How wrong you were Maestro…

On September 7 , 2013, one of my favourite conductors, the great Zubin Mehta, with the help and organising skills of the German ambassador to India, conducted the Bavarian State Orchestra, playing pieces from Beethoven: Coriolan No3 & 5^th Symphony, Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto-1st movement and Haydn: Trumpet Concerto. “… Persian carpets were laid out in a row on the grass for the ‘VVIP’s’ to cross with their retinues; fashionable women ascended a long red ramp, wearing saris and Jackie O sunglasses” as said the New York Times (NYT) report by Ellen Barry, September 7, 2013 from which I have quoted at length in this article (with gratitude to the newspaper and Ms Barry). “At 4 in the afternoon…elegantly dressed people began filing into the sumptuous cool of Shalimar Garden, past the pink stone pavilions and whispering fountains that made long-ago emperors, stuck in dusty Delhi, weak with yearning.”

“Soulful strains reverberated in the majestic backdrop of Zabarwan Hills when the famous conductor performed before a select audience on the banks of the famous Dal Lake — amid heavy security” as NDTV had it. The ‘heavy security’ was reportedly three miles deep and the music was mostly grand, not ‘soulful’: Beethoven’s 5^th as one example.

The Times quotes Mirza Waheed “one of several Kashmiri cultural figures who protested the event” as saying: “How can you have a concert in a walled garden, surrounded by rings and rings of security? The entire idea sort of collapses that this is a concert for peace. The people are not invited. It is as simple as that.”

But Mr Mehta’s take was: “They all came and sat together”, talking about his performances in conducting the Israeli Philharmonic before an all-Arab audience in Nazareth, or the dramatic performance in Sarajevo’s burned library. “So I always thought, why not in my country? And where in my country would be more apt than Kashmir? I just want to play for Hindus and Muslims that sit together. That’s all I want to do.”

But why not Gujarat Mr Mehta? There are communal troubles there as well but the possession of Gujarat is not contested by another country, as Kashmir is. Two armies don’t sit on the borders of Gujarat staring each other down and killing the other’s young soldiers (and civilians) now and again. Indeed why not get Hindus and Muslims together and play music for them at Ayodhya where there have been repeated cases of communal violence taking many lives?

I have to say here that the General Manager of the Orchestra, Nikolaus Bachler, was the most sensitive to the quite valid criticism: “We were expecting to play for the people of Kashmir in the spirit of brotherhood and humanity but organisers, turned this concert into an exclusive, elitist event for a selected, invited crowd and this understandably became a political issue, which is a pity and against the aim of art.”

The justification given for the concert is: “Despite several recent episodes of violence involving Indian and Pakistani troops at the disputed border, it has been a quiet season for protests in Kashmir, the third quiet summer in a row, perhaps evidence that psychological fatigue has set in after 20 years of conflict. The last notably violent year was 2010, when more than 128 protesters, mostly stone-throwing teenagers, were killed by police bullets. Each death prompted a new set of demonstrations, which were inevitably followed by tougher crackdowns” (NYT).

I see. “Third quiet summer in a row”? What is a ‘quiet summer’ in Indian Kashmir please? When ‘more than 128’ teenagers are not killed? Well, what about the killing of one or two people every so often; what about incidents of rape of poor village women who live in the countryside, and disappearances that occur every other week all over Kashmir?

But the most ludicrous, the most arrogant, the most infantile response to the criticism was mounted by Indian Kashmir’s Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, a young man who I at least thought could reach out to the young of Kashmir and, slowly but surely, get the Indian government to give more self-governing status to his state.

He is reported to have said: “It’s the fashion of the season to be seen coming out and saying something against this. How many people are actually genuine connoisseurs of Western classical music? I have had people ask me for passes and then ask me, ‘What sort of songs does Zubin Mehta sing?’” Er, Mr Abdullah, how many Indians in general (or Pakistanis for that matter!) know what songs Mehta ‘sings’? Why be so spiteful about your own people?

At the end of the day everyone seems to have understood the enormity of the cruel faux pas they had committed: even Mehta said the next concert in Kashmir would be for the people “in a stadium”? Well why not the first one? Some concert, eh, to which another 500 invites were issued to counter the valid criticism of the project being elitist, the seats being mostly filled by ‘plainclothes police officers’!

Let us end with the words of Iram Majid, a 26-year old teacher at a convent school, who “was … escorting a dozen students from a convent school” who said that “missing from the evening’s programme … was any mention of the violence of 2008 and 2010. The side that no one is talking about is that people have been slaughtered,” she said quietly. “Killing is a small word. People have been slaughtered.”

And with those of Khurram Pervez, spokesman for the Haqeeqat-e-Kashmir concert, which was held in protest but only allowed 10 miles away from Mr Mehta’s ‘soulful’ music: ‘The concert was an attempt by the Indian government to whitewash its crimes in Kashmir, to obfuscate the truth, hide the reality from the world’. Recall please that Mr Pervez also worked on the report on the discovery of unmarked graves in Indian Kashmir, according to some accounts numbering in the thousands.

Postscript: How much more apt if Mr Mehta had carried along some opera singers and conducted Mozart’s Requiem; or Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Op 36, Enigma; or, and indeed, Albinoni’s Adagio for some really ‘soulful’ music?

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2013.

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