Tapeworm

The din ricocheting around the Niira Radia tapes reminds me of the way we drive on our roads. All the honking, tail-gating, lane straddling, near-misses and mayhem only delay our journey to our destination and leave us tired, irritable and stressed out. So also the titillation over the Radia phone calls. What is the real point of all the noise?


The scandal has gone viral on the internet, but not many seem to recall the suspense and cynicism that surrounded last year’s government formation and the drama around the DMK’s men in Delhi. (For a refresher, read my June 6, 2009 post "Writhing On The Wall"). The coalition nearly fell apart over just one ministry – telecoms – that the DMK wanted so desperately. Everybody is so fixated on Delhi and its muck that few are asking why the DMK wanted to keep that gold mine for itself. For that answer, you have to look at Muthuvel Karunanidhi’s sons and nephews and the insurance policy his third wife and her daughter needed to take out, their premium an upstart politician called A. Raja.


Exactly how did the journalists on the tapes influence the prime minister’s allocation of portfolios in his cabinet after last year’s general election? Is there a smoking gun? Were the journalists plied with wine and money and worse? So far there is a lot of speculation and much discomfiture but not much of incriminating evidence. How many more conversations would the authorities have to tape to trace every sticky strand in this huge web of false friendliness, deception, and influence peddling?


Journalists as a class are narcissistic. In India they believe they are so powerful that many are delusional. They are delusional because they have moved around for far too long in a psychedelic whirl of tip-offs and “off the record” conversations to recognise that they have gone beyond observing and reporting to being players themselves in the power game. It is a dark and dank world where PR agencies erupt like toadstools and younger journalists quickly learn that you do not need to be a specialist in any subject to report on it because somebody is going to spoon-feed you with the story and the script. All you have to do is ingratiate and regurgitate.


At a broader level, very few Indians seem to worry, or care, about the implications of the Radia tapes for privacy and the government’s over-arching power to burrow silently and deeply into your life without your knowledge or say-so. A senior official in the intelligence community told me that the government can intercept and tap up to 6,000 phone conversations a day. The Home Secretary or the Chief Secretary has to authorise wire-tapping in the interests of national security. Earlier this year Parliament was briefly agitated about allegations of interception of opposition politicians’ phone calls, but the row quickly blew over. The Radia wire-taps were apparently triggered by complaints of income-tax and foreign-exchange violations. The selective leaking of the tapes and the feeding frenzy it has triggered should worry any Indian who cares about individual liberty.


Watching the endlessly talking heads on television, I was reminded that the use of lobbyists, the courting of senior journalists and the recognition of television as a powerful medium first emerged as a legitimate tool during John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, so we are only honing a half-century of use and abuse. And for those of us who despair of the bad news that sprawls across our screens and newspapers, it is worth recalling media guru Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the rise of advertising and the cheering good news that it throws relentlessly at you. “Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. In order to balance off the effect and to sell good news, it is necessary to have a lot of bad news,” McLuhan wrote, adding at another place: “Real news is bad news – bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.” Most certainly for Niira Radia.

The Sant's Son -- A young Sikh remembers Bhindranwale

The traffic noise from the flyover outside the window was deafening and I could barely hear what Baljit Singh Brar was saying. Brar edits Jalandhar’s Aaj Di Awaz newspaper, aptly named, amid the din. “Where is Bhindranwale’s son?” I had to shout. He pointed at the man sitting quietly at the corner of his desk.

So this was the elder of the two sons of India’s most dreaded “separatist leader” from a quarter-century ago. Light brown eyes, five-foot-ten, tight black turban, flowing salt and pepper beard, ready smile, his two cellphones blinking. Ishar Singh looked like your friendly neighbourhood realtor, somebody you could trust enough to buy your house from.

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Ishar Singh is 37, the same age his father was the night he was killed in the devastated Akal Takht after the Army sent tanks into the parikrama of the Golden Temple. “My father died four days after his birthday,” Ishar said.

He remembers that an uncle, a subedar in the Army, identified the body. It took the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee and the Akal Takht nearly two decades to acknowledge that Bhindranwale was dead. On June 6, 2003, Ishar Singh was honoured with a siropa at the Golden Temple, watched by an assortment of old Khalistani diehards like Jagjit Singh Chohan and Wassan Singh Zaffarwal. Matters had been delayed because Bhindranwale’s successor at the Taksal, Baba Thakkar Singh, had persisted in proclaiming that the Sant was not dead, would reappear one day, and lead the Sikhs to glory. Every year now, Ishar Singh dutifully turns up at the Golden Temple for a memorial for his father on June 6, the anniversary of the climactic Blue Star battle. The Akal Takht organises an Akhand Path of the Guru Granth Sahib.

There is a certain morbid fascination with the families of history’s most infamous characters. What were the wives and children like? What did they come to? Were those men good husbands and fathers? So we know about Hitler and Eva Braun (no offspring); Saddam Hussein (wife and two daughters in exile in Jordan, both sons dead, both sons-in-law killed on Saddam’s orders); Velupillai Prabhakaran (killed with older son in final LTTE battle, wife, daughter and younger son dead in separate battle). What about Bhindranwale?

Ishar was just five years old when Jarnail Singh Brar was anointed the 12^th Jathedar of the Damdami Taksal. He left home and adopted the “Bhindranwale” after the village of Bhindran Kalan where the sect was originally located. “After that we only saw our father at his satsangs,” Ishar said. “But we were well looked after.” Did he miss his father? “From the family point of view I was sad, but from a Sikh point of view I was very happy.” The Jalandhar editor waved a laminated family photograph at me – a very young Ishar Singh with his eyes shut, an oddly self-conscious Sant Bhindranwale, his younger son Inderjit, his wife Pritam Kaur.

When he was ten, Ishar Singh was sent to study Gurbani under Mahant Jagir Singh at Akhara village near Jagraon. Immediately after Operation Blue Star, Pritam Kaur moved with her young sons to her brother’s home in Bilaspur village in Moga district.

Ishar does not have his father’s piercing gaze. He has a good sense of humour, but not the earthy wit that Jarnail Singh flashed as he held court on the rooftop of the Guru Nanak Niwas in Amritsar. Ordinary folk tiptoed into a meeting with him. There was always a hint of menace, helped by the young men lounging nearby with their rifles.

“I was detained for two days by the police in 1988 and tortured,” Ishar says, “but they had to let me go.” He was a good student, and stood first in his tenth-class examination in Sangrur district, winning a scholarship for the final two years of his matriculation. But just then, in 1991, he married Amandeep Kaur, whose father Joginder Singh perished with Bhindranwale in the fighting at the Golden Temple. Ishar never went to university. “My wife completed her BA,” he says proudly. He himself became a dairy farmer, and grew two crops, kank (wheat) and jhona (rice) on the family land.

“Many people offered to help us,” Ishar said. “We were never in need. My father did everything for the people, and they loved him.”

What had his father left him, besides his notoriety? “What more can he give me?” Ishar said. “I am very, very proud of him. I can never be bigger than him. I cannot add to his name, only reduce it. “

Ishar Singh does not believe his father ever preached violence. Could he begin to imagine the tension in Punjab in the early 1980s, Bhindranwale’s defiant, gun-toting drive through Delhi, the skirmishes on the periphery of the Golden Temple, the drive-by shootings of innocent civilians in Delhi, the assassinations of prominent opponents, and the terror in the air?

“My father never threatened, he only replied (to threats),” Ishar Singh said in the Jalandhar office. “He was accused of ordering the deaths of 70 Hindus for every dead Sikh. He was misquoted. Bal Thackeray had said India has 70 crore Hindus and two crore Sikhs and there are 35 Hindus to every Sikh. The Tenth Guru (Gobind Singh) had said each Khalsa can fight 125,000 enemies. My father only said each Khalsa can take on 70 enemies, and this was distorted.”

Whatever the ratio, I remember a tense journey in a state transport bus from Amritsar to Delhi in early 1984. The Sikh passengers were clustered near the driver, and the Hindu passengers were huddled in the rear. Nobody spoke. Only when the bus reached Ambala, and Punjab was behind us, did everybody relax.

Today Punjab’s highways are four-lane and traffic moves at high speed, save for the occasional tractor or the farmer with his wife riding pillion. Sometimes Blue Star seems twenty-five light years away.

So were Ishar Singh, his brother and his mother content with anonymity after the carnage of 1984 in Punjab and Delhi? Both he and Inderjit applied for passports, he said, and were turned down. “But you know how it is in India. Somebody pulled strings and we got our passports.” Inderjit emigrated to Canada in 1999; Ishar is reticent about where his brother works. A plastic factory, is all he will say. He himself has travelled to Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

On the outskirts of Toronto a gurudwara sports a large portrait of Bhindranwale on its gate. The dreams of Khalistan linger among the diaspora. Bhindranwale is alive and well on YouTube, where you can watch him make his straight-from-the-holster speeches. He has a Facebook fan group, and is a “trending topic” on Twitter.

“In England small children used to say to me, can I touch you?” Ishar said with a smile. “My father did not become so popular in one day. There are seven or eight thousand Sants in Punjab. Why are you asking me only about him?” Brar, the newspaper editor, jumped in to say younger Sikhs were admirers of Bhindranwale. “You should see the number of cars with Santji’s pictures on the dashboard,” he said. “There are Bhindranwale ringtones. Many gurdwaras perform ardas for him regularly.”

Ishar said his father never believed in politics, only in dharma. “Politics is based on deception, religion on morals,” he said. So how did he reconcile this with his own work as a property dealer, where so much black money is sloshing around? His reply was elliptical. “The government wants 45 lakh rupees to convert one acre to residential use,” he said. “How can this be honest?”

Where was 21^st century Punjab headed? “Most of the IAS and Punjab Civil Service officers today are from outside Punjab,” Ishar said. “Nobody wants to study.” He agreed that drugs were becoming a huge problem. “There are one or two gang wars in Jalandhar every day,” he said.

We were meeting on the eve of Gandhi Jayanti. Did he think Gandhi…. Ishar did not let me complete my question. “Don’t talk about Gandhi,” he said. “He betrayed the Sikhs in 1947.” And Brar the editor said “Whenever we talk about a weakling we call him ‘Gandhi’.” Ishar Singh laughed heartily, his eyes shining.

What about his own children? Ishar Singh spoke proudly about his daughter Jeevanjyot, who is 16. She studied “non-medical” subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics, he said. What did she want to be? An interior designer, he said. That would be a lucrative choice, I said. He laughed again, in agreement. His son Gurkanwar is 13 and he does not know where his life will lead.

As we parted, Ishar Singh said, very much the realtor: “Tell me if you need a car. I have two or three. I can arrange anything. People are always prepared to help me.” We agreed to meet the following day at the Golden Temple for pictures.

The next morning Ishar Singh came to the Golden Temple with Bhai Ajaib Singh, an old associate of his father’s. Ajaib Singh said Ishar was the president of the Sant Kartar Singh Educational Trust, which runs two schools and a hospital in and near Mehta Chowk where the Damdami Taksal is headquartered. A tall Sikh in traditional attire was walking down the jute matting atop the marble parikrama, and both Ishar Singh and his companion stooped to touch his feet. “That was Giani Jaswinder Singh, the head granthi of the Harmandir Sahib,” Ishar said.

The Harmandir Sahib looked as glorious in the sunshine as it did 25 years ago. The Akal Takht, blackened and pocked by tank shells and heavy gunfire during the bloody fighting, had been restored to its old splendour. At the rear rose rows of whitewashed rooms where pilgrims could speed up the long waiting lists of akhand paths. The government has acquired land around the Temple and landscaped it, except in the front where the old shops still stand cheek by jowl, doomed to be moved soon. The quiet and peace was punctuated only by the shabad kirtan broadcast round the clock from the inner sanctum.

Thousands of people hurried about their devotions, oblivious of Ishar Singh as he posed for the photographer. Nobody came up to him in awe or reverence. He wore a saffron turban on this day, and he looked like just another pilgrim come to pay his respects.

Waiting to bid him farewell, I watched while Ishar Singh fiddled with one of his two cellphones, standing still among the milling worshippers. He appeared to be looking for something. Finally he said, “I want to show you something. Let’s move to the shade in the portico.” There, he proudly held out a picture on his phone. “My family,” he said. “That’s me, my wife, my son, my daughter.”

(This piece appeared in Outlook magazine, Oct 19, 2009)

The future of news

A lot of feathers are flying around after the AP decided to extend DRM to all its output . This follows close on the heels of Amazon's Kindle. What this means is, if you copy and paste AP text or pictures into your website or blog, or even tweet, you will be liable to pay the AP.

And there is of course Google's proposal to put every published book in the world in a virtual library that will then be accessible, downloadable, and eventually eliminate the need for physical books altogether.

So let's see now. India continues to have one of the world's lowest internet and broadband penetrations. Research house Frost & Sullivan predicted that Asia's broadband users would hit 171 million by the end of 2008. India's broadband penetration? 1.4 percent ! This compares with 90.8 percent in South Korea.

Sharm el-Sheikh and appeasement: a lesson in history

O tempora! O mores! Were that Cicero were alive today to witness the depths India is plumbing in self-deception, we might hear the opening words of his famous oration.

Leader after leader of the world’s biggest democracy is standing up to be counted with words that can only be described as desperation wrapped in dementia inside dyslexia.

“We have nothing to hide”; “We are an open book”. And, the day after Manmohan Singh delivered a courageous defence of the joint statement that has brought him so much vexation, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee made a speech in parliament that excoriated all the doubters.

And then Mukherjee said something that would make students of history blanch:

“Everybody knew that before the Second World War when Chamberlain entered into the Munich Pact, that it is not going to succeed, but it was considered necessary because they thought that the last effort should be made to save the world from the impending Second World War. This is the lesson of diplomacy, which we should not forget. Pakistan is going to exist and our relationship with Pakistan has not been cordial from the very beginning. But keeping the communication channel open does not mean it is conceding or surrendering on any particular point. Foreign policy is the extension of the national interest in the context of the external situation and atmosphere.”

Dear, dear Pranabda. He was barely three years old when Neville Chamberlain gifted Hitler the Sudetenland, the border area in Czechoslovakia where Germans were in a majority.

Chamberlain told his people he had averted war. He was proud of his appeasement and believed he had given Hitler what seemed to be his “reasonable” demand. After all, the same year (1938) Time magazine voted Hitler the Man of the Year.

Mukherjee can be forgiven for not remembering Chamberlain’s words: “However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour … If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that. I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul; armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me... War is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.” (emphasis mine)

Ringing words. And ringing words were what Prime Minister Singh delivered in parliament on July 29. “I say with strength and conviction that dialogue and engagement is the best way forward,” he said. And later, “Let me say that in the affairs of two neighbours we should recall what President Reagan once said – trust but verify. There is no other way unless we go to war.”

Let us refresh our memories on what the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement said. "Action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these should not be bracketed. Prime Minister Singh said that India was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including all outstanding issues," the communique said. Bracketed? All issues ... including all outstanding issues?

That bit of “bad drafting”, as Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon so helpfully put it, was followed by a wan ruling party damning the prime minister with ten days of silence and then a pallid statement earlier this week that left it to him to hoist himself out of trouble.

The opposition outcry was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, and what a glorious example they set! Atal Behari Vajpayee's peace-making bus trip to Lahore in early 1999 was followed by the Kargil war, which Pervez Musharraf now proudly says forced India to discuss Kashmir (ergo, "all outstanding issues" above).

I well remember the ignominy of shepherd boys noticing that all the commanding heights along the Srinagar-Leh highway had been quietly occupied by heavily-armed Pakistani "irregulars". (Ten years ago the Pakistanis had not learnt phrases like "non-state actors"). And Musharraf, who gave India a bloody nose, is today gleefully owning up to the Northern Light Infantry, battalions of which had been set up specifically to stage the Kargil attack. In fact, Musharraf’s smug boasts drowned out whatever few efforts were made to track down the families of the Indian soldiers who died in the Kargil war.

Anybody reporting on Kargil in 1999 knows that the Pakistanis agreed to end their "aggressive patrolling" -- another piece of doublespeak from Musharraf -- only after U.S. President Bill Clinton twisted Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's arm in Washington.

The sub-text in 1999 was the West’s fear that India and Pakistan would unleash their newly-acquired nuclear weapons on one another. The spectre of a subcontinental Armageddon has only grown over the past decade. “There are uncertainties on the horizon, and I cannot predict the future in dealing with neighbours, two nuclear powers,” Manmohan Singh told parliament, referring to Pakistan and China.

Five months after Kargil, Pakistan-nurtured “freedom fighters” again put India’s broken nose into splints with the hijack of Indian Airlines Flight 814 to Kandahar. We watched the humiliating spectacle of our foreign minister escorting terrorist leaders to the Afghan city to be swapped with the Indian hostages.

Nothing daunted, Vajpayee invited Musharraf to the Agra summit in July 2001 – an event that the Pakistanis turned to their own advantage with what can only be described as “muscular diplomacy”. Five months later, terrorists staged the attack on India’s parliament.

Again and again, Pakistan has extended its fist to India’s palm. And Musharraf, the man who taught his Indian interlocutors the fencer’s art of feint and thrust and parry and lunge, is now feted and wooed by Indian talk-show hosts and conference organisers who proclaim him the only man who cracked down on terrorism and wished for peace with his “big and powerful neighbour” (see Chamberlain above).

The travesty is that Musharraf did underwrite secret talks between his emissaries and Indian envoys that brought the neighbours within sight of a tantalising Kashmir solution, a formula that would render the 740-kilometre Line of Control redundant. But Musharraf’s own overweening ego brought about his downfall, and the secret talks now hang like a chimera over the blood and smoke of the Mumbai attacks.

Manmohan Singh made an admirable speech on Wednesday. It was a good speech from a man of peace. But the genteel negotiators of Delhi’s South Block must contend with the stomp and swagger of the denizens of Rawalpindi’s Army HQ. And the ever-hopeful Indians need to remember what Canada’s Lester Pearson said a long time ago: “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.” Not the other way round.

(This column appeared in Khaleej Times on August 1, 2009)

How to apologise without saying sorry

Apologising is never easy. Barack Obama knows this now. He made a non-apology apology last week to a Massachusetts police sergeant two days after saying the officer “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr because he was trying to break into his own house.

Obama’s decision to wade into a local issue involving an African-American friend triggered a worldwide debate on race and the U.S. criminal justice system. The Cambridge Police Department dropped a charge of disorderly conduct against Gates and said the incident was “regrettable and unfortunate”, but demanded that Obama himself apologise and in an unusually direct rebuke said the president had used the right words but at the wrong party.

It was ironic that Gates should be involved in a racial row. When football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the charge of killing his estranged wife Nicole and her friend in 1995, Gates published a brilliant and critical analysis, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” in The New Yorker. “Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial’s outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor’s comic rejoinder ‘Who are you going to believe — me, or your lying eyes?’” Gates wrote.

Not forgetting that Rupert Murdoch had to apologise to the victims’ families for planning to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.

But Obama, who shot into national consciousness with his carefully choreographed “colourless” campaign and was hailed as ushering in a new, post-racial United States, had to interrupt a White House press briefing on Friday to offer the kind of mea culpa that his wordmeisters must have sweated bucketfuls over.

Obama said he could have “calibrated those words differently”. Then he said:

“My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.”

It sounded like Obama had studied the same primer as Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who said after sledging Mayawati: “"I regret what I said in a fit of anger. If it is being misconstrued, if it's being misinterpreted, it is being taken out of context, then I regret it.”

Apparently Obama decided to “apologise” to Sergeant Jim Crowley after talking the matter over with his wife Michelle. The president has quite a few other things to mull over. His honeymoon is definitely over. A Zogby poll last week put Obama’s approval rating at 48%; 51% of those polled felt the U.S. was “on the wrong track”. This, pollster John Zogby noted, was about where George W. Bush was with voters just before the 9/11 attacks. A CBS News Poll put Obama’s approval rating at 57% -- down from 68% in April. The good news is that another CBS poll said more blacks in the U.S. – 59% felt that race relations have improved, up sharply from 29% in July 2008.

The bad news is that 43% of blacks believe they are stopped by police because of their race. DBW – Driving While Black – is not a nice place to be, even if you are driving an expensive BMW.

So on a range of issues – healthcare reform, the way the huge stimulus package is being spent, the backtracking on Guantanamo, the growing “surge” in Afghanistan – Obama is not coming through as a blazing reformer with a flaming sword.

Actually he is having a fairly easy time of apologising. His predecessor spent his first few months in the White House feeling regretful.

Very early in his first term, Bush had to apologise personally to the Japanese prime minister after a U.S. nuclear submarine smashed into a Japanese fishing vessel carrying schoolchildren off Hawaii, killing nine of them.

A few weeks later, a U.S spy plane with 24 crew members force-landed on China’s Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The Americans sent a repatriation team to bring back the crew after an 11-day standoff, and said they were “very sorry” that the Chinese pilot had died in the collision.

You would think that after Vietnam, Cambodia and Watergate, Americans had had a lot of practice in deniability.

Ten years ago NATO planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. China’s People’s Daily commented scornfully this May that the incident had been shrugged off by the U.S. as a “mistaken bombing”. “Taking into account that this event is a page already turned in history, the alertness and latent hostility that the U.S. holds towards China seems not to have vanished.”

Six years into its occupation of Iraq, we are only just beginning to hear a little less about the collateral damage of teenaged U.S. soldiers shooting dead civilians who did not slow down near checkpoints. We don’t hear apologies either about the civilian deaths caused along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border by unmanned drone bombings. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in April that 546,000 people have registered as refugees, forced to flee their homes by the relentless bombing.

Back to the art of apology. The Japanese used to have it down pat. Their language is peppered with apologetic phrases. Every time somebody brushed against me in an impossibly crowded Tokyo subway train both of us would mutter gomen nasai – forgive me. And Indians did not invent anticipatory bail – the Japanese routinely say shitsurei shimasu, “excuse me for what I am about to do”. But the coinage has got a little debased recently.

Much was made last year when Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, did not apologise personally for a series of mishaps in which Sony’s lithium-ion batteries caused laptops to burst into flames.

Observers noted that a lower-ranking Sony official bowed from a sitting position while apologising for the overheating batteries, of which Sony eventually had to recall 9.6 million.

In contrast, Citigroup’s former CEO Chuck Prince, apologising for problems that led to the closure of the banking giant’s Japanese private banking licence, stood up and bowed for a full seven seconds. Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, writes in Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation that CEOs need to follow three important steps when apologising: take responsibility, act quickly, and communicate sincerity.

Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso was tearful last week when he announced early elections and the dissolution of the Lower House. "My wavering remarks caused anxiety and distrust in the public and led to a fall in the party support rate," Aso was quoted by Kyodo as saying at the start of his speech. "I'm deeply repentant."

Apparently Aso had planned to apologise in the middle of his speech but his Chief Cabinet Secretary advised him to start off with an apology. In May, Ichiro Ozawa resigned in tears as president of the main opposition party over a political funding scandal.

Maybe Obama’s wordsmiths need to get together with Manmohan Singh’s to craft a non-apology apology for the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement. Or maybe our diplomats and ministers just need to tear up a bit.

(This piece appeared in the Business Standard of July 31, 2009)