Innholdsfortegnelse for December 9, 2019 i India Today

The promiscuity of Indian political parties is well known. The past four decades are riddled with instances of the strangest bedfellows getting together to be in power. The most recent of course is the soap opera played out in Maharashtra. Two parties—the BJP and the Shiv Sena—which had been allies for the past 30 years fought the election together. They got a mandate to rule the state jointly, but fell out after the results were declared on October 24 over the Sena’s claims that they had a 50:50 arrangement to share the chief ministership. The BJP denied it had made any such promise and, after a 16-day stand-off, decided to call the Sena’s bluff. However, much to the BJP’s consternation, the Sena made good on its threat—after lengthy tripartite negotiations,…

In response to a series of questions in Parliament, G. Kishan Reddy, the minister of state for home affairs, offered a barrage of statistics to show that Kashmiris were increasingly participating in ordinary life, that children had returned to school, that security was under control and that communications had largely been restored. But the numbers did not answer all questions. For instance, the home ministry, while providing overall tourist numbers in Kashmir for the past six months, did not shed light on the losses the tourist industry has suffered since August 5 and the abrogation of Article 370, nor did it offer specific numbers of visitors since the lifting of a travel advisory in October. Similarly, the home ministry provided numbers on arrests for stone-throwing this year to bolster its…

On November 28, more than a month after the results of the assembly election were declared on October 24 and following a week of high political drama, Uddhav Thackeray became the first in his family to become chief minister of Maharashtra. He left the BJP, the Shiv Sena’s ally of 30 years, bargaining for two and a half years of chief minister-ship, and ended up winning a full term with the help of his political rivals of 30 years, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress, under the aegis of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA). The momentousness of the occasion was evident, as an emotional Thackeray told the gathering of 165 MVA lawmakers in Mumbai: “Those I worked with for 30 years betrayed me, but those I fought for…

JAYANT PATIL, 57 The state NCP president is likely to lead the party in the government too. Patil has presented 10 budgets in a row as state finance minister. A sober face of the NCP, he wields influence in western Maharashtra VIJAY AKA BALASAHEB THORAT, 66 He took over as state Congress president after the party registered its lowest ever tally in Lok Sabha with only one seat. The veteran is the Congress’s best bet to inject some vigour in the party CHHAGAN BHUJBAL, 72 The veteran NCP legislator is the most influential OBC leader in the state. His main task is to break the OBC vote bank, loyal to the BJP. A taint of money laundering could be his biggest disadvantage PRITHVIRAJ CHAVAN, 73 The former chief minister is…

Even after his resignation on November 26, Devendra Fadnavis was closeted with senior BJP leaders through the day at his official residence ‘Varsha’. He attended a meeting of BJP legislators at the Garware Club inside the iconic Wankhede stadium in the night where everyone resolved the party would play the role of a responsible opposition. Fadnavis has set two contrasting records against his name in the past few months—become the first non-Congress Maharashtra CM to complete a full term, and also the shortest serving one, with his 80-hour second stint. Fadnavis was elected leader of the BJP legislative party on October 30 and it is almost certain he will get the post of leader of the opposition in the legislative assembly. If so, it will be a departure from the…

In his new book on architecture, culture and the state of our cities, seething with barely contained rage, architect Gautam Bhatia eviscerates the middle classes—our obsessions with money, prejudices and vanities, ambitions and pettiness, disdain of the public realm and our hatred of the other and each other. This is a book that instead of shying away from the ugliness around us, revels in describing it. The book is divided into chapters, each covering the various horrors of the contemporary Indian city. With titles like ‘Consumptive Life’, ‘Parasitic Lives’, ‘Nowhere goes Nowhere’, they describe the landscape of our cities, their inequities, squalor and injustices. As an architect, Bhatia has an unerring eye for gruesome detail and he dissects these landscapes to show us what we always knew but pretended not…

“MY RELATIVES, MY FATHER CAME FROM BANGLADESH... AFTER, I WAS BORN IN TRIPURA. SO, IF ANYONE SUFFERS A LOSS DUE TO NRC, I SHALL LOSE MY CHIEF MINISTERSHIP FIRST. AM I A FOOL THAT I SHALL IMPLEMENT NRC...?” Speaking in Bengali at a press conference, the BJP’s BIPLAB KUMAR DEB, the young motor-mouthed Tripura chief minister, was caught on camera equivocating about the National Register of Citizens, a white whale project seemingly close to home minister Amit Shah’s heart. This caused sufficient outrage on social media for Deb’s office to describe the video as having been faked and the stories as malicious. To be fair to Deb, the extended video does show that he was offering a convoluted defence of and praise for the NRC rather than criticism. But the…

India’s abysmal nutritional outcomes become newsworthy for about two days every year, coinciding with the release of the Global Hunger Index (GHI) report. This year was no exception: for two days, a handful of media outlets bemoaned India’s further slide in the rankings, a predictable highlight of which was that it had done worse than even Pakistan—India’s ‘Gabbar Singh’. Little attention is paid to two important caveats: one, the GHI ranking is rarely comparable across years and two, an aggregation of four indicators of hunger and nutrition, the GHI includes a questionable ‘calorie consumption’ measure from the FAO, which confuses food supply with calorie intake. These two caveats play in favour of the government, allowing it to dismiss the GHI findings. The focus on GHI, in fact, deflects attention from…

FLOOD ASSISTANCE An immediate challenge is to provide aid to flood-affected farmers. About 9.2 million ha. of crops have been damaged. The Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP had demanded an aid of Rs 25,000 per hectare, which requires a capital of Rs 2,300 crore LOAN WAIVERS The new government’s agenda includes significant expenditure on loan waivers and support for farmers, including Rs 10,000 annually for small farmers. This will invite an expense of Rs 1 lakh crore BULLET TRAIN The new government may pull out of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project. The state is expected to foot Rs 40,000 crore of the total cost, which the government would rather spend on farmers’ welfare. Uddhav Thackeray is also likely to review the allotment of 0.9 hectares at the Bandra-Kurla complex for…

Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon is best remembered today as the Defence Minister who lost the 1962 India-China war. But in the course of his long and varied career—as a lawyer, an expat freedom-fighter, an ambassador and a minister—Menon’s complex reputation frequently preceded him even as it dogged him. Given his combination of ambition, ability and a talent for making loyal friends and bitter enemies, it was perhaps predictable that his ascent would be mirrored by a dramatic fall. Now a new biography, releasing this month, written by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh draws on previously untapped archives of letters and personal papers to unravel the complex impulses that animated this polarising figure. In these excerpts, episodes from Menon’s ministerial twilight suggest the twisting path of decisions and missed opportunities that can…

In A Death in the Himalayas, a British resident of a town in Kumaon is found murdered in the forest, prompting one character to succinctly note to investigators: “Who all will you run after? The list of people who are happy to see her dead is long, very long.” In Udayan Mukherjee’s second novel, a mountain-set murder mystery, everyone seems to have a motive, but none seems to have an alibi. There is the shifty American neighbour, the dubious British husband, the nasty local MLA and a cast of other rogues, buffoons and interested parties with good reason to do in Clare Watson. Watson, a writer and activist, had angered many; right-wing groups who opposed her book, local men whose wives she had empowered and real estate interests whose development…

Long before #MeToo, a series of sexual assault allegations erupted against California-based yoga guru Bikram Choudhury. He was eventually tried and convicted in a civil case brought against him by a former legal adviser. He fled the US. Australian filmmaker Eva Orner’s engaging new documentary, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, charts the astronomic rise and gradual fall of the once wildly popular Kolkata-born immigrant who brought what he claimed was a revolutionary new form of yoga to Americans. The film, which premiered on Netflix on November 20, is a tightly told story of the man, his cultish followers and his misdeeds. Lurking behind a flashy lifestyle, Bikram was the old stereotype—a powerful man with a predatory urge “Despite news coverage of the story over the years, I felt [it] had never…

Season 2 ‘ALIF ALLAH’ Arif Lohar and Meesha Shafi Not many had heard of Coke Studio until Arif Lohar belted out‘Alif Allah’ aka ‘Jugni’ with a passion that only Meesha Shafi could imitate. The somewhat unusual pair put the folk in pop effortlessly. Season 4 ‘RABBA SACHEYA’ Atif Aslam It’s with some fervour that Atif Aslam puts to music verses written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The song—essentially a Q&A between man and God—still has the capacity to leave its listeners swooning. Season 10 ‘NAINA MORAY’ Javed Bashir and Akbar Ali Recreating a thumri sung by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan takes some audacity, but Akbar Ali brings to the table a simplicity of spirit that is wholly captivating, much like Javed Bashir’s extra qawwali punch.…

THE IMPOSITION OF BRITISH CLASSIFICATIONS ON LOCAL NOTIONS OF ‘THE OTHER’ RESULTED IN A RIGID DEFINITION OF NATIONALITY THAT PERSISTS TODAY Contemporary Myanmar’s best known historian Thant Myint-U’s latest book brings his series of books on Myanmar, beginning with his thesis on The Making of Modern Burma, up to date to the present. In the process he provides as complete a guide to understanding this captivating yet enigmatic country as possible. It is a complex story with a resonance well beyond Myanmar, told with a historian’s sense of perspective and analysis and a writer’s gift for storytelling. It begins with the early history of the Arakan—where Mughal India, the Burmese Konbaung, the Arakan rulers of Mrak-U and seafarers from the Arabian Sea to the early Europeans met and sometimes collided—and…

On November 25, while voting was under way for three assembly bypolls in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced her government’s decision to grant land ownership rights to 11,900 refugee families in the state. “It has been a ‘na ghar ka, na ghat ka’ (neither here, nor there) existence for these refugees for over 48 years, despite residing here, earning a livelihood, sending their children to school and casting votes. We have decided to regularise all refugee colonies,” Mamata declared. The announcement is strategically timed, as Bengal simmers over the BJP’s repeated assertions that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) survey held in Assam will be extended nationwide and Mamata makes noises about not allowing it in her state. Regardless of how many refugees will ultimately benefit—only 94 refugee…

Madhu Koda, Jharkhand’s only ‘independent’ chief minister, who ruled the state for about two years between 2006 and 2008, suddenly finds himself out of the electoral race as the five-phase assembly election kicks off in the state from November 30. Koda had approached the Supreme Court to challenge his three-year disqualification by the Election Commission (EC) in September 2017 for failing to submit expense details related to the 2009 Lok Sabha election contest from Singhbhum. On November 15, the court issued a notice to the EC on Koda’s petition. It also ruled that pending a response from the poll panel, Koda could not be allowed to contest the assembly election. Koda, who became chief minister in September 2006 by toppling the Arjun Munda-led BJP government, is being probed by the…

1 JUNE 19, 1966 Political cartoonist Bal Thackeray launches the Shiv Sena to champion the cause of Maharashtrians with a rally at Shivaji Park, Dadar. Party targets ‘outsiders’, including South Indians, in Mumbai 2 1971 Sena allies with the Congress (O) faction opposed to Indira Gandhi in the Lok Sabha poll. All three Sena candidates lose. The party makes inroads in Left-controlled labour unions 3 1975 Thackeray supports imposition of Emergency. Backs Congress (I) in the 1977 Lok Sabha and the 1980 Maharashtra assembly election 4 1984 Sena and BJP tie up for the general election. Amid a Congress wave, both Sena candidates, contesting on the BJP symbol, lose. Sena’s Hindutva drift begins 5 1990 Sena and BJP emerge as principal opposition parties, displacing the PWP and the Janata Party…

Widely regarded as one of India’s leading modern lights, Manu Parekh, 80, says, “You can create art from art—or from life.” The “life” that Parekh speaks of is abundant in his work. It was conspicuous at Parekh’s NGMA retrospective last year, and is now evident in 42 of the artist’s new compositions that have been compiled in Manu Parekh: Recent Paintings. The book is defined by Parekh’s belief—“nothing is original.” He says, “This attitude towards revealing my influences is open and very honest.” Somewhat expectedly, many of Parekh’s new works revolve around Benares. For the past three decades, the artist has created a magical Benares series that has been brimming with beauty and poetic symbolism. In his new work, Parekh again devotes himself to capturing the ‘city of light’. Rather…

This collection of horror and mystery stories by Ratnakar Matkari, translated from the Marathi, features a telepathic boy, a troubled ghost, and a child with a dangerous, invisible friend. In Shreya Sen-Handley’s collection of 13 stories, ordinary people encounter extraordinary situations, including a bored wife seeking a fling, a wheelchair-bound poet and a stationery thief. In this book, K. Hari Kumar mines the chills and thrills of Mumbai’s Towers of Silence, a haunted mall in Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh, and the notorious Bhangarh fort in Rajasthan, among others.…