I wrote in a previous column about India’s growth flattening out. Despite having a poor per capita gross domestic product — about one-thirtieth of what it is in advanced nations — India’s growth has collapsed to an ordinary five or six per cent when not supported by foreign inflows. This is down from its peak of nine per cent-plus, which it achieved for four years under Manmohan Singh, and which is now looking unlikely for the near future.

Some think, in my opinion wrongly, that this problem can be addressed purely by more reforms. The more India opens itself to foreign money, the more transparent its systems of government are, the more efficient and less corrupt its bureaucracy, the better for its economy. That is the logic. None of this is exceptionable, though all of it assumes that the high growth path is something for which only the government is responsible.

I think we should also look elsewhere to seek an answer to why we cannot grow. I did not write about why this was so in my earlier piece because this brings us into the realm of culture. Economists have little regard for this sort of thing and their work assumes that the environment is everything.

There are almost no studies (Harish Damodaran’s is one) on India’s mercantile culture and the baniya ethic. Though it is often said that India’s entrepreneurial base is big, the evidence is that it is caste based and small. Among Muslims, it is even smaller, and that explains to me the sorry state of Bangladesh’s and Pakistan’s economy.

The second aspect of India’s economy is the lack of mobility. Being middle class in India is essentially a lottery of birth.

This is, of course, true of most nations and most cultures. Europe has an aristocracy, most obviously in England with its landed rich.

But in few places, is it as pronounced as in India. Here, fate doesn’t land us either in wealth or in the middle class. It sends us directly into a hell with almost no access to escape. The state has no resources to help you get out.

Even if you believe the government’s figures, a third of India is poor. The fact is that the government’s numbers are based on calorie consumption for immediate sustenance and food. Indians who earn Rs23 a day in villages and Rs29 a day in cities are not poor. A monthly income of Rs674 in villages and Rs860 in cities is thought to be sufficient. This compares with Rs22,000 a month in the United States.

In that sense, the poverty line of India is cruel. It is merciless and doesn’t allow the majority of Indians any money for shelter or access to education or health care or sanitation or anything else that civilised nations would consider as essential as food.

You could not have access to and money for any of those things listed above and still be considered not poor in India. You could have no money to travel anywhere for work or education and not be considered poor in India.

The argument people who draw this line have is that if it were raised to a more humane standard, perhaps 70 per cent of Indians would be regarded poor. But what is wrong with admitting that?

Peter Ong, a friend of mine from Australia, who consulted a newspaper in Mumbai, would often notice the poor of the city. “What’s her future?” he would ask of some urchin on the road as we drove past. At first, I was defensive and would mumble something about how it was all changing in India. But that was not the right answer. The child had no hope and would spend her life and die in poverty of a truly frightening kind.

Almost none of the work done historically by the church in Europe on poverty and education is done by religion in India. Our wealthy have little interest in philanthropy, though Azim Premji and Nandan Nilekani can lead us to think this is changing.

And the truth is that the Indian media is totally disinterested in poverty. This is because the reader has no interest in this — and as someone who has edited newspapers in three languages for many years, I can speak with some authority. To assume that, in such a place, politicians can legislate us back into the high-growth orbit is, to my mind, delusional.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2013.

The Congress recently won elections in Karnataka, and the side story was the deflation of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi. He campaigned in the state (and received raucous crowds as usual) but his party was hammered. This is seen, correctly, as his inability to influence national elections.

To me, however, the side story is different. It is a story of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s shaming. The two campaigned aggressively in a state where their party was scheduled to win according to every opinion poll. In comparison, only a few months ago, they were all but absent from Gujarat, a state where they were headed for defeat.

Whatever else one may think of Modi and his managing of Gujarat, it is true that he is brave and commits himself. He would surely have known that his speeches would not sway an election in South India, but he came and he attacked the Congress. It was a selfless act for his party and a statement on his unchanging beliefs. This cannot be said of the Gandhis on the evidence of these two elections. They displayed opportunism and a fear of defeat that is bordering on cowardice. Let me give an example.

In the 2002 elections in Gujarat, as pointed out by The Hindu, the Congress had two manifestos. It had one in English, about secularism and “the soul of India”. It had another in Gujarati, where this was not referred to. The paper explained why this was the case:

“The Gujarati version of the manifesto has no space for secularism, the ideas of nationhood or even for denunciations of the Congress’ chief opponent that the English one has. This seems to suggest that the Congress has accepted the BJP’s formulation that concern for India’s secular Constitution is restricted to a rump of English speakers, some, no doubt, among its party members. What is terrifying about this ham-handed piece of political cynicism is the assumption that the English speaking/English reading class can be silenced with words. And, that the Congress’ claim to inheriting the legacy of independence can be sustained through a linguistically targeted text. It would be facile to suggest that the Congress and the BJP are the same creature. But, while the BJP actively pursues an ideological agenda, the Congress has reduced its own to context-free slogans. If those whose hopes are riding on a Congress victory expect justice, and through it, the restitution of the constitutionally guaranteed rights, life and liberty, then they will be disappointed. For, there is nothing in the Congress’ record to suggest that once in power, it will make such a course of action a priority.”

In December’s election, the English manifesto had also removed the obligatory references that were present 10 years ago. I was surprised at going through the manifesto to see that even the conviction of a minister was ignored. Only months before, Maya Kodnani, Modi’s minister for women and child welfare, was convicted for organising the murder of 98 Gujaratis, including three dozen women and children.

Why would the Congress choose to abstain from pointing this out? On television debates, I was told by Congress spokespersons that it was because “everyone knows it”. That was a lie. The fact is that the Congressmen of the state convinced Sonia that there was no gain in pushing a secular line in Gujarat. Most Gujaratis are communal and will reject the message — is the logic — so let’s move on from that. This was bought as pragmatism The Gandhis should have chucked the idea of winning in Gujarat and stood on a matter of principle. They have lost three elections in Gujarat anyway, so why sacrifice principle and ideology on such a poor gamble? The truth is that the line dividing pragmatism from opportunism can be fine and the Congress has crossed it.

Who will fight for pluralism in India if not the party of Gandhi and Nehru? They would be ashamed of the Congress today, and particularly of the opportunistic behaviour of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 12^th, 2013.

How much principle should one have in politics in India? The high-minded and moral party is usually punished by the voter for acting on principle. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) refuses to reconcile with the Lingayat leader BS Yeddyurappa in Karnataka. The Congress refuses to reconcile with Jaganmohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh.

In both instances, an ambitious man charged with serious corruption wanted to become chief minister. Both Yeddyurappa and Jaganmohan blackmailed their parties and broke them when they stood on principle and refused to give them power. And in both instances, the voter has disagreed with principle. The BJP lost a recent local body election after its vote was split by Yeddyurappa’s party and the Congress, too, lost after its votes were split by Jaganmohan’s party. In both instances, the defeat came after a significant chunk of the caste vote left with the leader.

The Indian voter picks his party confessionally, and will side with his caste. Corruption, governance, anti-incumbency and other such epithets are superficial for the most part and applied on top to justify what is essentially a success of community agglomeration by the party.

The voter doesn’t care about corruption and demonstrably corrupt people can return to power in India. The history of elections in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar shows us this quite clearly and to look for other justifications is to be blind to reality.

The other aspect is to what extent issues matter in an election. We in the media would like to believe that it is policies, ideologies and governance that are the deciding factors. To recognise how removed the voter can be from all this, let’s look at two of India’s most cultured and literate states.

Next year’s general election in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal will exclude the two parties competing for government, the Congress and the BJP. Neither party will have many, and perhaps even any, seats from here.

These are two of India’s largest states and in both, it is totally irrelevant to the voter whether the Congress or the BJP rules from Delhi and whether or not Narendra Modi or an Italian woman becomes prime minister. Tamilians will vote for parties that are formed on the basis of linguistic and regional chauvinism and are caste based. In our largest state, Uttar Pradesh, which has more people than Germany, Britain and France put together, the two main parties will not be running to form the government in Delhi either. Here again, the Congress and the BJP will be more or less irrelevant. It will be Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party that will pick up seats in parliament depending solely on how good their caste combination is.

Naturally, parties in India are supremely aware of this and their politics are conducted so as to have as wide a caste base as possible. Even the Hindutva party is actually a party of only select Hindus.

If one goes through the list of Punjab’s legislators, it is clear that the partnership between the Akali Dal and the BJP has a logic rooted in community and caste. The Akalis bring the Sikh vote and the BJP brings the Hindus. In fact, except for one Sikh MLA (cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu’s wife), all the other BJP state legislators from Punjab are Hindus, so far as I could spot, and almost without exception, from the upper castes.

Similarly, in Bihar, the partnership between the Janata Dal and the BJP succeeds because of a caste logic and I have written about this here before. Though this voters’ clinging to their caste come rain or shine is accepted for the most part, the parties, at times, take a position against corruption, whether because of media pressure or their conscience. The RSS has a genuine moral problem with corruption and that explains the exit of Yeddyurappa. The Congress also, it appears, did the moral thing rather than the pragmatic thing when it decided to take a beating instead of letting Jaganmohan become chief minister.

It is strange to say this, given how much bad press they get, but often, it is the politician who is more moral than the voter in India.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2013.

How will India’s high growth continue? Its run as the world’s second fastest growing economy has already ended, and chances of it returning to that position don’t seem good.

The Congress, under Manmohan Singh, has failed to deliver consistently high growth and the numbers are now clear.

In the last nine years, Singh’s team and their policies made India grow nine per cent-plus in four years and eight per cent-plus in two years. But last year, growth was 6.2 per cent, and it is slowing down further. This year, it is expected to be five per cent, the lowest since the BJP-led alliance left power in 2004.

At about two trillion dollars, India’s economy was the tenth largest in the world last year, and it will become the eighth largest this year, ahead of Russia and Italy. But this rise in the rankings is not by itself significant.

The important aspect about India’s economy is, of course, that per capita GDP is very low.

It is only $1,500 per Indian or thereabouts, which is one-thirtieth of what it is in developed nations. We are not a middle-income nation, are a long way from becoming one and the majority of Indians are, in fact, very poor and will remain very poor for decades.

But even on this low base, our growth collapses from nine per cent to five per cent when the global economy softens. Why? It was the easy money coming in from the West, economists like Ruchir Sharma say, that lifted the Indian economy for many years of the last decade. When this dried up, we immediately sank to six per cent growth, first in 2008, and now for two consecutive years. This is remarkable and it shows that the internal thrust for high growth is missing, for the most part, in India.

So, what should be done to bring high growth back? Singh says some reforms will help but it isn’t clear to me whether the next Lok Sabha will be more capable than this one in passing reform. Also, it doesn’t seem to me that just some more reform will by itself add the missing four percentage points of growth. Some new thinking and a new strategy may be needed that addresses the lack of internal economic dynamism rather than only attracting easy money, which by most accounts isn’t coming back any time soon.

Who is going to guide the Indian economy out of these doldrums of stagnant growth?

Singh has said that he cannot rule it in or out that he will again be the Congress candidate for prime minister in 2014. I think there’s little chance that he will offer himself for the job (he will be 82 next year). He has left it ambiguous out of maturity, purely to ensure that the focus would not immediately move to Rahul Gandhi.

And there’s little chance also that the Congress will consider Singh even if he were willing.

The fact is that though he has had a reasonably good innings so far, his credibility on the economy is currently low. He has kept saying in the past couple of years that high growth will return but he has been wrong and he doesn’t seem to know when or how it will return.

We need someone who can tell us what the internal issues are and how to revive what Singh has called the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurship.

To my mind, and this is to be fair to whoever runs the economy, this is not a political or legislative problem, but a broader social and cultural one. However, it is essential that political solutions are thrown at it to see whether there is a reasonably quick fix to bring us back into high growth trajectory.

Singh has had his chance and done as well as might be expected given his handicaps. Now, it’s time for him to wind down. After 2014, when he steps aside, someone new must take charge of what is a serious problem that needs a fresh approach.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 21^st, 2013. 

This month, Surat was judged India’s best city. The parameters for this included, according to a report in The Times of India, “mobility, water supply network, cleanliness, public amenities, pollution control, greenery, safety and easy processes of getting work done at the corporation.”

Pune stood second in the “quality of life” category, while Ahmedabad was placed third. This was the result of a survey, and we must discount surveys as not being an effective tool to measure quality.

However, I must add my two bits here because I am delighted with the results. To me, Surat is the most interesting city in India. It would be so even if it weren’t the place I called home for most of my life.

It was a city before Bombay and New Delhi and Madras and Calcutta and Bangalore existed. It wasn’t designed by outsiders and it had an urban culture developed by its citizens, much of which it retains today.

Surat was already a big city when, in 1608, the British first landed in India. They came hoping to trade and were given a licence to set up a warehouse (called ‘factory’) by a drug-addled Jahangir. From here, they began the adventure that climaxed two centuries later with their taking Delhi from the Marathas.

Writer Khaled Ahmed says that Surat’s importance came from it being India’s only west-facing port. It was the place from where the Mughals — who did not control the land route — and their harem departed for Hajj. But it was also always the most important city for the empire outside the capital because of its traders’ ability to generate customs revenue and bring in gold. After the English Restoration, Bombay came to the possession of Charles II as dowry and this little transaction transformed India and world history. The British held on to this little corner with zeal and would not be dislodged. The teetotaller Aurangzeb disliked Europeans but had to defer to British power because their ships controlled the passage to Makkah.

The decline of Surat as a port happened at the same time as the rise of Bombay. Some believe this was because the river Tapti silted over, its banks no longer able to berth large ships. Though the Bombay harbour was superior, however, the city was, at that point, only a collection of villages. There were no proper mercantile castes to manage British trade. And so, the British encouraged the migration of Surat’s merchants — Hindu, Muslim and Parsi — to the city, creating what is still India’s only proper urban space, South Bombay.

As Bombay rose, Surat declined, but for a short period. Regeneration is built into its genetic code. Its capacity for producing fine business minds is undiminished (Ratan Tata was born here). It is Gujarat’s only city of proper diversity, where the lower classes have street space. It is for this reason the one city where a decent meal may be easily found for those who eat meat, in what is otherwise an oppressively vegetarian state.

The Surti in caricature is for other Gujaratis, a person who enjoys the good things of life. I can testify that this caricature is true.

Ahmedabad and Baroda are India’s two most communally violent cities. Given this, it is quite remarkable that Surat should be so different from them, inclusive and for most of its history, peaceful. Why is this so? I have my theories of caste and religious inclusion, but these are not the result of academic investigation. In another country, such a city, rich with history and culture, would have been ethnographed and biographed dozens of times. Scholars and journalists would have examined its character and its contributions to transforming South Asia.

Unfortunately, that is not our way. Anyway, no point whining about that here. I left Surat in 1994 because there is little work available there unless you want to be part of a business. It has, like Ahmedabad, no significant white collar middle class even today. English is not the first language of its middle class. Those excited by this survey should have a look at these cities to know all aspects of Gujarat’s mercantile culture and the urban spaces it produces.

Personally speaking, I do not think either Surat or Ahmedabad or indeed Pune are better to live and work in than Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai or Bangalore. However, I can without embarrassment or exaggeration call Surat India’s most interesting city.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2013.

A decade ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed it would win the elections on the back of India Shining and called early elections. India Shining was the campaign executed brilliantly by Nirvik Singh of Grey Worldwide. It told Indians that they were a Great Power and a middle-income nation.

The problem, of course, was that we were neither. And the other thing was that the shining aspect was mainly in the BJP’s head. In the three years before the campaign, India’s GDP had grown 4.4 per cent (2000-01), six per cent (2001-02) and 3.8 per cent (2002-03). Hardly the sort of record that should have made voters ecstatic about the party.

India Shining was a hit advertising campaign that didn’t have a product to sell.

But Pramod Mahajan (the BJP’s smartest next generation leader before Narendra Modi) was convinced that the time had arrived for a positive, nationalist election campaign. He was wrong.

In 2009, the Congress could have campaigned on India Shining because they actually had the achievement. In the four years before the election, India grew 9.5 per cent (2005-06), 9.6 per cent (2006-07), 9.3 per cent (2007-08) and 6.7 per cent (2008-09).

But despite this, the Congress chose not to campaign on India Shining. It projected itself as the party of the poor and campaigned on the strength of legislation, such as the right to work scheme, which assured the poor 100 days of work, the Right to Information, which addressed ordinary corruption, and so on.

Some analysts, like Swaminathan Aiyar, believe that it wasn’t this campaign advertising itself as the party of the common man, but the economic growth that actually won the Congress the 2009 election.

It is so difficult to gather data on voting patterns in India that we cannot say if this is necessarily true. In my opinion, the Congress itself has two ways of looking at it. The Sonia Gandhi-led traditionalists believe that it was mainly the laws aimed at the poor that won the day. The Manmohan Singh-led modernists believe that it was mainly the economic growth with some elements of the laws for the poor.

The BJP now faces a Gujarat Shining moment. Should it run a positive campaign around Modi’s fine economic achievements? That becomes inevitable in the event of his becoming candidate for prime minister. I have written before in this space that I do not think he will become prime ministerial candidate, and I still believe this. But let us assume that with his recent elevation into the BJP’s central parliamentary board, he will, at least, become the focus of the party’s campaign.

Many in the BJP, like actress Smriti Irani, do not tire of telling us that Modi is the only man ever in Indian history to use development as the issue, as he did in Gujarat’s elections. Will his joining the party’s national team bring this positiveness to the 2014 campaign? It will be interesting to see because the experience of India Shining will be fresh for many others in the BJP.

The important fact here is that the key asset Modi brings to the party in New Delhi is the urban youth and the middle class voter. It cannot be denied that for large numbers of these, he is an attractive figure, whom they want to see leading India. For them, talk of high economic growth and efficient government is more important than the social sector schemes that the Congress focuses on, which concern the rural and semi-urban poor.

It seems quite certain that the Congress campaign will again focus on its delivery to this section of Indians. These include things like direct cash transfers for food and fertiliser instead of subsidies, and the Right to Education, under which private schools are being forced to reserve seats for the poor. Even if it had wanted to, the Congress cannot campaign on its economic performance because this time, it has not been great, for whatever reason.

This means the space is available for the BJP to project itself, under Modi, as the party of the middle class and also the party of economic development and growth.

Will they grasp it? Or will the ghost of India Shining spook the BJP’s headquarters?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2013. 

First, we banned Pakistanis from the Indian Premier League (too soft on terror). Now, we have banned the Lankans (too tough on terror). This upsets some of us who think the decision was wrong. I’m writing this mainly for them. There is no point in feeling emotional about this sort of irrational behaviour unless you see it as episodic. It isn’t, of course, and anybody who observes India function can see this. It’s endemic and representative of the tribal society that India as a whole is. By tribal I mean one that cannot examine individuals without the prejudice of a collective label.

We have no problem with punishing the entire race of Lankans for the actions of their government. And the truth is that we are consistent in this behaviour. For many years now, we have used the same approach with Pakistani musicians and cricketers. This has not been noticed because there is a consensus against Pakistan in our middle class. Our arbitrary you-cannot-play-here order to professionals was fine, as long as it targeted Pakistani players. The Lankan matter has made more people sit up but, as I said, this is not a new thing. When this is so, we necessarily open ourselves up to scrutiny on the charge that we are racists who believe in collective punishment. Who among us can deny we are not, faced with this sort of evidence?

Writing about the latest provocation, leading to the decision to keep the Lankan players out of Chennai, The Hindu said in its editorial:

“For a person entrusted with the task of ensuring law and order, Ms Jayalalithaa, in her letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appeared too eager to surrender her responsibilities. Far from extending assurances on the law and order front, she voiced her apprehension that the participation of Sri Lankan players ‘will aggravate an already surcharged atmosphere and further offend the sentiments of the people’ of Tamil Nadu. To drop the Sri Lankan players on this ground is to blatantly discriminate on the basis of nationality and ethnic identity.”

True, of course, but what the paper should have considered was whether what Jayalalithaa was claiming was also true. I think it is. Tamilians would have gone violent if the Lankans had been allowed. In the same way that the Shiv Sena and its voters behave when there is talk of Pakistanis playing at the Wankhede Stadium.

Like some Pavlovian creature, the Indian crowd can always be set off on the right cue. The other thing to observe is how we find nothing wrong in behaving like schoolyard bullies, and at the same time, spout cliches about cricket being a gentleman’s game. It’s nothing of the sort in India. It’s like a circus in Rome: vicious and nationalistic. Why are we so petty and mean? The answer is because we can be. We kick around smaller nations that are our neighbours because we can; there’s no other reason. Meanwhile, really offensive things in cricket rarely bother us because they are done by members of our own tribe.

The Tamilian head of the BCCI owns one of the teams his body governs. He can bend the auction rules to suit his team but this is fine. And who will object? Two of the most respected cricketers in the world, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, are paid Rs30 lakh every month to parrot the BCCI propaganda on television. A third commentator, Harsha Bhogle, also put his hand up but couldn’t conclude the sale because of some problem with the contract, according to The Economic Times.

We have no problem with any of this and it continues. The parties involved have accepted the facts but even after being thoroughly exposed, they say there is no conflict of interest. I would say they are right because conflicts of interest arise only in cultures with a set of principles and morals, which I don’t think we have. I have long ceased to be surprised by the simian antics of the Indian mob. To a writer, this mob isn’t even interesting anymore. It is actually quite predictable whether it gathers in Chennai or in Mumbai or in Jhumri Telaiyya. Indians are the same everywhere, and mostly, we are insufferable.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st, 2013.

This is actually a local story but its details will interest Pakistanis, especially in Karachi, who want to understand India’s politics.

It concerns the chief minister of Bihar (India’s second most populous state) who is thought to be reconsidering his partnership with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If he goes ahead, Nitish Kumar, a devotee of the socialist intellectual, Ram Manohar Lohia, could change the course of the 2014 general elections. This has excited our newspapers.

However, I find it difficult to see why Kumar’s Janata Dal United (JDU) would consider breaking with the BJP.

His allying of Lohiaite socialists with Hindutva has produced the best caste coalition of any state in India. It is a formidable combination that is likely to stay in power for a long time if it stays together.

The JDU-BJP team commands 40 per cent of the vote in Bihar. This is remarkable for such a fragmented state, and invincible in our first-past-the-post electoral system. In India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, by comparison, Mulayam Singh won a majority with only 29 per cent of the vote. His rival Mayawati, just three per cent behind, was trounced 224 to 80.

In Bihar, Kumar has a 15 per cent vote-share lead over his primary rivals Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan’s alliance. This sort of dominance is not thrown away in politics. This is why it is difficult to see why Kumar would leave the BJP and side with the Congress after next year’s general election.

What is meant by best caste coalition? Let’s have a look. The key aspect of the JDU-BJP alliance is its domination across sections of society. We can observe this through the names of Bihar’s legislators, and through the winners of constituencies reserved for the scheduled castes.

In Bihar, the scheduled castes are totally with the JDU-BJP. Of the 38 seats reserved for scheduled caste candidates, 37 are with the JDU-BJP, split 19 to 18 between them. The attraction of Dalits to the BJP, where it is in power, is not unusual: in Gujarat also, Narendra Modi has trounced Congress eight to three in scheduled caste constituencies.

Of the 18 peasant Yadavs in the assembly, 14 are with the JDU-BJP (10 with the JDU), Upper castes are, of course, solidly behind the BJP as always. All eight Brahmin MLAs and the only Baniya name I could spot on the list are with the alliance, with six in the BJP.

Meanwhile, very large numbers of Muslims are voting for the JDU. Kumar has the most Muslim MLAs of any party. Of the 19 Muslims in the assembly, eight are with the alliance (of whom one is with the BJP). This sort of sweeping lower caste plus middle caste plus upper caste plus Muslim coalition that Kumar has put together is reminiscent of the Congress in the time of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. It shows his alliance in Bihar is working. Both parties have different strengths.

The JDU brings most of the middle castes and many Muslims, the BJP brings all the upper castes and the two split the lower castes. Kumar cannot replace the BJP easily because it has assets to offer him that no other party has.

The Janata Dal-BJP alliance has 115 and 91 seats respectively, in an assembly of 243. Their individual vote share is 22.5 per cent and 16.5 per cent, respectively. This is locked in and in the 2009 general elections, the JDU got 24 per cent.

By himself — it is obvious here — Kumar is unlikely to win Bihar again without the BJP. The other thing is that he has an excellent partner in the Bihar BJP, Sushil Modi. A pragmatist, who is not from the lunatic end of the party (his wife Jessie George is Catholic), Modi is the ideal man to temper the BJP and prepare it for the alliance. While all the attention is on the other Modi in Gujarat, he is one man to watch out for.

And so, the Kumar-Modi combination is likely to continue to 2014, with Kumar continuing to temper the BJP’s extremism to pacify his constituency.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2013. 

One of India’s most infamous men hangs himself in jail, another is hanged without due process only days before that, and we are angry that two Italians are refusing to come back to face trial.

Why are we even surprised? If I were the Italians, I wouldn’t come back either and I think it’s understandable if their government lied.

Nobody trusts our justice system, including most Indians, and the only people who say they do are the accused who have no option.

Our record is atrocious and open for scrutiny. Almost any case you take — even one as crucial as Abu Salem’s — will be messed up in monumental fashion. I’m not going to bring up Amit Shah, Gujarat’s former home minister, who is himself on bail and facing serious charges while in office. Who will trust this justice system?

My friend Yug Chaudhary, who campaigns against the death penalty in courts across India, will tell you stories about law in India that will make your hair stand on end. I could tell you a few, too. You need to have credibility if you want the world to send you its citizens for trial. India has none. We should accept that and clean up our act rather than blame the world.

To come to the case of Ram Singh, the man accused of murder and rape who hanged himself despite being unable to use one arm — how did he do this?

I’m interested because my beat as a newspaper reporter was at sessions court and I have spent some time inside jails.

Prisons don’t have fans inside the cell (or shouldn’t). The only way to “hang” yourself is to slip a rope or thin strip of fabric over the horizontal bars of the cell wall and then sit down and allow your body to choke itself through gravity in a noose. This is difficult and requires determination. I’ve not known of many cases where this is successful.

In an orthodox hanging, where a stool or chair is kicked out from under you, or you plunge into the gallows like Saddam Hussein, death comes from the snapping of your neck — not from slow strangulation, which is how it would happen in a jail cell death.

What did Ram Singh do? We have no idea. According to Hindustan Times, “he hanged himself from a rod in the ceiling of his cell in Jail No 3 using his clothes”. The paper added that “another version had it that he hanged himself from the ventilator grill”. Zee News had a third version, that he had “used a part of bed linen”.

The whole thing had been delayed by a day and Times of India said, incredibly, that “the postmortem could not be conducted as Delhi Police could not submit the required papers to the hospital on time”.

One of the cruel things about being in an Indian jail is the lack of privacy. There is always someone around you. Not just the police but other prisoners (one report said Ram Singh shared the cell with three people). Solitary confinement here doesn’t mean what it does in the West.

There are also closed circuit cameras observing inmates, especially those in solitary confinement. How did Ram Singh evade all this?

And then the material is not easy to fashion. Just cutting the clothes you have into straight strips and knotting them properly requires skill and application. A man with one dodgy arm would find it more difficult. Where did he get the tools from?

Making a noose isn’t easy (try it). It requires for the knot to be of high quality, such as a slip knot, and placed in a particular way opposed to the carotid artery.

Nothing about this case should give us confidence in ourselves. Our record is poor and a humiliating and very public demonstration of it is on view every other day. All of us have seen the police do unlawful things, like thrashing offenders, even children, rather than proceed per law.

The police in India in such a case as Ram Singh’s are guilty unless proven innocent.

This is unfortunate, but their record makes it true. And if we accept that, we should not insist that those poor Italians martyr themselves to our incompetence.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2013. 

This week, I was on a couple of television shows where something unusual struck me.

The shows were about Narendra Modi being denied the chance to speak at the Wharton India Economic Forum over a satellite link.

The desi students of Wharton had called him to speak to them about development. Some others from the campus in Pennsylvania objected and got a petition signed by 300 people. This put paid to Modi’s talk. The people opposing Modi were led by three professors, Toorjo Ghose, Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul. In their note they said two things that were relevant. First, that “In February 2012, the Supreme Court again criticised the Modi government for harassing activists fighting for justice with trumped up charges”.

This is current and not to do with the riots. It shows, depressingly, how Modi chooses to keep the riots alive. In fact, one of Gujarat’s finest police officers, Rahul Sharma, is facing action next week for going after the killers. The other thing the professors referred to was the Indian National Human Rights Commission report, which states there was “a comprehensive failure on the part of the state government to control the persistent violation of rights of life, liberty, equality and dignity of the people of the state”. Both of these are things that will follow Modi wherever he goes abroad, whether now or as prime minister. Something for him to think about, and possibly correct.

Personally, I think it silly that Modi should not have been allowed to speak. It is an old Indian habit to bully people into silence rather than to debate them.

However, what surprised me was that the division here was between the professors, who were upset with Modi, and the students, who were excited by him. Young Indians abroad seem to love Modi while older Indians are more circumspect. This is similar to Delhi’s Shri Ram College, where students were also greatly taken in by Modi.

When Wharton’s invitation to Modi was withdrawn, the Indian students put out a note saying: “The student organising body was extremely impressed with Mr Modi’s credentials, governance ideologies and leadership, which was the primary reason for his invitation.” They explained their reason for cancelling the talk by saying they did not want controversy: “Therefore, we as a team, would like to apologise for being a catalyst may (sic) have put Mr Modi and the Wharton school administration in an (sic) difficult position.” So, it seems to me that Wharton is producing the wrong type of Indian abroad. It is worrying that they should have, without a single reference to the objections raised by their professors, put out this defiant note after their capitulation.

Previously, this same student body had invited, for some reason, Varun Gandhi. I saw this reported in The Hindu. You will remember him as the man who promised his Hindu constituents that he would amputate the limbs of those they saw as enemies. What wisdom he could have given the students is not easy to figure out. In fact, it is disturbing. The other thing that struck me over the same issue is how different our entertainment industry is from Hollywood, which is the liberal citadel of the United States. Unfortunately in India, the Bollywood artist is opportunistic and not driven by any great liberalism.

Almost any television debate one is on, the BJP or the RSS is assured to have some figure from the entertainment business defending it. Most often it is Smriti Irani, who demanded Modi’s resignation in theatrical manner just after the riots but then saw the light and is now his supporter. Other film stars on the BJP’s side or endorsing Modi are Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha. This is not to say there aren’t any in Congress or elsewhere, but we don’t have Hollywood’s revulsion for politics based on nationalism and religion. This week, I had the unpleasant experience of being on a panel with actress Kiron Kher, who I did not know was a fan of Modi, screaming at one of the soft-spoken professors who moved the anti-Modi petition. Shouldn’t Bollywood, with its pretend liberalism, at least pretend to be against Hindu fundamentalists? Strange that it isn’t.

And how interesting to learn in the same week that our students and our actors are becoming creatures of the Right.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2013.