South Asia Daily

Vase by window

This should be all for today. 

Modi's firm grip will impact external ties

I did this quick piece for South Asia Monitor, a specialized policy journal, yesterday. 

 

By Mayank Chhaya 

 

In contrast to the old adage that “Success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan”, in India’s just concluded parliamentary elections success, it seems, has only one father. It is Narendra Modi.

 

Prime Minister Modi’s assertive win has shown that a populist wave that he created and rode to his first success in 2014 may generate even greater energy with a dose of divisive nationalism and carry its riders even farther. As he becomes India’s first non-Congress party Prime Minister to win a second consecutive term, Modi has been gifted an invaluable opportunity to refashion himself as a statesman rather than continue as an abrasive, brass-knuckle partisan exploiting India’s historic fractiousness.

 

As he enters the second phase of his prime ministership, the choice before him is clearer than what he faced in 2014—put India on a footing closer to China’s in terms of the latter’s domestic economic success as well as its undeniable global clout. With the United States under President Donald Trump shrinking into grimy and paranoid introversion and China expanding its influence across continents, particularly Africa, India under Modi 2.0 has the opportunity to make its presence truly felt as the world’s largest democracy.

 

It is often not fully grasped in the West that even the size of India’s electorate is so big as to be the third most populous country after India and China. The fact that 67% of the 900 million eligible voters, which is a staggering 609 million people, cast their votes, slides by the Western democracies with only a few recognizing the sheer remarkableness of it. Within that for Modi to have scored a resounding victory for the second time in the face very genuine rural agrarian distress as well as rampant unemployment is an extraordinary feat by any measure.

 

From the standpoint of the Trump administration, Modi’s victory holds a great promise to hedge its bets as Trump stomps all over Washington’s trade relations with Beijing. However, given his temperament it is unlikely that Trump will engage Modi in a way deserving of the world’s largest democracy and vibrant trading nation. It is particularly because the president is deeply embattled over a host of potential scandals, including the suspected dubiousness of his own finances and whether that would upend his own re-election in 2020. The personal equation between Trump and Modi has been businesslike at best and awkward at worst. It remains to be seen whether Trump puts in any extra effort to change that dynamic.

 

Modi’s robust return to power has been a source of particular triumph for a majority of the diasporic Indian population worldwide, particularly in America where he enjoys overwhelming support. Indian Americans of an older generation, who have been here for decades, do not find it even remotely incongruous to celebrate Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party as well as Hindutva politics with Indian nationalist gusto even though they have been US citizens for a long time. Several watch parties were hosted by the Indian American community in many cities on the night of May 22 as the results started coming in. There were chants of “Har Har Mahadev” and “Modi Modi Modi” at these gatherings.

 

It is often overlooked that Modi, who does not tire of describing himself as a fakir, has been in a position of power, first as Gujarat’s Chief Minister since 2001, and then as Prime Minister since 2014. It is that ability to brand himself in defiance of his political consequence that has worked in his favor. From the vantage point of the Indian diaspora, it is his relentless self-belief and ability to project self-assurance as an unapologetic Hindu that have kept them enraptured often to the exclusion of any serious critical analysis. As far as this segment of the diaspora is concerned, Modi has no recognizable flaws and even if they exist, they are of no consequence. It is a strangely discommoding relationship of absolute faith that brooks no substantive opposition. How long it endures in his second term is a question of time.

 

In terms of America’s policy towards India, both in the context of South Asia and Asia, Modi’s firm grip on India’s political pulse will have a direct impact. That is when Trump has any time from his Twitter rants and suspected scandals.

Some thoughts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's triumphant return

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a victory rally on May 23

Defying my professional impulses, I successfully stayed away from the often ludicrous and embarrassingly ignorant social media back and forth over the just concluded parliamentary elections in India. The quality of the discourse was so often so bereft of substance and even elementary intelligence that it was easy for me to disregard the minute-by-minute lunacies on display on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. Mercifully, I do not have WhatsApp.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prepare to rule India for another five-year term after handily winning the elections, I suggest they take yes for an answer and move on. I also suggest that as Rahul Gandhi and his Congress Party confront prospects of political irrelevance for the foreseeable future, they take no for an answer and move on. 

As someone used to dealing with facts in an unemotional and detached fashion, the fact is that Modi and BJP president Amit Shah delivered a swift kick up Congress’ arse yet again. Going by the trends as of writing this post, the BJP seems set to improve by at least 18 parliamentary seats over its 2014 tally of 282 seats. That is an astounding performance by any measure, particularly considering that Modi was up again genuine rural and employment distress apart from significant socio-cultural tensions resulting from his government’s policies and his ideological cohorts’ machinations. It is unquestionable that the BJP rode Modi’s extraordinary personal popularity cashed in on the ground by Shah’s efficient electoral management.

Of the 900 million eligible voters, of whom some 67 percent or 609 million exercised their right, I am not yet sure what percentage voted for the BJP. That analysis will have to wait a bit longer. However, it should not be surprising if it is much higher than about 31% that voted Modi into office in 2014. One can safely assume that notwithstanding his obvious shortcomings on the two important fronts of agrarian distress and urban employment, a decisive number has chosen to not only give him a second chance but do so with even greater confidence. Some 15 million or so eligible to vote for the first time too would have swung the numbers in Modi’s favor.

Speaking before his party workers during a victory speech at his Bharatiya Janata Party’s headquarters in New Delhi Modi struck all the right notes.

Perhaps his most significant overarching point was two-fold. One was to emphasize that “Sarkar bhale hi bahumat se chalti ho desh janmat se chalta hai”(Government may work on a majority, the country works on the basis of everybody’s voice) and the other was to say, “Samvidhan hi yehi hamara supreme hai.Usi ki chhaya mei, usi ke har shabd ke bhav ko pakad ke chalna hai” (Our constitution is supreme. We have to work under it by understanding its letter and spirit.) Both these assertions are often seen to be in direct contradiction to his and his party’s conduct in operational terms but in so much as he at least makes them, it is commendable.

As for Rahul Gandhi, the election results are as close to a political comeuppance as it can get. It is a measure of how badly things have turned out for him that he even lost his primary seat in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, a virtual Gandhi family fiefdom. He lost to a feisty BJP leader and former minister, Smriti Irani. Of all the utterances that Gandhi made during the election campaigning the one that has stayed with me the most came during an interview with The Quint news website. He insisted and even guaranteed barely four days before the outcome that Modi will not be prime minister. Even if one discounts political grandstanding, I cannot compute the logic of this claim. It is particularly because it came at the end of the campaigning where such hyperbole would not have made any difference. If I ever interview him, I would like to ask how a seemingly rational man can make such an absurdly definitive claim in electoral politics.

The exultation and euphoria over the victory will subside soon enough and it will be back to the rough and tumble of governing for Modi. He will have to pay particular attention to the rural distress and massive unemployment in a serious thoughtful way rather than coming up with flippant suggestions. He wanted another term to prove himself. He has got it and has five more years to live up to his promises.

Karma, Donald Trump, Amit Mehta and Merrick Garland

Yoga, karma, pundit and guru must be among the four most used Sanskrit words in America and not necessarily in that order. This week it is the turn of karma.

The concept of karma is being invoked yet again in the context of an upcoming appeal by President Donald Trump’s attorneys against the ruling of a federal judge yesterday upholding a congressional subpoena demanding his tax returns.

The federal judge in question, Amit P. Mehta ruled that Trump’s financial records held by his accounting firm Mazars USA be handed over to the Congress’s House Oversight Committee. In a meticulously argued 41-page ruling Mehta wrote, “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.”

Judge Mehta was responding to the Trump attorneys’ contention that the Congressional demand is overly broad and serves no legislative purpose.

The idea of karma was already brewing in the fact that this potentially devastating setback for Trump was delivered by a judge appointed by former President Barack Obama, a figure the current president has almost viscerally disliked. That Mehta is of Indian heritage makes the idea of karma even more fitting.

However, what makes the theory of karma as popularly interpreted, particularly befitting here is that the Trump attorneys’ appeal against Judge Mehta’s ruling is likely to be heard by Merrick Garland, who is the chief judge at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. It is the same Judge Garland whose appointment to the US Supreme Court, after being nominated by Obama following the death of the arch conservative Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, was scuttled with a stunning degree of political shamelessness by the Republicans led with gusto by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It was on the absurd ground that since the appointment was coming in the last year of his presidency, Obama should not be allowed to make it and it would be prudent for the new president to consider it.

McConnell’s move was utterly undisguised in its cynical political calculation—incidentally, he won handsomely with the successful appointment of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch—and was widely applauded by those on his side of the aisle.

So it is a rollicking good irony that as Trump, who nominated Gorsuch to a seat that should have gone to Garland, is now up against the same Garland. Hence the invocation of the theory of karma. It is nobody’s case that Chief Judge Garland is so unprofessional and eaten up by a sense of revenge that he would automatically uphold Mehta’s ruling. He is a widely respected judge known for his impeccable law career. There is nothing at all to suggest that he would be so consumed by the slight that he would rule against Trump. That said, there is also nothing to suggest that he would not do so based on a sound legal reasoning even if he runs the risk of being seen as a partisan.

I am not an automatic believer in the theory of karma merely because I grew up in a Hindu household where my father read the Gita regularly as if it were a novel. Human history abounds in examples where the theory of karma—or at any rate its most popular interpretation that your karma will catch up with you in a good or bad way depending on the quality of your karma—did not seem to have worked. One can argue that the ways of karma are often baffling but that can be said of anything in life. Taken to its extreme, the theory karma ought to ensure that those who have an accumulation of bad karmas such as Trump who clearly seems to have do not rise to a level of consequence and/or success in the first place. Well, it appears that is not how karma works. It is far more complex and layered than just the simple idea of bad karma means you will inevitably, albeit eventually, be punished and good karma means you will inevitably, albeit eventually, be rewarded. I am sure somewhere along there is a calculation whether your good karmas outweigh your bad ones and vice versa.

However, in so much as it is popularly understood here in America—“Karma is a bitch” sort of thing—Garland being set to hear the Trump appeal is a delightful instance of that.

It's a path, it must go somewhere

Raah-MC

राह है, कहीं तो जाती होगी  

ग़लत या सही, कोई मंज़िल तो पाती होगी 

(It's a path, it ought to go somewhere

Right or wrong, it must find a destination)

--मयंक छाया/MC

That should be all for the day. 

Some post-electoral depression

Prime Minister Narendra Modi meditating near the Kedarnath shrine in the Himalayas. (Photo courtesy: His Twitter handle)

It seems exit polls in India have acquired the sanctity of an officially certified national election outcome. Reading the average numbers from the numerous exit polls of the just concluded seven-phase mammoth electoral exercise, in which some 900 million Indians were eligible to vote and well over 50% actually voted, it seems the currently incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Modi will return to power.

An aggregate of all exit polls predicts that the BJP and its allies known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will win 306 parliamentary seats out of a total of 543 while the main opposition Congress Party under its president Rahul Gandhi and its allies just 122. Going by these predictions, there are those who are already celebrating the return of Modi just as there are those who are mourning the defeat of Gandhi. And then there are those who think it prudent to wait for the actual results.

An argument can be made that exit polls cannot be so wrong as to offer a projection that is diametrically opposite to the actual outcome on May 23. Having now lived in America for over two decades I may not have a direct stake in any electoral outcome in India but as a journalist who has reported the rise and fall of seven Indian prime ministers before coming here I am deeply interested.

One of the consequences of the 2019 election outcome that I will be particularly watching out for is even greater mythologizing of Modi who has the distinction of mythologizing himself. The most striking example of self-mythologizing came in his purportedly several hours-long, by one claim between 15 and 16 hours, meditation inside a cave in Kedarnath, one of the most important and frequented Hindu shrines at the elevation of over 11,000 feet in the Himalayas. As is his wont, the prime minister went to Kedarnath to pay his respects with a battery of photographers. There are what seemed like pre-meditation meditation pictures because when the prime minister reportedly went into a deep trance no photographers were allowed. This is what I mean by self-mythologizing. All politicians do it but in Modi’s case, it has acquired a new height, quantifiable at 11,000 plus feet.

Presuming the exit polls have it right, get set to see more of such mythology-building for the next five years. There are those devotees of Modi’s who are already saying that his cave-bound meditation has ensured his return to power.

Although official results are still three days away, I can imagine that New Delhi is already abuzz with a whole lot of political activities, particularly in the BJP-NDA camp which has all but concluded that it has returned to power. The Congress and allies appear chastened and relatively quiet in the foreboding doom that has been spelled for them by the exit polls. Gandhi’s latest tweet is instructive in its subtle sense of resignation at the impending outcome. He said, “From Electoral Bonds & EVMs (electronic voting machines) to manipulating the election schedule, NaMo TV, “Modi’s Army” & now the drama in Kedarnath; the Election Commission’s (EC) capitulation before Mr Modi & his gang is obvious to all Indians. The EC used to be feared & respected. Not anymore.”

As the abrasiveness of electioneering subsides, there are expectations of five more years of conceited chest-thumping by Modi and his legion of followers. Gandhi, in the meantime, is still young by Indian political standards. He is 48 and can afford to wait as Modi, according to his followers, rules for the next ten years since winning a third term in their eyes is a fait accompli having already won a second, according to the exit polls.

If he does indeed win, Modi will become the first prime minister from the main opposition to have won a second consecutive term since India’s independence in 1947. That wouldn’t be mythology but a simple fact.

No headline required

This took me about seven minutes from a blank canvas to finish this morning. It has become my current favorite. I painted it from memory of a stunning melange of clouds last evening over Naperville.

'The moment you recognize something as you it fades as soon as you have recognized it'

Tathagata--MC

As India celebrates Buddha Purnima, the 2562nd anniversary of the Buddha, I republish  a somewhat reimagined encounter between the Buddha and Pukkusati whom he found to be earnest and intelligent that I wrote a couple of years ago.

My name is Pukkusati and I am on way to Savatthi in search of Tathagata. I may find him or I may not find him but I am certainly looking for him. Looking for people is often more fulfilling than finding them.

As I take a break from my journey on foot to the countries to the north I choose this potter’s shed to rest for a few days. Like all potter’s sheds this one too is serene in its air and languid in its pace. That may be because of the way a lump of clay sits and spins on the wheel with the potter’s hands gently giving it a shape. It is deliberate and contemplative. The potter's wheel and hands move as if in convergence with some cosmic rhythm that only the potter can see.

It has been a few days and I must return to my journey. Tathagata is known to move much and may not remain in Savatthi for long. I must find him. I have no belongings. So leaving a place is essentially just getting up and leaving. I do not have to bother with whether I am forgetting something. As long as I am there I have all that I need.

Before I step out of the potter’s shed I hear the rustle of footsteps. The man walking ahead of the rest does not seem to be in any hurry to get anywhere. He knows where he is going but is not distracted by the destination. He is fully here right now even as he may not be here at all. We greet each other. “O Bhikkhu*,” he says, “It appears you are on a quest. You seem to have left home and family.”

I reply, “O friend, you are right. I am in search of Gotama, once the prince of the Sakyas and now a recluse.”

“Why do you look for Gotama? Have you seen him? Do you know what he looks like? Would you recognize him?” the man asks me.

“No, I have not and no, I don’ know what he looks like and no, I wouldn’t recognize him,” I reply. “Why I am looking for Gotama is because he is the Arahant.”

“What is it that you seek from him?” the man asked.

“I want to join the Sangha,” I said.

“I will teach you the doctrine of the Sangha,” the man said with such authority that I didn’t think of asking who he was to teach me the doctrine of the Sangha.

“We are composed of six elements. Solidity, fluidity, heat, motion, space and consciousness. None of these is really you, your Self. They appear and disappear. The moment you recognize something as you it fades as soon as you have recognized it. So you cannot really know that it was you. The only way to come to grips with this continuous transience is through equanimity. Detachment is the answer. If you do not cling to anything, you are never anxious. If you are never anxious, you are calm within…..”

The man’s words very magical. They fell over me like a sheet of silk so fine that it was there and not yet there. I could feel it but couldn’t see it. I could see it but couldn’t feel it.

I knew I was in the presence—the presence of Tathagata. I was embarrassed at having addressed him as my “friend”. Tahthagata is not a friend. He is the Arahant. I beseech him to ordain me into the Sangha.

He asks me if I have three robes and an alms-bowl. I say I don’t. He wants me to get those. I come out of the potter’s shed where the potter was making tiny cows and calves. I walk towards the marketplace and reach there to find some commotion. A cow is indiscriminately charging through the main street destroying shops and wares. Suddenly, I find she is charging head-on towards me. Before I could get out of her way she has gored me. I did not survive.

Francis Bacon's captivating 'Study of a Head'

'Study of a Head', 1952, Francis Bacon, (Image: Sotheby's)

My pastel study of 'Study of a Head'

I do not necessarily like the celebrated British figurative artist Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) famously raw and macabre paintings but admire his brilliant craft. They are never less than captivating and often discommoding. ‘Study of a Head’, 1952, one of his most iconic works, was auctioned yesterday at Sotheby’s for a blockbuster $50.4 million.

‘Study of a Head’, part of his Pope series, is a painting you cannot look away from once you see it. It is visceral and evocative at the same time. I first saw it on Sotheby’s website a couple of days ago and immediately felt prompted to a version of it. I started off well enough with swirls in black and white using a coarse napkin. However, the first work ended up becoming a piece I call ‘Jahan’.  My piece was as far away from Bacon’s as chalk is from cheese. I like ‘Jahan’ but it is not even remotely what Bacon might have considered a painting.

I returned this morning to it after watching a feverish bidding by the moneybags of the international art market. It was sold in less than five minutes for that sum. I did a quick pastel study. Bacon’s brilliant works is stunningly primal in its execution while mine looks like a man guffawing. I present it anyway.

Walking a prairie trail in Naperville

Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve, Naperville (Photo: MC)

Naperville has some lovely trails as part of its forest preserves. I took to one of them, Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve yesterday for about 20 minutes and was rewarded instantly.

It is a bird habitat and found many just as soon as I entered. Since ornithology is not my strong suit, I couldn’t tell you what kind of birds, but I spotted at least three different varieties within minutes. They were all chirping and swinging on the thin, scraggy branches of plants which I couldn’t name. It is embarrassing to acknowledge that my floral and avian knowledge is so woefully non-existent. However, that ignorance did not stand in the way of my being thoroughly enraptured.

Being a prairie, it is somewhat undulating but mostly flat and devoid of trees. The birds in the habitat do manage to find some plants to perch on a slight elevation. Even those brief 20 minutes that I spent there were so invigorating and instructive. I have always been acutely aware of how so many parallel sentient worlds exist beyond our own often ugly human world. I am sure these worlds have their own ugliness and violence but on the face of it they seem rather serene. I felt a liquid calm washing over me in that very brief outing.

These days photographing the places we go to has become a reflex action. I took a few shots.