Mayank Chhaya Daily

Breaking News….Tonight, I am the breaking news

Illustration/cartoon really by yours truly

For a medium that can treat just about anything as “Breaking News” it makes sense not to waste a perfectly primed up controversy about itself. So it is just as well that NDTV anchor Barkha Dutt, who has now officially been described as India’s Katie Couric, has decided to subject herself to a harrowing ordeal of being questioned by four independent journalists. Now if that is not great television what is?

If I had known this earlier I would have suggested the following opening: “Tonight (drumrolls getting progressively louder and ominous with the ‘Jaws’ score of an impending shark attack also playing along)….I am the breaking news. Tonight…. a special on how news is broken and fixed.”

The best way to deal with a crisis, especially one that involves professional ethics, is to abusrdify it. (Absurdify is not a word but then television news is not news. Remember you read it here first.) It would help if each of the four peers would be armed with replicas of weapons used by the Roman gladiators. In the interest of aesthetics though they should not be allowed to dress up as gladiators because show me a journalist who is toned and I would show you a pretender. Flab is a requirement in the profession.

I am willing to give Dutt the benefit of the doubt that she does really want to engage in a genuine debate about the raging controversy over whether she and other journalists, who ended up on wiretaps intended to for lobbyist Niira Radia, crossed the ethical line. Equally, I cannot help but think that somewhere along the line NDTV bosses may have reasoned that a show like this could be a ratings bonanza if handled with a degree of marketing savvy.

The picture would be complete if the show is sponsored by Tata who as we all know never engages in questionable business practices (as far as I can see which is not that far considering I sit in my basement and write this blog.)

Misery merely changes its victims

Jim Yardley's story on drought ravaging millions of lives in India (The New York Times) reminds me of my first full-length feature as a journalist. In 1984 I was sent by the editor of my newspaper Free Press Journal to the Beed district in Maharashtra, reputedly one of the driest places in the state. Although the story was more about how a handful of committed agriculture scientists were trying to transform this bone dry district, to me the underlying theme was how in India those who were marginalized remain so for generations. Yardley's story from Pimpri village has the same ring of desperation to it.

The story quotes a 65-year-old woman called Chandli Bai as saying, "We eat once a day." Bai's farm has gone without water for 12 weeks and is confronted with the very real prospects of losing everything. "I may die before I can repay that loan," she says of the Rs. 80,000 her family borrowed to treat her late husband's kidney problems.

It is amazing how easily I could have attributed these very quotes to some of the people I spoke to in a village called Karanjvan a quarter century ago. Misery merely changes its victims. I know that contrasting official claims of recovery with the reality on the ground is the oldest trick in journalism to draw attention to a problem. Yardley does that too but then that is the only way to sober down heady claims of recovery that those sitting in any nation's capital make.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that drought exists in India in some form or the other at any given time. The reason why it does not get talked about is because t has become such an intrinsic part of rural life in the country. I hardly, if ever, inject morality into any debate but droughts and their devastating impact on the poorest of Indians is indeed a matter of great moral urgency. It is morally unacceptable to have a woman standing at the edge of her dried up farm four months after her husband's death and wondering whether she would be able to repay Rs. 80,000 before she dies. Let's add this one to a long list of morally unacceptable human suffering.

Jaswant Singh and his expedient silence

The following comment was published in and around India on the IANS wire.

By Mayank Chhaya

The more expelled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh exposes embarrassing machinations and failures in his former political sanctuary, the more he also implicitly acknowledges his own acquiescence in the goings-on.

For some strange reasons the media has not asked him two fundamental questions. Why did he choose to remain in a party that seemed to be unravelling under the weight of its own contradictions and compromises for at least 10 years? Would he have disclosed any of these details had the party bitten its lips over his Jinnah book and not expelled him?

After all, Jaswant Singh has admitted to "covering up" for former home minister Lal Krishna Advani over whether the latter knew about of the swapping of three terrorists to secure release of about 140 passengers on board a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in December 1999. At the very least that incident alone is a great marker of all that went wrong with the BJP since its rise to power. If Jaswant Singh felt compelled to cover up for Advani for whatever mystifying rationale he may offer now, the fact remains that at that particular juncture he was party to the very machinations and lies that he is now out to nail.

Another equally damning disclosure that Jaswant Singh has made since his expulsion relates to the "cash for votes" scandal, in which BJP members loaded with Rs.3 crore (Rs.30 million) in alleged bribes told parliament that the money was part of an attempt by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to buy votes to save his government in 2008. According to Jaswant Singh, this stunt was backed by Advani.

These two transgressions alone should have ignited righteous rage in someone like Jaswant Singh and challenged the party leadership. It is possible that he did indeed let his displeasure be known to the leadership without making it public. But what he says now and what happened then is separated by a wide chasm in terms of his response.

That's where the second question becomes important. It is anybody's guess whether Jaswant Singh would have exposed such serious lapses had he not been expelled. The ferocity with which Jaswant Singh has gone after Advani in the aftermath of his ouster may make for a thrilling political drama, but it constitutes unconvincing extenuating circumstances for his own questionable conduct. For the country's home minister to claim that he did not know about the release of three terrorists is a stunning instance of cynicism that has overwhelmed political discourse in India. By the same token, a transgression of that magnitude should not have been "covered up" by Jaswant Singh in the name of party discipline or out of consideration for a senior colleague.

Jaswant Singh was quoted as saying: "I treated it as part of my continuing sense of commitment." On whether he regretted his action he said: "I don't regret because that was the step I had taken. But it was part of an election campaign... I was being very conservative with truth." Even if one discounts the poor phrasing of his response it is hard to explain why his "continuing sense of commitment" to whatever he was talking about should have been more important than national interests.

To say that he did not regret it because "that was the step I had taken" and then compound it by adding that it was part of an election campaign is an extraordinary illustration of how political leaders put personal and political interests before the interests of the country and people they seek to serve.

It is commendable that Jaswant Singh has chosen to speak out without fear or favour, but that should hardly excuse his expedient silence and acquiescence.

Jaswant Singh's expulsion and a political party's identity crisis

The following comment was carried on the IANS wire.

By Mayank Chhaya

It is tempting to describe Jaswant Singh's unceremonious expulsion from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a glaring example of the culture of intolerance of independence of thought that runs through India's political class. In reality, it is merely one political party's inability to define itself.

During his news conference Singh repeatedly mentioned his 30-year-long association with the party. While Singh may have been with the party for all of those 30 years, it is hardly clear whether the party was with him in those decades. His rise in the party leadership as well as cabinet positions notwithstanding, Singh always came across as an outsider looking in and not an insider looking out. In a sense he managed this dichotomy much less successfully than his more illustrious mentor Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He may have been removed from the party only now but he was never really fully in it.

The fact that he had no allegiance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological forebear of the BJP, always created wariness among the more doctrinaire members of the party. As long as Vajpayee was the decisive figure Singh's detached moderation was tolerated by the others. With Vajpayee retired it was only a matter of time before the hardliners struck against Singh.

What made the expulsion an easy fait accompli for the BJP's parliamentary board was the publication of the book "Jinnah: India - Partition - Independence", in which Singh demonstrates the temerity to be an impartial historian and not a party demagogue. If there ever was a perfect excuse to remove someone from the BJP, it would be to fairly assess Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Lal Krishna Advani tempted fate by doing so once but escaped retribution because of his RSS roots. There was no way Singh could have survived in the aftermath of the book.

A flippant way to look at the expulsion is to call it a telephone breakup of the kind teenagers engage in these days thanks to mobile phones. On a more serious note it underscores a lack of evolution within the BJP leadership which is grappling with a serious identity crisis.

Singh is accurate in saying that if India does not watch out it would enter a "dark alley" by stifling dissent and discouraging honest intellectual reflection over its history's most traumatic phases. One can legitimately describe the book as the proverbial last straw that broke the camel's back but it is a serious illustration of how atrophy has gripped the BJP. It is not enough to coin sincere sounding terms such as "chintan baithak". It is more important to actually seriously reflect and ruminate over how the party has lost its way. On top of the agenda should have been to ask why it felt compelled to expel Singh.

An impartial assessment of Jinnah is not going to reverse history, nor is it going to expose the BJP to any political jeopardy in a country where a large majority of its 550 million people below the age of 25 would not know if Jinnah danced in front of them. Some of the BJP leaders need to be brought out of their slumber and reintroduced to the India of 2009. Unless the party repositions itself to the dramatically different realities of now, no amount of "chintan baithaks" will help reclaim the lost ground. In that context Singh's intellectual inquiries and assessments as an author are hardly an obstacle.

In many ways Singh must feel a sense of liberation now that he is no longer hamstrung by party discipline. India needs serious contrarians who can frequently challenge lazy certainties of established wisdoms. It is a great and powerful role that someone like Singh can fulfill even as he continues to remain in public life.

India's water woes

Gethin Chamberlain reports in the Guardian about water wars in Bhopal after India experienced the driest June in over 80 years. The Guardian story begins with the hacking to death of three people who stole water by drilling a hole in a water pipeline. Water wars were considered a figment of extreme imagination some two decades ago. It is a reality across India and many other parts of South Asia.

After an unusually long spell of strong monsoon rains stretching over a decade and a half India is facing very real prospects of drought this year. In a country where 60 percent of the arable land is unirrigated and depends on monsoon rains it is always a matter of national concern when monsoon rains are delayed or lower than the average. The country's Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has already warned of a "drought-like" situation. This has a direct impact on the country's economy which has already slowed down in the face of the global financial meltdown.

The killings in Bhopal over water are but a taste of what could go wrong in India unless it urgently address its water crisis building over the past couple of decades. Rural poverty, which has been one of the factors fueling Naxalite/Maoist violence, has a direct connection with monsoon rains. The country is already witnessing a worrisome spread of such violence. A bad monsoon this year can only aggravate all that.

"Sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head"

 

 “Yes do it. Sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head.” 

These clinically cold and precise words are part of a five-part documentary “Dispatches: Terror in Mumbai” which has been broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 is a must watch for all those interested in the behind-the-scene goings on during the November 26, 2008 attacks. 

What lifts the documentary above the ordinary is the use of phone intercepts of conversations between the Pakistani gunmen who had taken over three locations in Mumbai and their handlers in Pakistan. The intercepts were captured by the Indian intelligence. I am not sure if the real time exchanges between the handlers and the gunmen were relayed to the Indian forces on the ground battling the meticulously trained attackers. That could have preempted a lot of what went on in the city that dreadful day. During the hours when even a minute of lead time over one’s opponents could have dramatically changed the nature of the outcome, it is crucial to find out whether the Indian intelligence was passing on any information to the forces directly engaged with the gunmen. 

This five-part documentary sifts through a vast amount of audio-visual materials and peppers it with their own original work to produce a captivating account of a city under siege. 

It is a measure of how focused the attackers and their bosses back home were that the handler speaking to one of the gunmen in Chabad House, where they taken its Jewish inhabitants hostage, even says how to fire bullets so as to avoid being wounded by ricocheting bullet fragments. In one of the most chilling moments the handler in Pakistan listens in as one of the gunmen kills the Jewish hostages.

Exaggerating zero

The Indian government says it is determined to fix responsibility among those who "exaggerated" the tiger population in the Panna sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. Ideally one would have applauded this statement but there is a minor problem. Here is why.

Those who are supposed to be in charge of such affairs had "exaggerated" the number of tigers to claim there were 30 of them in the sanctuary. The truth is there is none. Let me understand this one. By its very definition exaggeration means a willful overstatement of a number by some margin, which in turn means there were at least some tigers in existence. Exaggeration does not mean one can claim there was a particular number of tigers where there wasn't any. There is a word for that. It is called a lie.

A special investigating team set up by the National Tiger Conservation Authority concluded that the claims about the tiger population in Panna were wrong and the absence of the big cats can be attributed to poaching. India's junior minister for environment Jairam Ramesh said candidly: "Accountability would be fixed on the reason for the exaggerated projection of the tiger population and the reason for the effective population being zero."

Overstating numbers of wildlife on the verge of extinction is endemic not just across India but in South Asia as well. When those in charge of protecting tigers said there were 30 of them in Panna it could mean one or all of several things. It could mean they wished there were 30. It could mean there may be 30 or even perhaps just one. It could also mean a number they pulled out of either their own ass or a surviving tiger's ass. It could also mean they are merely saying a number that sounds plausible in case someone smart was actually monitoring such details.

Obama, India and Kashmir

 

In his interview with Anwar Iqbal of the Dawn newspaper President Barack Obama has taken a position on Kashmir that converges with what India has been saying for a long time. New Delhi has argued for over a decade and half that Islamabad should not make bilateral relations so conditioned upon the question of Kashmir that the two neighbors do not make any progress on other issues. Islamabad has generally rejected this approach on the ground that since Kashmir is central to the hostilities between the two, they should attempt to resolve that first.

India's has been the more pragmatic approach of the two although it is understandable if Pakistan see that as a ruse to scale down Kashmir's importance. On the other hand Pakistan's approach has been more ideological and even doctrinaire.

Here is what Obama told Iqbal.

'And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest,' he said.

 'And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don't think it's appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on.'

It is almost as if the response was written by some bureaucrat in India's Ministry of External Affairs. There is merit in the argument that bilateral relations between India and Pakistan can remain frozen in the uncertainties over Kashmir. We have tried using Kashmir as the core component of any bilateral exchange for decades but have not gotten too far. It may be time to try a fresh approach which attempts to build bridges over other less acrimonious issues in order to create an atmosphere which might then lead progress on Kashmir. In this context it is important to remember that India too has taken an unyielding stand on making resumption of a dialogue conditioned upon verifiable and tangible steps by Pakistan to prevent Islamist terror groups from using Pakistani soil and tacit support to launch attacks in India.

Pakistan's response to the November 26, 2008 strikes on Mumbai have become the pivot around which India wants to decide whether there is any sense in engaging Pakistan in a broader discussion. While it is absolutely essential that Pakistan comes up with a satisfactory response on the Mumbai terror attacks, it would equally be a mistake to make resumption of a dialogue conditioned upon that.

India’s restive dispossessed

Nothing makes the media more excited than developments which they can distil down to neat little labels. What labels do is help the media bypass the tedium of taking a more vigorous and more analytical look at complex social, cultural, political, religious and economic situations. Labeling any kind of unrest is particularly prevalent in India's broadcast media.

As I watch the country's security forces battle the growing threat from the "Maoist" groups in states such as West Bengal and Chhatisgarh, I am struck by how eager the media is to somehow reduce the enormously important question of economic and social inequities to a label. The current violence in Lalgarh, a predominantly tribal region in the state ruled by the communists, is an unsettling example of how the dispossessed and the disenfranchised will eventually resort to extreme measures to draw the country's attention to their existential crises.

Not having spent enough time on this particular region's problems, it would be glib of me to write about the specific provocations that eventually led to the ongoing stand-off between the government and who feel seriously wronged by it. However, one can say with a fair degree of confidence that at the heart of any such unrest or movement in India there is invariably decades of apathy and neglect of vast populations of people at the bottom of the pyramid.

One of the popular recurring themes among sociologists studying India's socio-economic imbalances to explain why the country was uniquely immune to a violent revolution or a civil war went something like this. Indians at all levels, particularly at the or near the bottom of the pyramid, have this deeply ingrained sense of fatalism and philosophical resolve to accept their station in life. To put it in less esoteric terms, what many sociologists were saying was the have-nots would not hit at the haves simply because they had resigned to their own miseries as part of some uniquely Indian acceptance of whatever life handed them.

While there may have been something to that rather patronizing theorizing, I believe what we are witnessing now could seriously shatter that comfortable and reassuring view.

BRIC by BRIC

China's President Hu Jintao with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

The Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) summit could not have gone unnoticed in Washington. At the very least the coming together of two democracies and two tightly controlled autocracies, which together represent a powerful economic bloc, ought to be a matter of anxious interest if not outright concern.

That the BRIC countries control foreign exchange reserves of $2.8 trillion and represents three of the world's most sought after economies are just two obvious factors of interest for the United States. It is true that any such narrow international groupings have a tendency not to live up to their full potential of posing any serious challenge to the supremacy of the United States. However, the aftereffects of the global financial meltdown triggered by some breathtakingly risky deals made by American financial institutions have made the U.S. significantly vulnerable to global doubt and wariness. In such circumstances any rise of a grouping like the BRIC, that incorporates India and China, has to be of great significance.

Reports out of Yekaterinburg in Russia where the summit took place suggest that the four countries may consider buying each other's bonds and swap currencies with the specific purpose of reducing dependence on the US dollar. Seen in the context of both China and Russia indicating their willingness to reduce the world economy's dependence on the dollar, the BRIC moves acquire much more importance. Of course, the US still remains the preeminent economic power which straddles all such groupings. That, however, does not take away from the potential of the BRIC to seriously influence economic trends, policies and decision-making in the next decade or so.