a crook?

America delights in its role of the champion of the free world, but how does such a president, who lied about losing the election and called for civil war, become democracy’s saviour? Trump subjugated his nation’s foreign policy to Putin, but is considered the true American patriot by his party. He shared classified CIA briefings with the Russians and stole confidential documents from the White House, but it is Hillary Clinton who is reviled for using her private emails in official correspondence. What explains this dark moral dichotomy of the US democracy?

The truth? America will never be a civilisation. Its society is deeply racist and Bible-thumping. It is misogynistic and anti-immigration even though outsiders powered its rise. A closer inspection of American history reveals that its ways enriched White immigrants and persecuted other races. Trump represents the worst of America. The Republican Party, which fought for emancipation in the American South and fielded Black candidates, is today the embodiment of monoculture and xenophobia. The ancient empires of Rome, Egypt and Sumeria became civilisations because they practised inclusivity. Which is why McFreedom will ultimately fail and the obituary of American culture will just be a meme of inhumaneness, phony decency and unbridled zealotry.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Words speak louder than actions in Biharhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/01/words-speak-louder-than-actions-in-bihar-2561077.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Apr/01/words-speak-louder-than-actions-in-bihar-2561077.html#commentsa5a64bde-e0a4-4920-917b-3ec73c487ff4Sat, 01 Apr 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-04-01T15:21:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Nitish Kumar,BJP,BiharRavi ShankarThe BJP has competition from a new Anglophobe. Last week, when his eyes fell on the harmless words ‘honourable’ and ‘speaking time’ on a notice board inside Bihar’s Legislative Council, chief minister Nitish Kumar became apoplectic: “Hindi ko khatm kar dijiyega kya (Do you intend to finish off Hindi)?” he shouted.

A month ago, mushroom farmer Amit Kumar said “government schemes” and got it in the neck. “What is this? Can you not say sarkari yojana?” snapped the professional political peregrinator whose own sarkari yojana included travelling from party to party without rising from the chair for 15 years.

The hapless Amit was only sucking up as is the normal practice of neophytes on a public stage, lauding Nitish’s governance juice that allowed a management graduate like him to throw up a cool corporate job for a career in farming in Bihar. Instead of beaming brightly as any neta does when praised, Nitish grabbed the mike and yelled at the brownnoser, “Aapko yahan bulaya gaya hai sujhav dene ke liye aur aap aadhi angrezi bol rahe hain. England hai yeh? Arre yeh Bharat hai na ji? Aur yeh Bihar hai (You have been called here to offer your suggestions, but you are speaking half the things in English. Is this England? This is India, and we are in Bihar).”

Then came the googly, “Jab se Corona aaya hai… sab mobile pe jo dekhne laga hai…Apni purani bhasha ko bhool jaa raha hai.. Naya naya shabd bol raha hai (Since Coronavirus came, people have taken to mobile phones and are starting to forget their language…they are speaking new words).” Who would have thought a politician will blame the Coronavirus for people talking in English and forgetting Hindi?

A language is neither good nor bad; superior or inferior. Language is an evolving cultural experience, which is connected to experience through memory. Speaking in English or Greek or Tamil doesn’t mean other tongues are secondary.

Had Amit spoken in Maithili, Bhojpuri or Magadhi, would it make him less Bihari; like talking in English has made him less Bharatiya by inference? Maybe Nitish is hoisting the BJP on its own petard by playing Lingo Lego -- it has been the saffron prerogative to try and impose Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking Indians.

Or he is an entity in search of an identity: like Naveen Patnaik, he belongs neither in the Opposition nor in the country’s ruling party. While Patnaik is happy in Bhubaneswar tending to his state, Nitish is a regional politician with national recall. When coalition politics became a thing in India, it made him a pan-Indian player. Now, he is using language politics to reincarnate as a regional nationalist.

The burden of leaders is to find new enemies or find new ways to slingshot old enemies. Kumar’s fertile brain did both. This is what happened: as Amit began talking during his five minutes of fame, Nitish’s Broca’s area, located in the front part of the left hemisphere of his brain, passed on the information to its motor cortex, thereby bringing into play Wernicke’s area placed in his temporal lobe just behind his ears to understand and process Amit’s syco(phant)-babble.

Using a nerve cluster called arcuate fasciculus that connects both ‘areas’, Nitish understood Amit’s concept in English. Then his motor cortex reacted, taking the info from Broca’s area and ordering the muscles of his face, mouth, tongue, lips and throat to move together to fulminate in Hindi. The brains of both men reacted in the same manner even though the languages spoken were different. Go figure.

Ravi Shankar can be reached at ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Paradox of the liberal racistshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/18/paradox-of-the-liberal-racists-2556686.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/18/paradox-of-the-liberal-racists-2556686.html#comments98a06590-0d24-45ea-a24e-c4137217ae3aSat, 18 Mar 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-03-18T13:09:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Deepika Padukone,Oscars,racismRavi ShankarOn September 4, 1888, just a month short of his 19th birthday, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sailed for British shores. His family was wealthy and powerful: both his grandfather Uttamchand and father Karamchand were the Diwans of the Porbandar state in Gujarat. Like all rich Indians who send their offspring to be educated in England, Karamchand too dispatched Mohandas to become a barrister. But all his wealth, breeding and the Inner Temple stamp did not stop the young Gandhi from being ejected from a whites-only train compartment in South Africa. It did not stop him, either, from protesting to a Johannesburg health officer in 1904 that towards the “mixing of the Kaffirs (his term for Blacks) with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly”.

Later, he became the champion of the ‘untouchables’ renaming them Harijans—the children of God. Perhaps this was atonement or a quest for redemption. Or just an astute move to accumulate political virtue by opposing the Indian equivalent of racism: caste.

The human race isn’t colour blind, it is colour-coded. The modern world’s most liberal and vocal clan is artists. In America, it is Hollywood. Actors are cause-driven, liberal and politically correct. They booed racist Trump and roasted him on SNL. They adopt African babies. And now they are handing out Oscars to Asians. So why are Indians indignant that SS Rajamouli was seated in the last row near the exit at the 95th Oscars ceremony where Naatu Naatu won the award for the Best Original Song? Deepika Padukone is one of the world’s most gorgeous women.

She is also one of the best-dressed— at the awards, she wore a long black off-shoulder Louis Vuitton dress with matching velvet gloves, and Cartier jewellery. She is the third Indian after Priyanka Chopra and Persis Khambatta to present at the Academy Awards. But Vogue magazine, which makes a living off celebrities like Deepika, mistook her for Brazilian model Camila Alves, who is married to superstar Matthew McConaughey. Before our nationalist tweeple's explode in a fit of rage, Deepika wore Vuitton and Cartier not because Sabyasachi or Radhika Agarwal are naff, but because she could meet and beat Hollywood royalty on their own ground.

Visual power dominates history. In its palette, colour is a deeply ingrained prejudice. Linguists refer to race as a metaphor: white hats are good while black hats are bad; a villain has a black heart while angels are dressed in white. Most Hindu gods are fair while all demons are black—Aryans are considered fair and non-Aryans dark. A dusky daughter is an embarrassment and a marital drawback. Race is as close to the home where the heart is: perhaps there’s no need to travel far to get the origin of pigment-pandering. History has been written by victors, who were mostly fair-skinned Muslim and Christian upstarts.

Machiavelli’s ‘paradox of conquest’ harps on the necessity of a new prince to “appear ancient”—
pedigree, manufactured or not, is a prerequisite for legitimacy. Hence, politicians and leaders push the ‘we were there before’ trope to justify their superiority by identifying with the past. White colonisers of the Americas, Asia and Africa annihilated ancient civilisations that proved otherwise. Even now, arts, culture, science, medicine and finance in the West have white donors and patrons. Whether it be Gandhi’s early racism or showing Indians their place at the Oscars, the establishment reveals its true colours when the message is delivered in black and white.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Reservation in corruption counterproductivehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/11/reservation-in-corruption-counterproductive-2554604.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/11/reservation-in-corruption-counterproductive-2554604.html#comments8bfa8d54-29ac-4f3f-92dd-ec14bdfb98deSat, 11 Mar 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-03-11T07:35:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182corruptionRavi ShankarIt is no longer safe to be an Opposition politician. They joke that the ED and CBI are the real double-engine sarkar. Two weeks ago, AAP’s enchilada, Manish Sisodia, found himself enjoying the dubious hospitality of the Indian prison system. Once, politics used to be live and let live, to die another day: vindictiveness, not vindication, defined the brotherhood of corruption.

Unless the straits were dire, a nudge and a wink settled the matter. Then the media used to be on steroids and all politicians faced Trial by TV, irrespective of identity or ideology. The incarceration of Suresh Kalmadi, A Raja, Kanimozhi et al when UPA II was assailed by a string of scams was political PR. Likewise, AR Antulay and Sukhram were jettisoned when they became image-imperiling inconveniences.

Bangaru Laxman went behind bars for pocketing Rs 1 lakh, though Yeddyurappa’s prison stay was short. Shahabuddin was a thug. Nobody had ever heard of Pappu Kalani or Mohammed Surti, so they don’t matter in history’s roll call of knavery. Such was Indian politics until Narendra Modi came along and upended the cosy cabals.

Modi is a solitary traveller on the path of power. He has few friends in politics; only allies, assistants and acquaintances. He has an agenda for greatness—for himself and his country. In this definitive narration, he usually ignores stuff like “chowkidar chor hai” because the baloney wouldn’t stick; letting his minions deal with Rahul’s twaddle. When the Adani scandal broke and markets plummeted, the Opposition went into overdrive, clubbing Modi with corruption. Now, the Prime Minister is a patient man, but not a forgiving one. Pawan Khera barely made bail for his rather tasteless remark on the PM’s father.

Arvind Kejriwal, Modi’s vituperative bête noire, perhaps needs to watch his back—hawala, bribes for seats, snooping, a sex scandal and booze blowback dog his  credibility. BJP politicians have hinted that after Sisodia, Telangana Chief Minister KCR’s daughter K Kavitha too will face the liquor scam fallout. Opposition politicians have been raided, arrested or jailed ahead of elections—for money-laundering, job scams and land deals. NCP ministers were arrested for doing dodgy deals. P Chidambaram spent jailtime and so did his son Karti. Mamata Banerjee’s nephew was grilled in a coal scam case.

Last week, it was the turn of Rabri Devi, the notorious jailbird Lalu Yadav’s wife, and his brood, to face CBI tormentors—their son Tejaswi is Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister in serial side-swapper Nitish Kumar’s Cabinet. Though oneupmanship among Opposition leaders is blocking unity, they are after all united by the equality of corruption.

Corruption is misuse of power, and absolute corruption is absolute misuse of power. It would only be fair if BJP lawbreakers face the same treatment Opposition delinquents get. Heavy-hitters like Himanta Biswa Sarma, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ face graft allegations, but haven’t been caged or even investigated by the parrot. Although the Karnataka Police booked BJP MLA Madal Virupakshappa, whose son was caught taking a bribe of Rs 40 lakh, the politician had enough absconding time to get bail and even a media gag order. The state elections are around the corner, and a bribery scandal, a missing MLA and a seemingly clueless police aren’t good news for the BJP. Protecting him only makes it worse. Voters don’t approve of reservation in corruption.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The fall and fall of Pakistanhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/04/the-fall-and-fall-of-pakistan-2552495.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Mar/04/the-fall-and-fall-of-pakistan-2552495.html#commentse6b76730-a6d2-4530-bbd5-0991e493fabbSat, 04 Mar 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-03-05T05:18:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182pakistan,IMF,Pakistan economic crisisRavi ShankarEverything is rotten in the state of Pakistan. Late in February, Hizbul Mujahideen overlord and US-designated terrorist Syed Salahuddin led the funeral prayers of fellow killer Imtiyaz Alam aka Bashir Ahmad Peer. Alam was one of India’s Most Wanted. Salahuddin carries a bounty of  $10 million, but that didn’t stop him from appearing in public. Significantly, the ceremony was held at the Pakistan Army burial ground in Rawalpindi and attended by ISI hot-shots, indicating the terrorist was treated by the Pakistan military as one of its own. In the same week was also buried Pakistan’s hope of a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the funeral is yet to be held.

It was a bad week for Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Pakistan faced terrorist attacks, Imran Khan’s machinations, military squabbles, China’s financial blackmail, and violent unrest in PoK, Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The unkindest cut was PoK. Hungry Kashmiris took to the streets, railing against skyward prices and army land grab while its so-called President Barrister Sultan Mehmood Chaudhry left on a two-week jaunt to Turkey, the UK and Belgium at government expense. 

In Gilgit and Baltistan, desperate citizens marched against the government demanding flour, pulses, electricity and jobs. Trucks carrying food items were looted by crowds, attacking markets in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Baluchistan. The people of PoK and Baluchistan are comparing their situation to East Pakistan in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. 

But who is responsible for Pakistan’s descent into hell? In 1958, the first military-dictator of Pakistan, General Ayub Khan, had a startling epiphany, which cannot be explained even by the best meteorologists. After he overthrew the government of Iskander Mirza, Ayub announced that democracy doesn’t function in hot climates like Pakistan’s and can flourish only in cold countries like Britain. With Sharif feeling the heat and Pakistan out in the cold because of its terror games, Ayub’s ghost will be feeling vindicated now. The country is broke. Its rupee fell to a historic low of 272 to the US dollar last month. Inflation hovers over 27 percent. Foreign reserves have shrunk to $3.2 billion. Public debt is a gigantic $270 billion, which exceeds government expenditure.

Pakistan’s moribund civic structure is also plagued by power cuts—in January, a nationwide blackout plunged the country into darkness for 24 hours. Most neighbourhoods aren’t safe; crimes like murder, kidnapping and theft are on the rise after the October 2022 floods drowned nine million people in poverty. The Ukraine war has compounded the crisis by forcing Sharif to enter a bidding war with other developing countries over ill-affordable liquid natural gas, which Pakistan needs to keep the lights burning at home. “They walked into the debt-trap situation with their eyes open, there were no major external and internal shocks. The Russia-Ukraine war and floods hastened the trajectory, but aren’t solely responsible,” says Sareen.

Because of the shortage of drugs like insulin, disprin and medical equipment, doctors are postponing surgeries. Without forex, the government cannot import medicines, which are held up at Karachi port. On February 16, arm-twisted by the IMF, Pak Finance Minister Ishaq Dar dropped what cynics call the “petrol bomb”, which hiked fuel prices to historic highs—consumers will have to cough up `170 billion more in taxes while the elite remains unaffected. “Power outages, wheat shortage and fuel crises can impact any economy, but in Pakistan, political instability, weak governance and institutional corruption—collective policy failure—have contributed to the current crisis,” says Nasir Iqbal, associate professor at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.

This looks like political suicide since the country goes to polls in October. There is no money to hold elections, however. A spokesman of the Pakistan Democratic Movement, the ruling coalition, confessed that the government cannot pay salaries and pensions. But Pakistan’s upper class seems unaffected: Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons opened in Lahore on February 10 and had people standing in line for hours; one coffee costs Rs 700. 

Amid the economic nightmare, quacks are having a field day. The far-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) advised Sharif to pick up the Quran in one hand and the nuclear suitcase in the other, and order the world to fall at Pakistan’s feet. Journalist Naila Inayat reported that TLP founder Khadim Hussain Rizvi instructed the government to tell IMF that since interest is haram in Islam, it will pay the basic debt amount, but only when Pakistan has the money. A YouTube preacher’s bizarre suggestion was to start a $1-billion chit-fund with 57 Islamic countries, claim the first committee, and then stop depositing more money. “That way, Pakistan won’t need IMF,” he exulted.

What next? Maryam Nawaz starting a kitty party and playing tombola? Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Programme at the Wilson Centre, told news site Intercept that India has made efforts to implement policies that move closer to things like universal education and access to healthcare, but in Pakistan, those with the power simply have disregarded the economic needs of the people.

The cornered Sharif has now reduced the allowances of ministers and officials. The government will no longer pay their phone, electricity, water and gas bills. All government luxury vehicles will be auctioned and no new ones can be purchased. No five-star hotels during foreign visits either; officials can fly only cattle class. Only tea and biscuits will be served at government functions. Its military though has no intention of cutting down spending—a key IMF precondition for aid.

Writing in Dawn newspaper, Pakistani lawyer Faisal Siddiqui divided the country’s main players into eight actors: coercive and surveillance power (army), executive and legislative power (politicians and bureaucrats), constitutional and legal power (judiciary), narrative power (media), political mobilisation power (middle class, especially youth and women), economic power (the moneyed elite), fatwa power (old and new religious leaders) and anarchic power (terrorists and secessionists). The executive and judiciary lack the will and clout to take on the generals; the National Corruption Perception Survey 2022 named the judiciary and police Pakistan’s most corrupt institutions.

The Pakistan Army’s obsession with India escalated after General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and combined religion with power. He radicalised the army, and created a parallel Sharia judiciary—jurists versed in the nuances of law became secondary to anachronistic mullahs. Pakistan returned to the Medieval Age: adultery, fornication and blasphemy were new offences in the penal code; whipping, amputation and stoning to death became a part of jurisprudence. Un-Islamic material was dropped from textbooks and libraries. Rabid preachers became celebrities and the ulema became omniscient. Jinnah’s dream of a Muslim nation had morphed into an Islamist state. This zealotry is largely responsible for Pakistan’s economic chaos.

The CIA sent billions to Pakistan to fight the Soviets and subsequently terrorists. The West gave mountains of dollars in charity, but the money was gobbled up by the generals and politicians to enrich themselves and train terrorists to attack India. “Pakistan’s fundamentals are wonky.

During the US war in Afghanistan, they benefited from the largesse coming to their aid; money from Western sources was siphoned off—it has been their survival technique. The Pakistan civilian government sees the military as corrupt, and as a sanction for them to do the same,” says national security expert Bharat Karnad.

As Pakistan slowly slid into financial, social and political anarchy, its landlord millionaires, who politically control the country, tightened their grip. In 1959, when Ayub tried his hand at land reform, the furious aristocracy bribed the sectarian party Jamaat-e-Islami to protect the “sanctity of private property in Islam”. As of 2015, half of rural households in Pakistan owned no arable land, although two-thirds of farmland is held by 5 percent of the feudal aristocracy, who are just 1.1 percent of the population. Pakistan’s pro-elite taxation policy is crippling its economy since less than 1 percent of citizens pay direct income tax. Neither the rich landholders nor corporates, businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats pay direct taxes while indirect taxes burden Pakistan’s poor and middle class. Tax collectors stay away from multi-million property transactions by politicians, army officers and clerics. Capital flight of real estate profits to buy palatial mansions in Dubai, London and Toronto are widely known, but ignored.

A UN Development Programme (UNDP) report in 2021 calculated the treasury lost nearly $17.4 billion—6 percent of the economy—by pampering the elite. Nearly half the national income is in the hands of the richest 20 percent, while the poorest 20 percent get only 7 percent. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva scolded Pakistan: “It shouldn’t be that the wealthy benefit from subsidies; it should be the poor. And there the Fund is very clear. We want the poor to be protected.” 

With the IMF insisting on defence cuts and taxing the elite, Sharif played a losing game. He cannot rein in army expenditure. The military operates the biggest business empire in Pakistan through the Fauji Foundation (FF), Shaheen Foundation, Bahria Foundation, Army Welfare Trust (AWT) and Defence Housing Authorities—“the largest conglomerate of business entities in Pakistan, besides being the country’s biggest real estate developer and manager, with wide-ranging involvement in the construction of public projects”, according to the investigative website Fact Focus. 

The army way of life is both luxurious and criminal: even middle-level officers own luxury vehicles, live in mansions, grab land from small farmers and encroach on government property. No major commercial operation can happen without the nod of generals. The FF and AWT are into real estate, petrol pumps, advertising, import, distribution, arms export, petroleum products, fertiliser and cement manufacture (the army is the biggest fertiliser manufacturer in the country), bakeries, farms and even the film industry. AWT owns Askari Commercial Bank, an airline, a travel agency and even a stud farm. “Through its various economic enterprises and foundations, the Pak army is a substantial economic actor, responsible for almost 5-10 percent of GDP expenditure, and it’s non-taxable. From Peshawar to Karachi, it controls transportation, which is the lifeline of the country. With 30 percent of its productive economy not taxed, it’s an enormous blow to the country and its people, who are hit two ways as the army dominates the economic scene and monopolises the budget,” says Karnad.

The UNDP’s National Human Development Report for Pakistan concluded that “the country’s powerful military, which has directly ruled Pakistan for roughly half of its 75-year history, was found to receive $1.7 billion in privileges, mainly in the form of preferential access to land, capital and infrastructure, as well as tax exemptions”. A popular joke is that Pak generals are Crore Commanders, not Corps Commanders.

Credit Suisse released details of Swiss accounts of wealthy Pakistanis, including former ISI head General Akhtar Abdul Rahman Khan. When Fact Focus posted unaccounted financial details of former army chief General Javed Bajwa and family, the government chose to investigate the leak rather than the general whose wealth had bloated to $47 million by the time he retired. The expose was a brave move by the Pak media; 43 journalists have been murdered in the last four years for doing their job. Abductions, beatings and warnings by ISI and the Army are routine for them.

For decades, the army and ISI have been running unchallenged the biggest criminal enterprise in the subcontinental history—the drug trade in the Golden Crescent. Pakistan’s former PM Nawaz Sharif told the Washington Post in 1994 that then army chief Gen. Aslam Beg and ISI boss Gen. Asad Durrani showed him a “detailed blueprint” for selling heroin to fund covert military operations in Kashmir. A 2022 NATO report of the Defence Education Enhancement Programme, titled Narco-Insecurity, Inc., pointed at the ISI’s role in drug production and smuggling in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At last, the corruption has come home to roost. A police officer, who didn’t wish to be named, said, “ISI has no money to fund its operations and so China has stepped in.” Field commanders complained last week that there is no money to feed its soldiers even twice a day. “Pakistan can’t afford such a huge military for security challenges of its own making. The mercenary game it played to big powers isn’t affordable anymore,” says Sareen.

To stir the boiling cauldron, Imran Khan is back with his recipe of mass disruption. Assassination attempts can create heroes, and he is behaving like one for now. This week, the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) went to Islamabad to appear in four cases—one of the courts issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against him in the Toshakhana case for his repeated failure to appear—flanked by his supporters. This was his first public appearance since he was shot in the leg last November near Lahore during a march he led demanding snap polls. 

A leaked video showed him blaming the ISI and army for plotting to “murder Pakistan’s most popular leader”—him. He accused former president Asif Ali Zardari of hiring Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) mercenaries for the hit.

At present, the Zardari-Bhutto and Sharif clans lead a coalition government boosted by PTI defectors. Imran somewhat alarmed the government by winning all eight national assembly seats in the byelections in October 2022. PTI also launched the ‘Jail Bharo Tehreek’ movement which started from Lahore’s Mall Road on February 22, and has been suspended after the Supreme Court ordered polls in the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

For Imran, the timing of protests couldn’t have been more perfect. But then the sporting genius has always been a master of it. General Zia had offered him a ministry in 1988 when Imran was still a celebrity cricketer. Concerned by the foxy general’s sacking of PM Muhammed Khan Junejo—who disapproved of the dictator radicalising Pakistan—Imran didn’t want to be a puppet. But in 1996, timing dictated that he join politics as a captain of the generals. He won the 2018 election promising ‘Naya Pakistan’ but was the first Pak PM to fall to a no-confidence vote. 

Amid the havoc, Islamabad is losing the confidence of its allies. And respect, too. Turkey is furious at Pakistan for reportedly repackaging Turkish relief material sent to help victims of the 2022 floods, and returning it as its own for earthquake relief. An official visit of Sharif and his foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to Turkey was postponed.

The Pak government is helpless to protect Chinese workers engaged in the $65-billion China-Pakistan  Economic Corridor projects. Delays due to massive corruption and terrorism have jeopardised Xi Jinping’s hopes to connect China to the Arabian Sea through roads, railways, pipelines and ports in Pakistan. “China has given loans, and not a grant, at high interest rates, and it may continue to twist and turn Pakistan. Also some projects Pakistan has signed up for are grey rhinos (till they really come close, you don’t see the danger). The country went for much more than it could take,” says Barua. Now Beijing is refusing to renegotiate the $87-billion loan to Pakistan which owes $1.1 billion to independent Chinese power companies. If the money isn’t repaid, Pakistan will have to surrender more territory and assets to China; the contested Shaksgam valley and Gwadar port are already in Chinese hands as foreclosures.

China is Pakistan’s single largest creditor since its banks hold 30 percent of its external debt; diabolically, Beijing has agreed to lend $700 million more. This will plunge its flailing economy into deeper debt and Pakistan could be the next Sri Lanka. The significant difference is that Sri Lanka eliminated terrorism while Pakistan funds it. “Unlike Sri Lanka though, Pakistan has not defaulted on debt yet, because it has friends owing to its strategic location,” says Barua.

As an established sponsor of world terror, Pakistan’s relationship with its poisonous progeny, the Taliban, is complicated. Islamabad, which outmanoeuvred New Delhi to bring the Taliban back to power in Kabul, is now at war with TTP, which is backed by the Afghan government with money and weapons. TTP faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the Peshawar suicide attack in January, which killed more than 100 in a police mosque.

How it all came tumbling down

1958-68: General Ayub’s non-liberal policies of the capitalist model increases income inequality

1970s: During Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s reign, there was a recession in exports, the partition of East Pakistan, the floods of 1974 and locust attacks. His nationalisation policies became the major reason for the loss of industrial units and private investment

1998: Pakistan tests its first successful nuclear device, resulting in G-8 imposing economic sanctions

2007-08: Affected by the internal crisis, the growth rate starts shrinking by 37%

2010: The country is hit by floods, resulting in inflation, spiralling FDI and increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio

2013-18: Hike in public debt and decline in exports continues during PML-N’s government

In 2013, 2016 and 2018, Pakistan seeks financial aid from International Monetary Fund, UAE and China

2021: Pakistan’s public external debt touches $86.4 billion, with over 25 per cent to China. Rollout of China- Pakistan Economic Corridor also increases the debt burden

2022: Floods affect 33 million people, resulting in damages worth over $30 billion. Exports decline by over 16 per cent and World Bank pegs GDP growth at just 2 per cent

2023:  At 27.55 per cent, inflation is at a 48-year-high as thousands of containers of food items, raw materials and equipment are stuck in ports

The Pakistani rupee falls 9.6 per cent against the dollar on January 26—the biggest single-day drop in 
over two decades

Forex reserves held by Pak’s central bank are $3.2 billion, just enough for a few weeks’ worths of imports

A few weeks later, TTP attacked a Karachi police station and killed cops. Demoralised policemen staged a demonstration soon after, asking for government protection, which is in no condition to give it. TTP has warned security forces to keep away from its war on the government to avoid reprisals. The Afghan Taliban’s acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said, “Had terrorism originated from Afghanistan, it would have spread to China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran as well... Afghanistan is not a centre of terrorism. The problem is within Pakistan.”

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs counted 23,372 Pakistani civilians and 8,832 security personnel killed in the highly publicised War on Terror. Meanwhile, carpe diem happens to be India’s motto. In January, New Delhi issued a notice to Islamabad to amend the 1960 Indus Water Treaty which gives river water from Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan and from Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to India. In November 2016, PM Narendra Modi vowed not to let even a drop of water reach Pakistan. India has planned to build projects on all the rivers passing through its territory which could parch Pakistan. Modi has a rising fan base among many Pakistanis who are on video wishing he would lead their country. “Pakistan has made it difficult for us to care for them, but the spillover effect of a nuclear state disintegrating will affect India. Pakistan is a sizeable neighbour India can’t choose to ignore,” says Karnad, adding that they are eminently co-optable and India should make an offer they can’t refuse.

But Modi is unlikely to step in and save Islamabad’s bacon. Iran and Turkmenistan are its only guardian angels currently. From March onwards, Russia is supposed to sell discounted oil to Pakistan for unspecified “currencies of friendly countries”, which according to Pakistan energy experts like Samiullah Tariq could “partially” help the country. It seems the Islamic republic has dug its own grave. In a dusty corner of Lahore stands the Shehr-e-Khamoshan, a new $1.2-million graveyard, built and owned by the Government of Pakistan. It has freezers imported from Germany to keep the corpses fresh; 22 cameras live-stream funerals for mourners who can't make it. The ‘model graveyard is laid out beautifully, with broad walkways and green lawns. Pakistan is desperately trying to convince donors with dollars that its pastures are still green. But anyone who sees beyond the make-believe freshness will see that it is still a graveyard of aspirations.

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Modi doesn’t give damn, but his sidekicks dohttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/25/modi-doesnt-give-damn-but-his-sidekicks-do-2550276.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/25/modi-doesnt-give-damn-but-his-sidekicks-do-2550276.html#commentsbca72885-f73c-4c2a-a881-ca79db0ab79fSat, 25 Feb 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-02-24T10:05:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Narendra Modi,Russia’s Ukraine invasionRavi ShankarConferences of world leaders yield nuanced diplomatic bromides. Last year, at the G20 conference in Bali, when Narendra Modi walked away after a session, Joe Biden rushed after him for some jaw-jaw. The US establishment’s bête noire in 2005, Modi’s India today is America’s best strategic partner in the region. So, when the income-tax department raided the BBC, all the US State Department said was, “We are aware of the search of the BBC offices in Delhi by Indian tax authorities. I would need to refer you to Indian authorities for the details of this search.” The British government stuck to defending press freedom without referring to Modi. What does all this say about the enigma that is Modi?

Scenario One: Modi doesn’t give a damn. He knows that the West, especially America, needs India as a strategic geo-political partner. He is a master at realpolitik; Pakistan is a failed state reeling under political and economic strife, and terrorism. India is still a democracy. It is also a major military and economic partner to the West: in 2018, the US Pacific Command was renamed the US Indo-Pacific Command to counter Chinese President Xi Jinping’s nationalist imperialism.

Modi has shrugged off sanctions after Russia’s Ukraine invasion, buying oil from Moscow without backlash. In 2019, the World Economic Forum predicted that the country will become the globe’s third-largest consumer market by 2030. It is reportedly the world’s second-largest importer of defence technology and the US has sold $22 billion worth of military equipment over the past decade to wean away the Indian Army from Russian weapons, which have been exposed as inferior in the Ukraine war. Moreover, as US companies look for a manufacturing hub outside China and expensive American workforce, India is already the second-most attractive manufacturing hub.

Scenario Two: Modi doesn’t give a damn. He is aware that all national surveys laud him as India’s best PM who is poised for a hat-trick next year. The Indian media doesn’t dare question him, but he may want to rein in the sycophancy of toadies who have proliferated like toxic mushrooms in India’s bleak journalistic terrain. Although ED and CBI raids on critical media are overkill, both TV and newspapers habitually headline the MEA’s broadsides against global liberals, be it media or celebrities.

Can’t blame S Jaishankar because he does have an axe to grind—in 1980, Indira Gandhi sacked his father Dr K Subrahmanyam, who was subsequently superseded for the Chief Secretary’s job by Rajiv Gandhi. George Soros is indeed a dangerous man with immense power and sees himself as a defender of democracy who interferes in foreign economies and politics. Jaishankar rightly abused the billionaire as “old, rich, opinionated”.

When the Adani scandal broke, the BJP went as far to identify the beleaguered businessman with India, and the Hindenburg report as an attack on the nation itself. The Prime Minister is aware that all such vicious retaliation is for domestic consumption. Though the Opposition has made the Modi-Adani plank to discredit him in the run-up to 2024 elections, Modi is known to stay loyal to people who have stood by him. “My shield is the trust of 140 crore Indians,” was his chest-thumping war cry in Parliament.

History swings from absolute power to absolute wokeness. Modi is making history and India is going along with him. He doesn’t give a damn about what the world thinks.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The war on domes is a war on common sensehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/18/the-war-on-domes-isa-war-on-common-sense-2548085.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/18/the-war-on-domes-isa-war-on-common-sense-2548085.html#commentsf7cda8b9-b2c9-4779-9aff-b1073df42085Sat, 18 Feb 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-02-18T13:22:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182BJP,Telangana,domesRavi ShankarNever before in the history of Independent India has such a plethora of experts, who know so little, have had such nuisance value. Ignorance or semi-knowledge is the politician’s playground and architecture is the latest bastion being stormed. 

A BJP-worthy from Telangana has vociferously and vehemently objected to the domes on the new Secretariat building. His beef with the state government and architects is that they remind him of the Taj Mahal. Anyone who is offended at the sight of the Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and the only one in India, must possess an incomprehensible aesthetic sensibility. If the Secretariat’s domes are objects of ire, bus stands weren’t spared the wrath of the saffron architectural Renaissance either.

Another BJP design expert’s warning was enough for Mysuru civic authorities to remove a couple of cupolas from atop a bus stand: news reports noted that the bubbles burst overnight and were to be seen no more. Incidentally, the architect of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya envisaged five domes instead of three so that more devotees can be accommodated. The War of the Hemispheres has begun and the sphere of influence of India’s new architectural saviours is wide and vigorous.

Romila Thapar mentions somewhere that today’s historians are forced to respond to people who aren’t history experts. In fact, such expertise is frowned upon by contemporary ideologues because they don’t fit the new narrative since most netas, irrespective of political affiliation, are ill-informed.

The anti-dome brigade is protesting not because of any architectural predilection, but because it wishes to be noticed by the leadership. Local Indiana Joneses and the Temple of Dome are signs that the second Indian social evolution has begun, with a new generation in authority, unsure of its power being forced to simplify India into a binary trope.

Father of the nation during his visit to the Mosque of Khwaja Qutbuddin, Mehrauli, Delhi. (Photo | Express)

Never mind that there are domes on top of the Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Supreme Court; they are simply ‘non-Indian’ or, to clarify matters, anti-Hindu to some. Shoot-from-the-mouth Wiki historians are unaware that domes are part of Hindu architecture, too—pre-Mughal temple architecture sports lotus designs on squat, circular domes topped by orbs.

Hindu domes can be seen in the Qutb complex in Mehrauli, Delhi, where temple architects used half-spheres atop numerous pillars. In fact, Muslim conquerors had to hire Hindu artisans since they were woefully short of their own builders—armies don’t usually travel with architects and city planners.

ALSO READ | Will demolish domes of new Telangana Secretariat if elected to power: BJP state chief

Subversive Hindu architects hence cleverly leveraged indigenous designs by placing hemispherical structures on square edifices. The cupola runneth over. Domes predate Islam: the dome of the Roman Pantheon, 142 feet wide and 71 feet high, is the largest unreinforced dome in the world.

The great dome of the Sanchi Stupa located in Madhya Pradesh is a marvel of Buddhist architecture. The Jain temples in Mount Abu constructed by Vimal Shah have domed ceilings. More recently, the landmark dome atop Hungary’s 96-m tall parliament building is one of the largest in the world.

The geometry of populist politics, which plays fast and loose with history, is skewed by the opportunism of ignorance much like squinches that can change a square into a circle to fit the base of a dome. Until an exasperated prime minister tells them to zip it, like he told the #BoycottPathaan bores, attention-seekers will scream away about domes. They are fitting metaphors of the anarchic architects of nation-rebuilding today.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Politics and business are old bedfellowshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/11/politics-and-business-are-old-bedfellows-2545981.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Feb/11/politics-and-business-are-old-bedfellows-2545981.html#comments84b805ed-cf19-419d-b716-ae8fc3f5db1eSat, 11 Feb 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-02-10T16:59:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182politics,businessRavi ShankarIn both politics and business, the mother lode is reputation. A good one gets politicians more votes and businessmen bigger bank loans. To put it simplistically, successful businesses boost the markets and trade, create jobs and expand infrastructure, which makes citizens richer and happier, and their political mentors more popular. But popularity is a fickle lover.

The Opposition has pounced on the Hindenburg report, which blames the Adani empire for doing dodgy deals to grow its formidable fortune. The target of the Congress and its cohorts is obviously Narendra Modi, the Indian leader with the cleanest reputation, who they allege helped Gautam Adani prosper.

The launch pad of the Adani billions, however, was the Mundra Port which was given land by Congress CMs in Gujarat—Chimanbhai Patel in 1993 and Shankersinh Vaghela in 1997. Magnates have ideological preferences, but the only religion of businesses is money.

From the days when the merchant classes funded royal campaigns and pageants, to today’s crony capitalism, power and money are historical bedfellows. America’s economy was built by ruthless robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D Rockefeller, who bribed, arm-twisted and wooed politicians for control of the financial system.

Once their empires were built, established and varnished by the 20th century, they did what all grubby businessmen do. They bought a reputation. But the maxim that ‘greed is good’, as Gordon Gekko outlaid in Wall Street, still sums up the capitalist ethos.

Despite the counterculture pushback from climate activists and Zoomers, greed holds good across the world. Governments favour big business because donations are the oxygen of politics. Los Angeles Times reported that Elon Musk received an estimated $4.9 billion in government support in the form of grants, tax breaks and discounted loans. Private military contractors like Blackwater earned billions from the Pentagon, exploiting the sufferings of the Middle East wars. Indian tech and construction companies have poured crores into political coffers in return for contracts. There is a lot of quid in quid pro quo.

In India, the cosy cuddle between business and politics started during the freedom movement when Congress needed funds for its cause. It was an investment that paid off for both. The handshake even had a nationalist glow. The Ambanis changed the rules of the game, interloping into the camaraderie of old money and new ministers, with brash charm and a keen understanding of the value of money down the food chain. Their power was feared because it wasn’t hidden by genteel gloss.

Too much money, and hence power, concentrated in the hands of one capitalist is a danger to democracy: on September 16, 1992, hedge fund billionaire George Soros earned the nickname ‘the Man Who Broke the Bank of England’ for shorting more than USD 10 billion in pounds and earning about USD 1.1 billion.

The pound lost value and the UK treasury lost £3.4 billion. Prime Minister John Major was forced to withdraw Britain from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the US, where political money floods the elections, mega funders aren’t shy about their loyalties; while donating billions to Barack Obama’s campaign, Soros said he has made it his life’s mission to defeat George W Bush, though he regretted funding Obama later.

The marriage of industry and politics is complicated because the tycoon is Caesar’s wife. Divorce is bad for the reputation of both.

Ravi Shankar

ravi@newindianexpress.com

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Indian right must fill its scholarship blankshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/28/indian-right-must-fill-its-scholarship-blanks-2541665.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/28/indian-right-must-fill-its-scholarship-blanks-2541665.html#commentsfb95f9df-9ecf-407d-8c95-fe4ea35924d1Sat, 28 Jan 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-01-29T05:15:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Narendra Modi,BJP,BBC,India: The Modi QuestionRavi ShankarThe question to B or not to BBC cannot be resolved in India. The Indian Right seems to lack the intellectual depth and scholarship to mount a counter-narrative. Its boffins write textbooks claiming that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar flew out of prison on a bird (not Twitter's thankfully) to visit his pals. Its polemists laud uncritical biographies by pretend-scholars and hold science conferences lauding Narendra Modi gravitational waves. Its prickly rhetoric bandies the tired trope of liberal control over academia; nobody was stopping them from building a formidable counter-intellectual phalanx with Indian versions of Conservative French thinkers Alain de Benoist and Bernard-Henri Lévy and his 'New Philosophers' group or American conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman. The BJP's ideological disputants must gain a better understanding of history to mount a cogent defence instead of calling Padmavati the national mother and Shah Rukh Khan a pro-Pakistan actor.

A paper by Markovits Claude, India from 1900 to 1947, Mass Violence and Resistance notes that "the British conquest of India was accompanied by large-scale violence, sometimes directed towards the Indian civilian population".

Why is the BJP yet to demand an apology from the British for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? It was Amarinder Singh's Congress government that did in 2019.

Or, for the communal and caste massacres under colonial rule?

In May 1925, police fired on peasants in Alwar protesting the rajah's land policy, killing 156 and wounding 600. On April 23, 1930, the British Army shot 30 Civil Disobedience activists in Peshawar who were agitating the arrest of Abdul Ghaffar Khan -- the unofficial toll was 200 to 250. Following the announcement of the Quit India movement on August 8, 1942, the government deployed 57 army battalions, which murdered 1,060 Indians in the Eastern United Provinces; unofficial estimates count 1,761 in Bihar alone. The rulers even used the Air Force to bomb agitators.

Communal riots in 1917 in Bihar and the Northwest Frontier Province claimed the lives of hundreds. In February 1928, 149 people died in riots. In March 1931, a hartal called by the Congress to honour Bhagat Singh sparked a major Hindu-Muslim riot in Kanpur, which claimed 400 deaths.

Writes Professor Margrit Pernau of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany: "The Civil Disobedience movement did not renew the scenes of communal amity which had marked the earlier Non-Cooperation movement. Most Muslims stood apart and did not join the boycotts and hartals, the closing of businesses as a sign of protest against a moral injustice."

In May 1932, Bombay witnessed more such riots that killed 217 persons and injured 2,569. Claude notes that "violence between Hindus and Muslims is one of the most publicised features of colonial India's history". All this happened under the watch of the British. A documentary would hence be helpful to understand context.

Saffron savants, intimidated by the English language and intellectually robust Left-liberal bluestockings, could start with some R&D by holistically delving into historical records to interpret and question history. The famous American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead intuited, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world; in fact, it's the only thing that ever has." The BJP’s brainiacs might want to take her advice seriously if it wishes to establish a globally respected thought leadership, which will stand the test of time.

(Ravi Shankar can be reached at ravi@newindianexpress.com)

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Judiciary, executive can't be law unto themselveshttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/21/judiciary-executive-cant-be-law-unto-themselves-2539422.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/21/judiciary-executive-cant-be-law-unto-themselves-2539422.html#comments77f78c7f-224d-4737-9344-9afa3ea891ceSat, 21 Jan 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-01-21T11:36:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Supreme Court,Kiren Rijiju,democracy,new Parliament buildingRavi ShankarThe Supreme Court of India faces a test of supremacy. Assert that it is a law unto itself or duck the fast balls of Law Minister Kiren Rijiju’s bodyline bowling. Going by the judicial mood, it is unlikely that Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and his men in black will let the aliens into the hallowed premises on Tilak Marg. Note the words of Babasaheb Ambedkar, Independent India’s first law minister: “However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.”

In a democracy, everywhere, the winning lot is considered the good lot. Democracy’s greatest flaw, and its greatest virtue, is the will of the people. A great mass of Indians, however, vote on the basis of caste, religion and ra ra rhetoric. They choose flawed men and women, who, in turn, choose flawed officials to do their bidding -- it’s the human condition. The miracle of democracy is that it endures not because of the people chosen to uphold it, but in spite of them.

The nature of power, therefore, buttressed by the vox populi paradigm, is to appropriate more power; after all, isn’t power in the hands of the people a good thing? The stronger and more beloved the leaders, the greater their desire for control because they believe nobody knows better. Which is why democracy has inbuilt checks and balances, which, maybe, Justice Chandrachud’s court is defending by blocking the government’s grasp.

Geotag back 73 years and you’ll find that India’s judiciary and legislature were only separated after birth. It was just two days after India became a Republic on January 26, 1950, that the Federal Court was rechristened the Supreme Court in the Chamber of Princes situated in the Parliament building. Parliament then consisted of the Council of States and the House of the People. The apex court continued to sit for 13 years in the Chamber from 1937 to 1950 -- the Privy Purse was abolished only in 1971. Perhaps, Narendra Modi’s new Parliament building is meant to rewire its colonial legacy.

Irrespective of the current establishment’s grotesque gyrations attributing the origin of every Western institution to ancient Bharatiya wisdom, India’s present judicial system, the media and the democratic process were also Raj creations. As are its flaws. The freedom struggle was a multi-layered mosaic. For example, in 1908, Lokmanya Tilak was defended at a sedition trial by British Barristers LP Evans Pugh and Garth, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. He was sentenced by Indian judge Justice Davar at the Bombay High Court to six years in jail and the judge was rewarded with a knighthood. Then in 1916, the British Police again charged Tilak with making seditious speeches, which claimed that there was more peace in India during the Peshwa rule than under the British. The prosecution harped on these words. Jinnah, representing Tilak, queried sarcastically, “Do you have personal knowledge to disprove this assertion?” The prosecutor retorted, “I’ve read my history.” Jinnah, in the presence of Magistrate CW Hatch, snapped, “Yes, you’ve read the history written by the British.”

History is, indeed, written by victors, but read by the losers. Both the government and the Supreme Court are navigating the narrative of a new history. Only, the bibliography will matter.

Ravi Shankar can be reached at ravi@newindianexpress.com

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The sudden Russian death syndromehttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/07/the-sudden-russian-death-syndrome-2535020.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/07/the-sudden-russian-death-syndrome-2535020.html#commentsc571e106-c2aa-45f3-91db-9ad2771ba5bcSat, 07 Jan 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-01-09T19:10:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Russia,Vladimir Putin,Ukraine,Fidel Castro,Soviet UnionRavi ShankarOn August 20, 1940, a Spanish communist named Ramón Mercader killed Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico City, where the world’s most famous Communist and Stalin’s greatest foe was living in exile. 

The Ukrainian Jew called himself Trotsky since 1902, a word adapted from the German ‘trotz,’ or ‘defiance.’ Stalin expelled him from the Communist Party in 1927 and sent KGB assassins after him. In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1937, he wrote that the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian state. Mercader was tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After his release in 1960, Fidel Castro welcomed him to Cuba and declared him a hero of the Soviet Union. 

Russian sausage tycoon and 65-year-old lawmaker Pavel Antov, who took a dive off the third floor of Sai International Hotel in Rayagada town in Odisha, was no Trotsky, but nevertheless was critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian military misadventure.

He is one of the three Russians who died suspiciously within a fortnight in India and the first in the Sudden Russian Death Syndrome the phenomenon that describes the abrupt, mysterious deaths of many oligarchs, bureaucrats, businessmen and journalists critical of Putin. Antov fell out of a hotel window defenestration is 
a common theme in the fatal list of two dozen important Russians who were found dead in bizarre circumstances last year.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, which was supposed to be the finale of the Russo-Ukrainian war that began in 2014. The invasion, which faltered in the first month itself, led to crippling sanctions on the Russian economy and thousands of Russian and Ukrainian deaths. Most of the initial disagreement with the war surfaced first among the oligarchs, who had benefited from being Putin’s cronies.

Putin with Ravil Maganov, chairman of
Russian oil company Lukoil, who
died on September 1, 2022 

Window to Russia 

The deaths open a window to the vindictiveness of the state. One of the first open window fatalities was Dan Rapoport, a Latvian-born American millionaire, who fell from the window of his Washington DC apartment, just a mile from the White House, on August 14, 2022. The police are still investigating.

Two weeks later, on September 1, another Putin foe, Ravil Maganov, literally took the fall. The chairman of Russia’s largest privately owned oil and gas company, Lukoil, fell six storeys from a window of the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, where he was admitted after a heart attack.

His company, with a straight face, issued a statement, saying, “We deeply regret to announce that Ravil Maganov, Chairman of PJSC Lukoil Board of Directors, passed away following a severe illness.”

Lukoil had publicly attacked Putin against the invasion, sided with its victims and asked for the war to end. In December, Grigory Kochenov, the 41-year-old creative director of Agima, a major Russian IT company, toppled to his death from the balcony of his apartment in Nizhny Novgorod while police officers were reportedly searching his place. The same month, Dmitry Zelenov, a 50-year-old Russian oligarch whose fortune Forbes estimated to be worth $1.4 billion, died mysteriously by falling down the stairs.

Gas chamber of horrors 

Then there are the mysterious suicides of Russia’s gas company executives in 2022. Six of them worked with or were former associates of, the two biggest Russian energy corporations. Four of them were connected to the mammoth state-owned energy company Gazprom in one capacity or the other. The remaining two were part of the system of Lukoil.

After the energy standoff between Putin and the West peaked, many gas industry magnates and leaders died in bewildering situations. Leonid Shulman, head of Gazprom Invest, which handles investment projects for the gas company, was found dead on January 30 in the bathroom of a cottage.

On April 18, Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Vladimir Avayev, ex-Kremlin official and former Vice-President for Gazprombank, found the bodies of her parents and sister in their Moscow apartment. According to the police, the banker supposedly killed them out of jealousy.

Then there was Sergei Protosenya, another top gas executive and head of Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer, Novatek, who also reportedly shot his wife and daughter at a villa in a sea resort in Lloret de Mar, Spain, and turned the gun on himself. 

Western nations pay for Russian gas deliveries through Gazprombank, the financial section of Gazprom and Russia’s third-largest financial institution. A 61-year-old former senior Gazprom official, Alexander Tyulakov, was found hanging in a garage of his luxurious St. Petersburg home on February 25. So was Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Watford, in March, in his massive mansion in the UK.

News site Visegrád 24 reported that the British Police investigating his death suspect that he could have been on a kill list. In July, the corpse of Yuri Voronov, the CEO and multi-millionaire founder of Astra Shipping, which dealt with Gazprom contracts, was found floating in a swimming pool of a cottage in Leningrad with a gunshot wound to the back of his head a favourite KGB execution method.

Andrei Krukovsky, the director of the Gazprom-owned Krasnaya Polyana ski resort, mysteriously fell off a cliff while hiking in May. Alexander Subbotin, a former top manager of Lukoil, was found dead the same month in the basement of a house in Mytishchi near Moscow, allegedly from toad venom supplied by a voodoo practitioner named Alexei Pindyurin. Russian energy executive Ivan Pechorin, 39, was found drowned off the coast of Vladivostok in September, becoming the ninth oil and gas millionaire to die mysteriously. Previously, his 43-year-old general director Igor Nosov reportedly died from a ‘stroke’.

“It is not uncommon to be told, ‘We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you’ll have the agency of your own undoing,’” Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told The Atlantic.

Did Antov really fall out of his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? “All of these things are possible,” Weiss told The Atlantic reporter. He could very well be referring to Antov, whose friend Vladimir Budanov had died of a heart attack in the hotel just a few days ago.

Coincidentally, last June, Antov had lambasted a Russian missile attack on a residential block in Kyiv that left a man dead and his seven-year-old daughter and her mother wounded. His WhatsApp message read, “It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.” He retracted the statement later, but fell out of the hotel window a few months later. The hotel staff noticed that Antov was distraught and even kicked a Sai International employee on the way up to the terrace.

Obviously, the Odisha Police is nobody’s fool: DGP Sunil Bansal has assured that the investigation is being conducted with an open mind. They have questioned the Russian couple and the interpreter who accompanied Antov while investigating whether the millionaire fell accidentally, jumped off or was pushed. Flight manifests are being examined to ascertain whether any other Russian travelled to the state during that period.

Depression is an ageless Russian trope, Dostoyevskian in scope and darkness, Chekovian in dark humour and Tolstoyish-like timeless Russia. Can a country that has known only revolutions and despots dare to hope for more?

Critical mass 

List of some of the Putin critics who have died mysteriously between 2014 and 2020

Alexander Tolmachev (November 2020): Journalist jailed in 2011 on trumped-up charges; died in prison shortly before he was due to be released

Salman Tepsurkaev (September 2020): The administrator of the 1ADAT Telegram channel that monitored human rights abuses was abducted and allegedly blown up with a grenade in his mouth

Mamikhan Umarov (July 2020): Chechen separatist and Ramzan Kadyrov critic; shot in Vienna

Nikita Isayev (November 2019): Politician, economist and journalist; died on a train returning from Moscow to Tambov of suspected poisoning by FSB 

Yelena Grigorieva (July 2019): Anti-Putin and LGBT activist; stabbed to death in St. Petersburg 

Dmitri Gribov (February 2019): Anti-corruption activist; beaten to death with baseball bats in Moscow 

Kirill Tomatsky (February 2019): Rapper; died of ‘heart attack’ after a concert in Izhevsk 
Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko (July 2018): Journalists working for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s media outlet, investigating Russia’s Wagner mercenaries; killed in ambush

Petr Ofitserov (July 2018): Businessman convicted with high-profile dissident Alexei Navalny in 2013; died from a head injury reportedly during a stroke

Yelena Gremina (May 2018): Founder of liberal theatre Teatr.doc in Moscow; died due to ‘heart and kidney failure’ six weeks after her husband Mikhail Ugarov

Mikhail Abramyan (April 2018): Krasnodar political and environmental activist; died after an undiagnosed illness of suspected poisoning 

Maxim Borodin (April 2018): Novy Den agency journalist who exposed deaths of Wagner contractors in Syria from a US airstrike; fell from a window of his flat

Mikhail Ugarov (April 2018): Artistic director of liberal theatre Teatr.doc in Moscow that was regularly harassed by authorities; died of a “heart attack” 

Nikolai Glushkov (March 2018): Business partner of Putin critic and billionaire Boris Berezovsky; found hanging in his London home 

Konstantin Sinitsin (January 2018): Opposition activist in St. Petersburg; beaten to death at the entrance of the building where he lived

Vedzhiye Kashka (November 2017): Crimean Tatar activist; died in Simferopol in prison

Serhiy Samarskiy (November 2017): Politician who initiated a decision in 2015 to label Russia an aggressor country; found outside his flat with a smashed skull

Amina Okueva (October 2017): Chechen fighter for Ukraine, married to Adam Osmayev, who was accused of plotting to kill Putin; died in an ambush

Alexei Stroganov (October 2017): Opposition activist; killed with an iron bar

Timur Mahauri (September 2017): Chechen with Georgian citizenship fighting for Ukraine; killed in a car bombing in Kiev

Anton Nossik (July 2017): Russian-Israeli blogger and Putin critic; died of a ‘heart attack’ at a dacha outside Moscow

Yuriy Voznyi (June 2017): Ukrainian Security Service officer; killed in IED blast

Maxim Shapoval (June 2017): Head of Reserve of Main Department of Intelligence at Ukrainian Defence Ministry; killed in a car bombing in Kiev

Dmitri Popkov (May 2017): Journalist who reported on police corruption; shot dead in the bathhouse
Nikolai Andrushchenko (April 2017): Co-founder and editor of opposition 

newspaper Novy Peterburg; attacked and killed in St. Petersburg by unidentified men

Denis Voronenkov (March 2017): Former Russian MP who fled to Ukraine with singer-MP wife Maria Maksakova in 2016; shot dead in front of a hotel in Kiev 

Yevgeny Khamaganov (March 2017): Opposition journalist; died of a broken neck after a beating

Viktor Parshutkin (February 2017): Lawyer who represented Ukrainian political prisoner Serhiy Lytvynov captured by Russia; died of unknown causes in Moscow

Alexander Kadakin (January 2017): Russian ambassador to India; died in hospital after a brief illness

Pavel Sheremet (July 2016): Belarusian-born Russian journalist and Nemtsov’s friend; killed in a car bombing in Kiev

Sergei Tikhonov (June 2016): Blogger allegedly killed by lethal injection on the orders of ‘Putin’s chef’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, according to independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta

Ruslan Israpilov (May 2016): Former Chechen fighter shot dead at his home in Ilimtepe, Turkey

Matthew Puncher (May 2016): Polonium expert involved in Litvinenko inquiry ‘stabbed himself to death’ at home in Oxfordshire after a trip to Russia. (Litvinenko, a former FSB spymaster who defected to the UK, was allegedly poisoned by Russian agents in London.)

Alesya Malakyan (January 2016): Daughter of opposition activist Irina Kalmykova, who was fleeing from Russia to Ukraine to escape her trial for protesting; died of unknown causes in Moscow
Ruslan Magomedragimov (March 2015): Dagestani activist; found dead near his car in Kaspiysk of suspected FSB poisoning

Boris Nemtsov (February 2015): Former deputy PM and Putin critic; shot on a bridge near the Kremlin
Timur Kuashev (July 2014): Journalist and rights activist; apparently poisoned near his home
Valeriya Novodvorskaya (July 2014): Soviet dissident who had spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; supposedly died of toxic shock syndrome in a hospital in Moscow

Volodymyr Rybak (April 2014): Member of Horlivka city council; abducted, tortured and murdered by pro-Russian militia after trying to raise the Ukrainian flag on the council building

Alexander Pochinok (March 2014): Former minister who criticised Crimea invasion; died of a ‘heart attack’

Reshat Ametov (March 15, 2014): Crimean Tatar activist; abducted by unidentified men in military uniforms; body found in a forest with signs of torture

Compiled by Sarah Hurst, British journalist and author of @XSovietNews, Twitter account about Russia

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Rahul's beard of self-discoveryhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/07/rahuls-beardof-self-discovery-2535024.htmlhttps://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/ravi-shankar/2023/Jan/07/rahuls-beardof-self-discovery-2535024.html#commentse0dbec58-ef59-4d91-b876-5fd93c5d3cabSat, 07 Jan 2023 23:30:00 +00002023-01-07T16:38:00.000ZPRAMEELA K/api/author/1847182Rahul Gandhi,beardsRavi ShankarHair today, gone tomorrow is an apt metaphor for the newly bearded Rahul Gandhi’s speed-walk through Bharat. In politics, optics is opulence. Big words. Big thoughts. Big beards. As Mr Gandhi’s political steps grow in Fitbit numbers, also growing is his beard: part-Karl Marx (Lefties are still divided on the historical significance), part-Rishikesh spiritual chic. He has made a clever hirsute statement because grey hair is traditionally associated with wisdom, patience and sage counsel.

Mr Gandhi in a makeover mood no doubt wishes to project all these with his boisterous beard. Gone is the clean-shaven man-about-town, whose easy smile and delightful dimples contributed to the chocolate boy "Pappu" tag. His face, now gaunt with travel, is hidden by a bushy salt-and-pepper growth, which gives its owner the distinct look of a glowering Rajput on the warpath. That many of our splendid warriors, in spite of all their bravery and sati, lost most significant battles against invaders is just a footnote; not to be mentioned here.

Beards in politics are mainly subcontinental affairs. American, British, European and Australian leaders are largely clean-shaven, except for the few Sikh politicians and wannabe Khalistanis in Canada. Don’t underestimate hair power: Justin Trudeau did pose with a stubbly jawline, but when he couldn't get a sparring partner for a charity boxing match, the Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau was roped in by their mutual hairdresser. Beards make a powerful statement: many social psychologists say the clean-shaven look invites confidence and approachability, signalling that the owners have nothing to hide.

Beauty lies in the eye of the beardholder and raises some hairy questions. Is facial hair sexy? A new Australian academic study suggests that women find a bearded man more attractive, but only if most other men around are clean-shaven. Is that why pink-cheeked Jairam Ramesh is always around Mr Gandhi? The study also found that if beards become common then clean-shaven men make the girls go weak in the knees.

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The supercool all-rounder American website FiveThirtyEight declared, 'Beards Are Less Attractive When They're Everywhere'. No wonder, the civilised world has an aversion to terrorists. See, in Pakistan, wildly growing beards are mostly reserved by Islamist preachers and terrorists like Hafiz Saeed or Syed Salahudin. Barbers are, of course, an extinct species in Afghanistan while bearded Taliban nutcases whip women wanting to study 'un-Islamic' stuff in college.

As we get to Iran and the Gulf countries, there is ample evidence of barbers at work; one can almost hear the click of scissors and the gentle susurration of combs passing through Arab beards over the noise of gushing oil that drowns the voices of women demanding their rights to let their hair down.

Is the bewhiskered Mr Gandhi walking up to beard the lion in his cave? Narendra Modi's perfectly trimmed white beard, matching his immaculately groomed silver mane, is his signature look. In tapasic mode in the Kedarnath cave after a gruelling election campaign, Modi's spiritual chi evoked the philosopher king and karmayogi of Indian cultural memory, which teems with sages and royals sporting flowing beards.

Modi did falter once in West Bengal when the Rabindranath Tagore vibe didn't quite carry the election. (A copycat aside is that 18 of his 58 ministers wear beards, which has not won them any special marks with their tough taskmaster.) Now that Mr Gandhi's crinose campaign is approaching a hairpin curve, the battle of the beards is bound to escalate. Many elections are coming this year, and a beard is always convenient to hide your feelings. Especially of disappointment.

(Ravi Shankar can be reached at ravi@newindianexpress.com.)

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