Nalin Mehta
Professor Nalin Mehta is Dean, School of Modern Media, UPES; President, EDGE Metaversity and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University Singapore. He is an award-winning political scientist, journalist and author who has held senior leadership positions in major Indian media companies; international financing institutions like the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland; taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (ANU, La Trobe University), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (Shiv Nadar University, IIM Bangalore).
He was previously Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, where he led a number of AI-led tech innovations to redefine digital news media. He has also served as Managing Editor, India Today (English TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. Mehta is the author of six best-selling and critically acclaimed books.
His latest book, The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party’, has been hailed as a ‘seminal’ work and remained No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists for 26 consecutive weeks in 2022. His other books include India on Television (winner of the Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (Longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015), Olympics: The India Story (2008, 2012), Sellotape Legacy (2010) and Dreams of a Billion (2020), co-authored with Boria Majumdar.
Mehta was founding Co-Director of the Times Lit Fest Delhi (2015-18) and a founding joint editor of the international peer-reviewed journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) as well as the Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series. A DFID-Commonwealth scholar, Mehta has a PhD in Politics from La Trobe University, Melbourne; M.A. International Relations, University of East Anglia, UK, and B.A. Journalism (Honours) from University of Delhi.
He was previously Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, where he led a number of AI-led tech innovations to redefine digital news media. He has also served as Managing Editor, India Today (English TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. Mehta is the author of six best-selling and critically acclaimed books.
His latest book, The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party’, has been hailed as a ‘seminal’ work and remained No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists for 26 consecutive weeks in 2022. His other books include India on Television (winner of the Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (Longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015), Olympics: The India Story (2008, 2012), Sellotape Legacy (2010) and Dreams of a Billion (2020), co-authored with Boria Majumdar.
Mehta was founding Co-Director of the Times Lit Fest Delhi (2015-18) and a founding joint editor of the international peer-reviewed journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) as well as the Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series. A DFID-Commonwealth scholar, Mehta has a PhD in Politics from La Trobe University, Melbourne; M.A. International Relations, University of East Anglia, UK, and B.A. Journalism (Honours) from University of Delhi.
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Praise for the book:
- "Nalin and Boria bring the depth of istorians, the insight of journalists and the dash of master storytellers to their subject. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Indian sports." - Uday Shankar, Chairman, Star & Disney India; President, Walt Disney, Asia-Pacific
- "...it is humbling to be a part of the collective journey chronicled in this comprehensive and wonderful book." - Abhinav Bindra, Beijing Olympics god medalist
- "This is a delightful, exhaustive and riveting work on a very important subject. Dreams of a Billion documents the Indian journey with objectivity and passion. It is clearly the most definitive work on the subject thus far and will enrich the global understanding of the Olympic Games." - Anthony Edgar, Head of Media Operations, International Olympics Committee
- "Nalin and Boria have a great passion for sports, are historians with an immense knowledge of the area and have the heart of sportspersons. As sports culture in India grows, it is very important that storytelling about sports develops as well. This book goes a long way towards contributing to that effort." - Pullela Gopichand, Indian National Coach and former All England champion
• The New York Times featured the book prominently: (https://nyti.ms/2ZIpo0K)
• Featured high on non-fiction best-seller charts in India, 2015.
This book looks closely at what is happening to India’s television industry, how is it adapting to the rapid digital changes in the country and what India’s television programming tells us about the state of the nation? In Behind a Billion Screens, Nalin Mehta examines how television works in India, how TV channels make their money or not and what this means for the cacophony that appears on our screens.
Given that television is a strategically vital social gateway for power, he also probes the ownership of television networks — politicians, corporations, real-estate tycoons and tells us why this matters.Based on extensive research and wide-ranging conversations with industry leaders, channel heads, policy makers and politicians, this is a comprehensive report on the state of the Indian television industry, how it is shapeshifting in response to the ferment of mobiles and social media and its vital role in the wider Indian story. Everybody watches television, everybody has an opinion on it and everybody claims to have solutions but Mehta brings new research and understanding to illuminate a topic that often raises a lot of heat and smoke but little light.
PRAISE FOR BEHIND A BILLION SCREENS
1. 'Nalin is probably the best media academic in India…this book is a seminal contribution to the evolving debate about the role of the media in India.’ — Uday Shankar, CEO Star India (2015); now President, Walt Disney Asia Pacific and Chairman, Star and Disney India http://bit.ly/2OTB3Jg
2. 'Remarkable for being both a distinguished academic and an experienced journalist, Mehta brings to this book the knowledge of a battle-hardened insider, the prose of a gifted story-teller and and the analysis of a fine scholar. This book is a major contribution to media scholarship — and a ripping good read.
— Robin Jeffrey, Emeritus Professor Australian National University and La Trobe University
3. ‘There is a coup underway in India: Some people who are inconvenienced by democracy have taken over nearly all the country’s television news channels….These facts are retold in a new book, “Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India,” by Nalin Mehta, a historian and former television journalist….Mr. Mehta’s book portrays a host of problems facing Indian television, including the tastes of viewers, a lack of talent, youth hampered by poverty and substandard schooling, and government policies that impede the ability of channels to expand their revenues.
-– Manu Joseph in The New York Times, May 13, 2015. http://bit.ly/1I8aA1x
4. ‘Television is dead. This book is its obituary’
— Rajdeep Sardesai, Consulting Editor, India Today Group
5. ‘Formidable book, excellent research. Nalin is well on his way to becoming India’s first media academic’
— Sagarika Ghose, Consulting Editor, The Times of India
‘
6. I love the racy casual style that makes serious matters so clear and interesting.’
— Jawhar Sircar, CEO, Prasar Bharti
7. ‘This is an ambitious book. Its promise is all the more seductive because of author Nalin Mehta’s background as a social scientist and media man…Behind a Billion Screens goes a fair way to meet its promise – it is engaging, full of fresh anecdotes’
— Vanita Kohli Khandekar, Business Standard
8. ‘Mehta’s book is a systemic analysis of Indian media and what brought it to its current state – where talent’s lost in a lattice of hackneyed, uninspired storylines and farcical “bhoot ka phone number” news reports – it also offers the promise of hope..
–- Mumbai Mirror, May 10, 2015
9. 'Nalin’s new book on India’s television practices, “Behind a Billion Screens” is a hotly debated one in the Capital, for there are few pieces of authoritative, research backed books that look at the world of Indian television apart from the punditry on display across social medium and online news portals’ — TheNewsMinute
1o. “This is a well-researched, thoroughly documented account of what ails television in India” – Indian Express, 27 June 2015
11. ‘Nalin Mehta has the rather unusual distinction of being a media academician who has also held a top editorial job in a TV news channel. As a result, his research is impressive and he also tells a good story. In one word, that story is: Indian news television is in a mess. But the tale is fascinating… Mehta’s recommendations to correct this logical mess are precise and logical’ –Sandipan Deb, Mail Today, 14 June 2015
12. “Mehta discusses the reach and social and political implications of television news in the same breath as scandals, fraud and the quest for influence. But the book isn’t dry or academic, referencing House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Hulu and Netflix just as comfortably as the ‘Herfindal- Hirschmann Index’… Overall, Mehta’s background in TV news stands him in good stead, as does his stint on a committee to revamp Prasar Bharati. The ambition of the book sees it through” – Open, 12 June 2015
This book traces the evolution of satellite television in India and how it effected major changes in political culture, the state, and expressions of nationhood. Explaining how television was adapted to suit Indian conditions, the book specifically focuses on the emergence of satellite news channels. It shows how live television used new forms of technology to plug into existing modes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language – national, regional and local.
The story of satellite television is also the story of India’s encounter with globalisation. This meticulously researched and persuasively argued book tracks how the two have changed the face of mass media and impacted the lives of millions of Indians.
PRAISE FOR NALIN MEHTA’S INDIA ON TELEVISION
'A genuine contribution to the literature, bringing together valuable material that deserves a wide audience.'
— Arvind Rajagopal, Professor of Media, Culture and Communications, New York University, and author of Politics After Television
Excellent. An incisive and much needed study of how television is changing India.
— Rajdeep Sardesai, Consulting Editor India, India Today Group, and author
'Mehta has done a remarkable job… [he] has produced an impeccably researched, crisply written book on a momentous development of contemporary India. It has enormous ambition and is exactly what is says it is — a much-needed chronicle of the past heady decade and this new and revolutionary theatre to the daily life of India.
— The Indian Express, 13 July 2008
'Wonderfully astute and insightful analysis… a book that is not only rich in anecdotes, but that also manages to marry the larger history of the medium with the personal ones of those who are trying to shape it.
— Business World, 25 July 2008
'The book is well researched and etches the story of [television’s] growth with numbers, accounts of memorable incidents in simple prose that is easy to relate to…..For every thinking man who would like to know the medium that provides him infotainment everyday, India on Television is a must on the bookshelf.'
— The Hindustan Times, 2 Aug 2008
'Nalin Mehta has made an authoritative, well-documented and scholarly study of this great TV expansion… The saga of the mega growth of TV in India… is also told in a delightful manner without losing sight of the medium’s sociological, political, economic and cultural impacts on the life of Indians, urban as well as rural… One of the best books since the publication of Michael Richards and David French’s Television: Eastern Perspective,1993'
— The Financial Express, 7 Sept 2008
'The quality of research – it is first rate. Mehta… marshals every conceivable source of research to put together the story of India’s transformation with satellite TV news… He digs hard and deep to come up with some excellent bits of media history…The book is full of delicious nuggets for anyone hungry to know more about the Indian media industry.'
— Business Standard, 17 July 2008
'There are books which are relatively easy to classify. This is one such book. It is first-rate…[it] is sure to change the way the thinking reader watches and understands television … What stands out is the author’s obvious intellectual ability, the wide range of references he has drawn from and the pains he has taken to ferret out information and views from different sources and collate them into a comprehensive whole.'
— Mail Today, 24 August 2008
'Nalin Mehta has produced a book that is a mine of information on how television emerged and grew in India…He has brought order and focus on a terribly disorderly and constantly changing subject, and done so with a creditable degree of lucidity. He writes easily, not with the ponderous consequence of an academic who drives a reader to the nearest television soap opera, and unravels developments while sticking scrupulously to facts, all of which he has meticulously documented and attributed, should one want to go into any one aspect in further detail…. that he has done it so comprehensively speaks eloquently of the enormous effort he has put in to get his facts and figures. He had the advantage of being right there in the middle of it all… and yet used his personal knowledge to provide a dimension that another scholar would not have been able to.'
— Bhaskar Ghose in Frontline, Vol 25, Issue 25 (6-19 Dec 2008)
'It’s a well-researched and well-written book… The narrative is racy, and the theoretical foundation is strong without being overwhelming. At a time when the relentlessness of 24-hour television is erasing memory, a historical account such as this is eye-opening.'
— Santosh Desai in Mint, 2 Aug 2008
'A well researched book that follows the transformation of India.'
— Deccan Herald, 6 July 2008
'Nalin Mehta’s India On Television is thought provoking. His thesis revolves around how satellite news channels are changing the Indian mindset…. Mehta’s research is not just about the razzmatazz of news channels; he also lists stark economic realities in India, where black-and white sets still account for an estimated 40 percent of all television owners, a fairly big number.'
— Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 28 (19 July 2008)
'A remarkable book… Nalin Mehta has put together an enchanting saga of the growth of the visual media in India in this 392-page well researched book. ..The author has provided a deep insight into the barriers the first independent TV entrepreneurs faced from the bureaucratic troglodytes who were loathe to give up the government’s monopoly on the flow of information…. The book covers it all… The role of TV in the transformation of social values and life is aptly described. Overall it is an excellent book.'
— The Pioneer, 17 August 2008
'Taking a hard look at television news content, quality and reportage, former journalist Nalin Mehta’s new book India on Television traces the growth and evolution of television in India and its impact on society. Mehta explains how television was adapted to suit Indian conditions and how it used new technology to plug into existing existing modes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language — national, regional and local… The book chronicles an important period of growth of television in India and [how it has] changed the society.'
— The Tribune, 3 Aug 2008
'Mehta has interesting things to say about the use politicians make of television, and he describes how some who look good on TV and perform well have been able to leapfrog over senior but less comely and more voluble colleagues. Politicians do not underestimate the effect of television on their fortunes. But, as Mehta points out, measuring the effect of television is “an inexact science”, and the effect can easily be exaggerated… Nalin Mehta does ask whether or not television contributes to violence, widens divisions in society, or encourages a political dialogue of the deaf by staging shouting-matches between politicians… Mehta believes we are hampered in [understanding TV’s impact on social strife] by “the satellite-size gap in the scholarship of Indian television”. Others have worked to narrow that gap and Mehta has taken the process further.'
— Mark Tully in Outlook, 22 Sept 2008
'The book covers a lot of ground… [and] relies heavily on reportage, with interviews of over 50 people connected with the early days of satellite TV. He reconstructs the pre- and post-liberalisation history of TV and analyses the TRP ratings, its failings and its power. A theme that runs through the book is the Indianisation of television. Mehta believes this is important to reiterate because “in most studies of globalisation, the theme is that there is a dominant centre that will come and take over'
— Time Out, 2 Oct 2008
Fantastic… Nalin has beautifully pieced together the real, untold story behind the soundbytes
— Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and now President, Republic TV
In most accounts of Olympic history across the world, India’s Olympics journey is a mere footnote. Olympics: The India Story sets that right. Drawing on previously unused archival sources, it demonstrates that India was an important strategic outpost in the Olympic family. It explores why the Indian elite became obsessed with the Olympic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century and how this relates to India’s quest for a meaningful role on the international stage.
First published to critical acclaim in 2008, this book has seen several reprints, and revised editions, thus bringing India’s Olympics story up-to-date.
Praise for Olympics: The India Story
'The first comprehensive, scholarly and yet lively account of India’s experiences with the Olympics by two of the foremost Indian scholars of sport.'
— Prof. Ashis Nandy, Senior Honorary Fellow and Past Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi
'India’s Olympic exceptionalism has long mystified scholars and poly makers alike. This ably researched and engagingly written book by two distinguished Indian sport historians lays bare the persistent regionalism, communalism, and political clienteleism that have kept India mostly an Olympic backwater, even as it rose to world hegemony in cricket and other cultural domains.'
— Prof. John. J. MacAloon, Director, MA Program in Social Sciences and Academic Associate Dean, Graduate Division of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago
'Pioneering and long awaited book….replete with little known, lively and telling details presented in an enchanting manner…[It] by virtue of its depth, dimension and erudition opens up fresh debates and numerous areas of research—besides being a delightful read.'
— The Hindustan Times, 4 Aug 2008
'The spread is excellent, the information marvellous, the interpretation satisfying….This book will be well-cited and, more importantly, will spring a lot more studies to give us even more insight than we have now.'
— Brian Stoddart in Biblio: A Review of Books, July-Aug. 2008
'This book is a triumph of Olympic proportions for both authors and the publisher and is worthy of a gold medal on its own.'
— Gulu Ezekiel in The New Indian Express, 10 Aug 2008
'[This book]…. is of great importance to Indian sport….This work may well set the tone for more serious writing on Indian sport and what makes it so special. It is a relief to note that there are writers who can think beyond medals, but also about the stories of sportspersons.'
— The Indian Express
“Meticulous research and scholarly presentation of facts and figures laced with an emotional tinge are the essential ingredients of this excellent work…Replete with information and anecdotes supported by statistics, this endeavour by the two authors fulfils the need for an authentic document about the history and growth of Olympism in India”
– The Hindu
'The first detailed history of India’s Olympic experience. This is the first time that documented history has been used to tell the India Olympic story, one of sordid, self-serving politics, egos, power equations and regionalism…..it is a valuable addition to contemporary knowledge.'
— India Today
'Majumdar and Mehta will give sports historians much to cheer about…As an academic work and a splendid primer for further research, the book is a triumph.'
— Mint, 8 Aug 2008
'An eloquent narration laced with rare anecdotes that makes it immensely readable…The wealth of previously unused archival sources is the strength of the book. Laudable for having picked up a subject hitherto untouched, the book proves that you have to study social histories of sport as a whole rather than as a history of cricket, football or Olympics.'
–-The Hindu (second review article on the book)
'This book by two well-known Indian sport historians is a comprehensive documentation of India’s experiences in the Olympics and also explores the complex role that regional and national identities play in it.'
— The Deccan Herald
'It adds up to a well-produced holistic account of India at the Games.'
— Business Standard, 1 Aug 2008
'The authors have aptly summed up a few of the ills that trouble our Olympians…A readable account which should wake up every Indian with some interest in sport.'
— The Tribune
'A well researched effort, the book brings out some astounding details of Indian sport, its origins, the politics, passion and sacrifices.'
–- DNA
'The book sees the story from a historical and cultural perspective which has so far evaded the eye of the nation’s sporting cognoscenti….Majumdar and Mehta place their arguments well.'
— Tehelka
'Majumdar and Mehta’s narrative is as much about the Olympics’ place in India as it is about India’s place in the Olympics….The content alone earns the book its place on any sports fan’s bookshelf.'
— Business World
'Olympics is a work of serious cultural history in which, at every turn, political and social themes are explored and interwoven with discussion of sporting matters. As such, it is no overstatement to say that, in addition to their titular subject matter, the authors make an important contribution to the study of Indian history. Sport, as a significant social institution in India, offers a telling point of connection with broader social and political events in the country (both pre- and post-Independence). It is to the credit of Majumdar and Mehta that they are successful in clarifying this connection…. [It] is written in a highly accessible style, and will be of interest to those keen to understand the evolving relationship between colonialism and postcolonialism in the Subcontinent. Indeed, by the end of the book, one ends up asking how the history of this relationship could be meaningfully traced without the type of articulation of sporting themes that Majumdar and Mehta provide.'
— John Hughson in Himal, Oct 2008
In particular, satellite television initially came to India as the representative of global capitalism but it was appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs and producers who Indianized it. Considering the full gamut of Indian television – from “national” networks in English and Hindi to the state of regional language networks – this book elucidates the transformative impact of television on a range of important social practices, including politics and democracy, sport and identity formation, cinema and popular culture. Overall, it shows how the story of television in India is also the story of India’s encounter with the forces of globalisation.
Selected Contents:
1. Introduction: Satellite Television, Identity and Globalisation in Contemporary India,
Nalin Mehta
2. The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why It Matters: Indian Broadcasting
Policy, 1920s–1990s, Robin Jeffrey
3. India Talking: Politics, Democracy and News Television, Nalin Mehta
4. Politics Without Television: The BSP and the Dalit Counter-Public Sphere, Maxine
Loynd
5. Muslims on Television: News and Representation on Satellite Channels, Roshni Sengupta
6. “Give Me a Vote, and I Will Give You a TV Set”: Television in Tamil Nadu Politics, Maya Ranganathan
7. Soaps, Serials and the CPI(M), Cricket Beat Them All: Cricket and Television in Contemporary India, Boria Majumdar
8. Bowling with the Wind: A Television Producer’s View on Cricket and Satellite TV
in Contemporary India, Peter Hutton
9. Changing Contexts, New Texts: ‘Inserting’ TV Into the Transforming Text of Post-1980
Bengali Cinema, Sharmistha Gooptu
This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader.
This book was first published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
PRAISE FOR GUJARAT BEYOND GANDHI
'answers the question [about Gujarat] insightfully and comprehensively…helps us to understand… better by dissecting the various dimensions of contemporary Gujarat…'
— Frontline, Nov. 5-18, 2011
'provides much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat.'
— Press Trust of India, 4 July 2010
'touches upon a fascinating range of topics …providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat'
— Indian Express, 3 July 2011
'The essays…. are written from varying theoretical perspectives but have in common a critical outlook….[and] often penetrating analytical insights.'
— Vinay Lal in Book Review, Aug-Sep. 2011
'The editors have traced the evolution of the assertive Hindu Gujarati identity very clearly. The articles are well researched and insightful.'
— Book Link, July 2011
Published in the months ahead of the Games, this book is primarily the story of the politics of these Games, that money that was spent and the priorities that shaped them.
With access to hitherto unexplored archives, including primary documents from the first-ever British Empire Games in 1930, this book is also the first and only attempt to place Delhi 2010 in perspective within the history of the Commonwealth Games, what they mean to the world at large and indeed the larger question of why need a Commonwealth at all.
PRAISE FOR SELLOTAPE LEGACY
'Blazing expose of what a humongous mess these Commonwealth Games have been. Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes scholar and senior research fellow at both a British and an Australian university, and Nalin Mehta, an honorary fellow at the University of Singapore, both sports buffs with solid backgrounds in their chosen area of specialisation—international sporting events—have produced a thorough, well-researched, sober and absorbingly well-written indictment of Everything You wanted to Know about CWG but were Afraid to Ask, the sub-title I myself would have chosen for this gem of an insight into all the pretensions, hypocrisies, distortions and vulgarisation of national values that have gone into the making of this circus.
— Mani Shankar Aiyer, Former Indian Sport Minister, Outlook, 4 Oct 2010
'Majumdar and Mehta provide perhaps the best analysis of any Games organisation to date, and it’s not a comforting story… The authors… have done an excellent job in framing this argument and are really strong on the Delhi finances and political intrigue… This book… will stand as the best work yet on the anatomy of a city’s bid processes, and should be mandatory reading…'
— Biblio: A Review of Books, Sept-Oct 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta marvellously invoke the line about the Commonwealth being “a body searching for a purpose”, and apply that to Delhi’s appropriation of the Games as a symbol of India’s new place in the world order. They trace the origins and contours of the Delhi Games inside a wider picture of the Games being part of a complex, even conflicted “Commonwealth” organisation.'
— The Economic Times, 5 Sept 2010
'Sellotape Legacy’s usefulness remains current—a chronicle of everything that’s gone wrong with the Delhi edition…The book is…solid— the research detailed, the language crisp, the scale wide. It throws up pertinent questions, which do not have clear answers but reiterate what’s already in the mind of Indians who can see their tax money turn into coffee machines at the Games Village.'
— Mint, 24 Sept 2010
'The book’s title, Sellotape Legacy, is prophetic in that it captures the mess the Delhi Games are in… Mehta foresaw it.'
— The Hindustan Times, 28 Sept 2010
'Majumdar and Mehta have made one of the few independent estimates of what the 2010 Commonwealth Games have cost India, including all related infrastructure. Their tally comes to around $17 billion – more than 110 times the first cost estimate prepared by organisers in 2002.'
— Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Oct 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta have produced the definitive word on the contentious event [Commonwealth Games 2010]… [The authors] reconfirm their expertise in drawing the bigger picture on issues of sports and placing it in a historical context. At its core, this is about the politics of the games, urban development and the artificial ambitions of India Rising. The picture they paint is not pretty.'
— India Today, 27 Sept 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta talk about the intransigence, the false promises and the mad budgets that have come to symbolise the event…At their heart, the Commonwealth Games are about the politics of development and the raging ambitions of a rising India that so animate the middle classes and many decision makers in this country. Fuelled by the unrelenting fear of global ridicule that so drives our weak egos – and by the colour of money – politicians, bureaucrats and India’s sports czars have taken the citizens of Delhi on a ride that will change their city forever.'
— The Times of India, Crest, 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy reveals actual Games’ spending… The startling figures, which appear in Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and The Commonwealth Games (HarperCollins India) by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, can only cause further embarrassment to the Sheila Dikshit government, which has been on a taxation spree on the pretext of the Games.'
— Mail Today, 27 Aug 2010
'As Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta set out to unravel the layers of the Commonwealth Games 2010, they zeroed down on the title ‘Sellotape Legacy’ with “some degree of disappointment.” They were “absolutely convinced that from here on what India can best achieve at the Games will be a Sellotape Legacy— it’s a last minute patch up job to get the event going.'
— The Financial Express, 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy (Delhi and the Commonwealth Games) by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta is very timely and on the dot. As more and more details of sordid corruption and financial profligacy surface with unfailing regularity, here is an extremely well-researched book on the Commonwealth Games (CWG) by two authors who probably had a bead on all the major players involved.'
— Afternoon Despatch and Courier, 20 Sept 2010
'In Sellotape Legacy: Delhi & The commonwealth Games, sports scholar Boria Majumdar and historian Nalin Mehta have sought to put the Delhi Games in a larger perspective, not just from a historical point of view, but also bringing in aspects of sociology, of the politics involved, of governance, and most importantly, of a legacy…It is a damning indictment…a well put-together, referenced and annotated document.'
— Deccan Chronicle, 29 Sept 2010
'There seems to be no end to the skeletons that are tumblings out of the Delhi Commonwealth Games organisers’ cupboard. While making the bid,organisers had promised that the ‘Post Games’ Village (residential place for the sportspersons) will be utilised to provide hostel facility for the Delhi University… This plan was published in cold print but was never heard of once Delhi won the bid. Delhi’s Games masters had always intended on selling the real estate and the much-needed DU hostel plan was given a quiet burial…This and several other unkept promises made by the Organising Committee and many things not factored in before Delhi made the bid have been highlighted by sports writers Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta in their book ‘The Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games’.'
— UNI (United News of India), 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy’ by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta asks pointed questions, specifically with reference to Delhi and the Games – the costs, who benefits, who stands to lose. The book provides figures to prove this….When the government approved the Games in 2002, the budget estimate was just Rs 617.5 crore. In seven years, this shot up to Rs. 70,608 crore! Obviously someone got their math wrong.'
— The Times of India, 26 Sept 2010
'Scared of losing the bid to the Canadian city of Hamilton, Delhi had promised to make the Commonwealth Games (CWG) Village a university hostel after the event, but scrapped the plan when the city won the hosting rights of the October extravaganza, a new book claims. ‘Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games’ by noted sport-writers, Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, reveals that Hamilton’s extensive legacy plan, with regards to the Games Village, had rattled Delhi to an extent that the city made some changes in its final bid.. The book also says the bid commitment was quietly broken once the hosting rights were won.'
— Business Standard, 28 Aug 2010
For cricket enthusiasts there is nothing to match the meaningful contests and excitement generated by the game’s subtle shifts in play. Conversely, huge swathes of the world’s population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports. The Changing Face of Cricket attempts to account for this paradox.
The Changing Face of Cricket provides an overview of the various ways in which social scientists have analyzed the game’s cultural impact. The book’s international analysis encompasses Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Its interdisciplinary approach allies anthropology, history, literary criticism, political studies and sociology with contributions from cricket administrators and journalists. The collection addresses historical and contemporary issues such as gender equality, global sports development, the impact of cricket mega-events, and the growing influence of commercial and television interests culminating in the Twenty20 revolution.
PRAISE FOR THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET
'a painstaking and commendable effort to study the complex cultural impact of cricket from imperial times to the present day of globalization…a comprehensive and highly welcome multidisciplinary examination of the evolution of cricket against broader social and political context, covering an impressively expansive geography (Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe).'
— Sport in Society
'..main contribution of the book to the wider field of sport studies lies in the disciplinary fluidity, the rich detail provided regarding identity and the discussion of post-colonialism in association with cricket.'
— Journal of Sport History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell and Nalin Mehta
2. Naturally played by Irishmen: a social history of Irish cricket Jon Gemmell
3. South African cricket and British imperialism, 1870 – 1910 Dean Allen
4. Irish Australians, postcolonialism and the English game Alan Bairner
5. ‘From far it look like politics’: C.L.R. James and the canon of English cricket literatureAnthony Bateman
6. ‘Fiery Fred’: Fred Trueman and cricket celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s Jack Williams
7. Rebellion, race and Rhodesia: international cricketing relations with Rhodesia during UDICharles Little
8. A national(ist) line in postcolonizing cricket: Viv Richards, biographies and cricketing nationalism Malcolm MacLean
9. Brian Lara in poetic form: tradition, talent and the Caribbean ‘mwe’ Claire Westall
10. Wunderkidz in a Blunderland: tensions and tales from Sri Lankan cricket Michael Roberts
11. Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India Nalin Mehta
12. Different hats, different thinking? Technocracy, globalization and the Indian cricket teamStephen Wagg and Sharda Ugra
13. Malign or benign? English national identities and cricket Dominic Malcolm
14. ‘Look, it’s a girl’: cricket and gender relations in the UK Philippa Velija and Dominic Malcolm
15. International cricket – the hegemony of commerce, the decline of government interest and the end of morality? Russell Holden
16. A legacy deeply mired in contradiction: World Cup 2007 in retrospect Boria Majumdar
17. Burning down the house Rob Steen
18. A strong sport growing stronger: a perspective on the growth, development and future of international cricket Ehsan Mani
19. ‘Bombay Sport Exchange’: cricket, globalization and the future Nalin Mehta, Jon Gemmell and Dominic Malcolm
Papers by Nalin Mehta
Praise for the book:
- "Nalin and Boria bring the depth of istorians, the insight of journalists and the dash of master storytellers to their subject. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Indian sports." - Uday Shankar, Chairman, Star & Disney India; President, Walt Disney, Asia-Pacific
- "...it is humbling to be a part of the collective journey chronicled in this comprehensive and wonderful book." - Abhinav Bindra, Beijing Olympics god medalist
- "This is a delightful, exhaustive and riveting work on a very important subject. Dreams of a Billion documents the Indian journey with objectivity and passion. It is clearly the most definitive work on the subject thus far and will enrich the global understanding of the Olympic Games." - Anthony Edgar, Head of Media Operations, International Olympics Committee
- "Nalin and Boria have a great passion for sports, are historians with an immense knowledge of the area and have the heart of sportspersons. As sports culture in India grows, it is very important that storytelling about sports develops as well. This book goes a long way towards contributing to that effort." - Pullela Gopichand, Indian National Coach and former All England champion
• The New York Times featured the book prominently: (https://nyti.ms/2ZIpo0K)
• Featured high on non-fiction best-seller charts in India, 2015.
This book looks closely at what is happening to India’s television industry, how is it adapting to the rapid digital changes in the country and what India’s television programming tells us about the state of the nation? In Behind a Billion Screens, Nalin Mehta examines how television works in India, how TV channels make their money or not and what this means for the cacophony that appears on our screens.
Given that television is a strategically vital social gateway for power, he also probes the ownership of television networks — politicians, corporations, real-estate tycoons and tells us why this matters.Based on extensive research and wide-ranging conversations with industry leaders, channel heads, policy makers and politicians, this is a comprehensive report on the state of the Indian television industry, how it is shapeshifting in response to the ferment of mobiles and social media and its vital role in the wider Indian story. Everybody watches television, everybody has an opinion on it and everybody claims to have solutions but Mehta brings new research and understanding to illuminate a topic that often raises a lot of heat and smoke but little light.
PRAISE FOR BEHIND A BILLION SCREENS
1. 'Nalin is probably the best media academic in India…this book is a seminal contribution to the evolving debate about the role of the media in India.’ — Uday Shankar, CEO Star India (2015); now President, Walt Disney Asia Pacific and Chairman, Star and Disney India http://bit.ly/2OTB3Jg
2. 'Remarkable for being both a distinguished academic and an experienced journalist, Mehta brings to this book the knowledge of a battle-hardened insider, the prose of a gifted story-teller and and the analysis of a fine scholar. This book is a major contribution to media scholarship — and a ripping good read.
— Robin Jeffrey, Emeritus Professor Australian National University and La Trobe University
3. ‘There is a coup underway in India: Some people who are inconvenienced by democracy have taken over nearly all the country’s television news channels….These facts are retold in a new book, “Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India,” by Nalin Mehta, a historian and former television journalist….Mr. Mehta’s book portrays a host of problems facing Indian television, including the tastes of viewers, a lack of talent, youth hampered by poverty and substandard schooling, and government policies that impede the ability of channels to expand their revenues.
-– Manu Joseph in The New York Times, May 13, 2015. http://bit.ly/1I8aA1x
4. ‘Television is dead. This book is its obituary’
— Rajdeep Sardesai, Consulting Editor, India Today Group
5. ‘Formidable book, excellent research. Nalin is well on his way to becoming India’s first media academic’
— Sagarika Ghose, Consulting Editor, The Times of India
‘
6. I love the racy casual style that makes serious matters so clear and interesting.’
— Jawhar Sircar, CEO, Prasar Bharti
7. ‘This is an ambitious book. Its promise is all the more seductive because of author Nalin Mehta’s background as a social scientist and media man…Behind a Billion Screens goes a fair way to meet its promise – it is engaging, full of fresh anecdotes’
— Vanita Kohli Khandekar, Business Standard
8. ‘Mehta’s book is a systemic analysis of Indian media and what brought it to its current state – where talent’s lost in a lattice of hackneyed, uninspired storylines and farcical “bhoot ka phone number” news reports – it also offers the promise of hope..
–- Mumbai Mirror, May 10, 2015
9. 'Nalin’s new book on India’s television practices, “Behind a Billion Screens” is a hotly debated one in the Capital, for there are few pieces of authoritative, research backed books that look at the world of Indian television apart from the punditry on display across social medium and online news portals’ — TheNewsMinute
1o. “This is a well-researched, thoroughly documented account of what ails television in India” – Indian Express, 27 June 2015
11. ‘Nalin Mehta has the rather unusual distinction of being a media academician who has also held a top editorial job in a TV news channel. As a result, his research is impressive and he also tells a good story. In one word, that story is: Indian news television is in a mess. But the tale is fascinating… Mehta’s recommendations to correct this logical mess are precise and logical’ –Sandipan Deb, Mail Today, 14 June 2015
12. “Mehta discusses the reach and social and political implications of television news in the same breath as scandals, fraud and the quest for influence. But the book isn’t dry or academic, referencing House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Hulu and Netflix just as comfortably as the ‘Herfindal- Hirschmann Index’… Overall, Mehta’s background in TV news stands him in good stead, as does his stint on a committee to revamp Prasar Bharati. The ambition of the book sees it through” – Open, 12 June 2015
This book traces the evolution of satellite television in India and how it effected major changes in political culture, the state, and expressions of nationhood. Explaining how television was adapted to suit Indian conditions, the book specifically focuses on the emergence of satellite news channels. It shows how live television used new forms of technology to plug into existing modes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language – national, regional and local.
The story of satellite television is also the story of India’s encounter with globalisation. This meticulously researched and persuasively argued book tracks how the two have changed the face of mass media and impacted the lives of millions of Indians.
PRAISE FOR NALIN MEHTA’S INDIA ON TELEVISION
'A genuine contribution to the literature, bringing together valuable material that deserves a wide audience.'
— Arvind Rajagopal, Professor of Media, Culture and Communications, New York University, and author of Politics After Television
Excellent. An incisive and much needed study of how television is changing India.
— Rajdeep Sardesai, Consulting Editor India, India Today Group, and author
'Mehta has done a remarkable job… [he] has produced an impeccably researched, crisply written book on a momentous development of contemporary India. It has enormous ambition and is exactly what is says it is — a much-needed chronicle of the past heady decade and this new and revolutionary theatre to the daily life of India.
— The Indian Express, 13 July 2008
'Wonderfully astute and insightful analysis… a book that is not only rich in anecdotes, but that also manages to marry the larger history of the medium with the personal ones of those who are trying to shape it.
— Business World, 25 July 2008
'The book is well researched and etches the story of [television’s] growth with numbers, accounts of memorable incidents in simple prose that is easy to relate to…..For every thinking man who would like to know the medium that provides him infotainment everyday, India on Television is a must on the bookshelf.'
— The Hindustan Times, 2 Aug 2008
'Nalin Mehta has made an authoritative, well-documented and scholarly study of this great TV expansion… The saga of the mega growth of TV in India… is also told in a delightful manner without losing sight of the medium’s sociological, political, economic and cultural impacts on the life of Indians, urban as well as rural… One of the best books since the publication of Michael Richards and David French’s Television: Eastern Perspective,1993'
— The Financial Express, 7 Sept 2008
'The quality of research – it is first rate. Mehta… marshals every conceivable source of research to put together the story of India’s transformation with satellite TV news… He digs hard and deep to come up with some excellent bits of media history…The book is full of delicious nuggets for anyone hungry to know more about the Indian media industry.'
— Business Standard, 17 July 2008
'There are books which are relatively easy to classify. This is one such book. It is first-rate…[it] is sure to change the way the thinking reader watches and understands television … What stands out is the author’s obvious intellectual ability, the wide range of references he has drawn from and the pains he has taken to ferret out information and views from different sources and collate them into a comprehensive whole.'
— Mail Today, 24 August 2008
'Nalin Mehta has produced a book that is a mine of information on how television emerged and grew in India…He has brought order and focus on a terribly disorderly and constantly changing subject, and done so with a creditable degree of lucidity. He writes easily, not with the ponderous consequence of an academic who drives a reader to the nearest television soap opera, and unravels developments while sticking scrupulously to facts, all of which he has meticulously documented and attributed, should one want to go into any one aspect in further detail…. that he has done it so comprehensively speaks eloquently of the enormous effort he has put in to get his facts and figures. He had the advantage of being right there in the middle of it all… and yet used his personal knowledge to provide a dimension that another scholar would not have been able to.'
— Bhaskar Ghose in Frontline, Vol 25, Issue 25 (6-19 Dec 2008)
'It’s a well-researched and well-written book… The narrative is racy, and the theoretical foundation is strong without being overwhelming. At a time when the relentlessness of 24-hour television is erasing memory, a historical account such as this is eye-opening.'
— Santosh Desai in Mint, 2 Aug 2008
'A well researched book that follows the transformation of India.'
— Deccan Herald, 6 July 2008
'Nalin Mehta’s India On Television is thought provoking. His thesis revolves around how satellite news channels are changing the Indian mindset…. Mehta’s research is not just about the razzmatazz of news channels; he also lists stark economic realities in India, where black-and white sets still account for an estimated 40 percent of all television owners, a fairly big number.'
— Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 28 (19 July 2008)
'A remarkable book… Nalin Mehta has put together an enchanting saga of the growth of the visual media in India in this 392-page well researched book. ..The author has provided a deep insight into the barriers the first independent TV entrepreneurs faced from the bureaucratic troglodytes who were loathe to give up the government’s monopoly on the flow of information…. The book covers it all… The role of TV in the transformation of social values and life is aptly described. Overall it is an excellent book.'
— The Pioneer, 17 August 2008
'Taking a hard look at television news content, quality and reportage, former journalist Nalin Mehta’s new book India on Television traces the growth and evolution of television in India and its impact on society. Mehta explains how television was adapted to suit Indian conditions and how it used new technology to plug into existing existing modes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language — national, regional and local… The book chronicles an important period of growth of television in India and [how it has] changed the society.'
— The Tribune, 3 Aug 2008
'Mehta has interesting things to say about the use politicians make of television, and he describes how some who look good on TV and perform well have been able to leapfrog over senior but less comely and more voluble colleagues. Politicians do not underestimate the effect of television on their fortunes. But, as Mehta points out, measuring the effect of television is “an inexact science”, and the effect can easily be exaggerated… Nalin Mehta does ask whether or not television contributes to violence, widens divisions in society, or encourages a political dialogue of the deaf by staging shouting-matches between politicians… Mehta believes we are hampered in [understanding TV’s impact on social strife] by “the satellite-size gap in the scholarship of Indian television”. Others have worked to narrow that gap and Mehta has taken the process further.'
— Mark Tully in Outlook, 22 Sept 2008
'The book covers a lot of ground… [and] relies heavily on reportage, with interviews of over 50 people connected with the early days of satellite TV. He reconstructs the pre- and post-liberalisation history of TV and analyses the TRP ratings, its failings and its power. A theme that runs through the book is the Indianisation of television. Mehta believes this is important to reiterate because “in most studies of globalisation, the theme is that there is a dominant centre that will come and take over'
— Time Out, 2 Oct 2008
Fantastic… Nalin has beautifully pieced together the real, untold story behind the soundbytes
— Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and now President, Republic TV
In most accounts of Olympic history across the world, India’s Olympics journey is a mere footnote. Olympics: The India Story sets that right. Drawing on previously unused archival sources, it demonstrates that India was an important strategic outpost in the Olympic family. It explores why the Indian elite became obsessed with the Olympic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century and how this relates to India’s quest for a meaningful role on the international stage.
First published to critical acclaim in 2008, this book has seen several reprints, and revised editions, thus bringing India’s Olympics story up-to-date.
Praise for Olympics: The India Story
'The first comprehensive, scholarly and yet lively account of India’s experiences with the Olympics by two of the foremost Indian scholars of sport.'
— Prof. Ashis Nandy, Senior Honorary Fellow and Past Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi
'India’s Olympic exceptionalism has long mystified scholars and poly makers alike. This ably researched and engagingly written book by two distinguished Indian sport historians lays bare the persistent regionalism, communalism, and political clienteleism that have kept India mostly an Olympic backwater, even as it rose to world hegemony in cricket and other cultural domains.'
— Prof. John. J. MacAloon, Director, MA Program in Social Sciences and Academic Associate Dean, Graduate Division of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago
'Pioneering and long awaited book….replete with little known, lively and telling details presented in an enchanting manner…[It] by virtue of its depth, dimension and erudition opens up fresh debates and numerous areas of research—besides being a delightful read.'
— The Hindustan Times, 4 Aug 2008
'The spread is excellent, the information marvellous, the interpretation satisfying….This book will be well-cited and, more importantly, will spring a lot more studies to give us even more insight than we have now.'
— Brian Stoddart in Biblio: A Review of Books, July-Aug. 2008
'This book is a triumph of Olympic proportions for both authors and the publisher and is worthy of a gold medal on its own.'
— Gulu Ezekiel in The New Indian Express, 10 Aug 2008
'[This book]…. is of great importance to Indian sport….This work may well set the tone for more serious writing on Indian sport and what makes it so special. It is a relief to note that there are writers who can think beyond medals, but also about the stories of sportspersons.'
— The Indian Express
“Meticulous research and scholarly presentation of facts and figures laced with an emotional tinge are the essential ingredients of this excellent work…Replete with information and anecdotes supported by statistics, this endeavour by the two authors fulfils the need for an authentic document about the history and growth of Olympism in India”
– The Hindu
'The first detailed history of India’s Olympic experience. This is the first time that documented history has been used to tell the India Olympic story, one of sordid, self-serving politics, egos, power equations and regionalism…..it is a valuable addition to contemporary knowledge.'
— India Today
'Majumdar and Mehta will give sports historians much to cheer about…As an academic work and a splendid primer for further research, the book is a triumph.'
— Mint, 8 Aug 2008
'An eloquent narration laced with rare anecdotes that makes it immensely readable…The wealth of previously unused archival sources is the strength of the book. Laudable for having picked up a subject hitherto untouched, the book proves that you have to study social histories of sport as a whole rather than as a history of cricket, football or Olympics.'
–-The Hindu (second review article on the book)
'This book by two well-known Indian sport historians is a comprehensive documentation of India’s experiences in the Olympics and also explores the complex role that regional and national identities play in it.'
— The Deccan Herald
'It adds up to a well-produced holistic account of India at the Games.'
— Business Standard, 1 Aug 2008
'The authors have aptly summed up a few of the ills that trouble our Olympians…A readable account which should wake up every Indian with some interest in sport.'
— The Tribune
'A well researched effort, the book brings out some astounding details of Indian sport, its origins, the politics, passion and sacrifices.'
–- DNA
'The book sees the story from a historical and cultural perspective which has so far evaded the eye of the nation’s sporting cognoscenti….Majumdar and Mehta place their arguments well.'
— Tehelka
'Majumdar and Mehta’s narrative is as much about the Olympics’ place in India as it is about India’s place in the Olympics….The content alone earns the book its place on any sports fan’s bookshelf.'
— Business World
'Olympics is a work of serious cultural history in which, at every turn, political and social themes are explored and interwoven with discussion of sporting matters. As such, it is no overstatement to say that, in addition to their titular subject matter, the authors make an important contribution to the study of Indian history. Sport, as a significant social institution in India, offers a telling point of connection with broader social and political events in the country (both pre- and post-Independence). It is to the credit of Majumdar and Mehta that they are successful in clarifying this connection…. [It] is written in a highly accessible style, and will be of interest to those keen to understand the evolving relationship between colonialism and postcolonialism in the Subcontinent. Indeed, by the end of the book, one ends up asking how the history of this relationship could be meaningfully traced without the type of articulation of sporting themes that Majumdar and Mehta provide.'
— John Hughson in Himal, Oct 2008
In particular, satellite television initially came to India as the representative of global capitalism but it was appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs and producers who Indianized it. Considering the full gamut of Indian television – from “national” networks in English and Hindi to the state of regional language networks – this book elucidates the transformative impact of television on a range of important social practices, including politics and democracy, sport and identity formation, cinema and popular culture. Overall, it shows how the story of television in India is also the story of India’s encounter with the forces of globalisation.
Selected Contents:
1. Introduction: Satellite Television, Identity and Globalisation in Contemporary India,
Nalin Mehta
2. The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why It Matters: Indian Broadcasting
Policy, 1920s–1990s, Robin Jeffrey
3. India Talking: Politics, Democracy and News Television, Nalin Mehta
4. Politics Without Television: The BSP and the Dalit Counter-Public Sphere, Maxine
Loynd
5. Muslims on Television: News and Representation on Satellite Channels, Roshni Sengupta
6. “Give Me a Vote, and I Will Give You a TV Set”: Television in Tamil Nadu Politics, Maya Ranganathan
7. Soaps, Serials and the CPI(M), Cricket Beat Them All: Cricket and Television in Contemporary India, Boria Majumdar
8. Bowling with the Wind: A Television Producer’s View on Cricket and Satellite TV
in Contemporary India, Peter Hutton
9. Changing Contexts, New Texts: ‘Inserting’ TV Into the Transforming Text of Post-1980
Bengali Cinema, Sharmistha Gooptu
This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader.
This book was first published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
PRAISE FOR GUJARAT BEYOND GANDHI
'answers the question [about Gujarat] insightfully and comprehensively…helps us to understand… better by dissecting the various dimensions of contemporary Gujarat…'
— Frontline, Nov. 5-18, 2011
'provides much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat.'
— Press Trust of India, 4 July 2010
'touches upon a fascinating range of topics …providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat'
— Indian Express, 3 July 2011
'The essays…. are written from varying theoretical perspectives but have in common a critical outlook….[and] often penetrating analytical insights.'
— Vinay Lal in Book Review, Aug-Sep. 2011
'The editors have traced the evolution of the assertive Hindu Gujarati identity very clearly. The articles are well researched and insightful.'
— Book Link, July 2011
Published in the months ahead of the Games, this book is primarily the story of the politics of these Games, that money that was spent and the priorities that shaped them.
With access to hitherto unexplored archives, including primary documents from the first-ever British Empire Games in 1930, this book is also the first and only attempt to place Delhi 2010 in perspective within the history of the Commonwealth Games, what they mean to the world at large and indeed the larger question of why need a Commonwealth at all.
PRAISE FOR SELLOTAPE LEGACY
'Blazing expose of what a humongous mess these Commonwealth Games have been. Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes scholar and senior research fellow at both a British and an Australian university, and Nalin Mehta, an honorary fellow at the University of Singapore, both sports buffs with solid backgrounds in their chosen area of specialisation—international sporting events—have produced a thorough, well-researched, sober and absorbingly well-written indictment of Everything You wanted to Know about CWG but were Afraid to Ask, the sub-title I myself would have chosen for this gem of an insight into all the pretensions, hypocrisies, distortions and vulgarisation of national values that have gone into the making of this circus.
— Mani Shankar Aiyer, Former Indian Sport Minister, Outlook, 4 Oct 2010
'Majumdar and Mehta provide perhaps the best analysis of any Games organisation to date, and it’s not a comforting story… The authors… have done an excellent job in framing this argument and are really strong on the Delhi finances and political intrigue… This book… will stand as the best work yet on the anatomy of a city’s bid processes, and should be mandatory reading…'
— Biblio: A Review of Books, Sept-Oct 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta marvellously invoke the line about the Commonwealth being “a body searching for a purpose”, and apply that to Delhi’s appropriation of the Games as a symbol of India’s new place in the world order. They trace the origins and contours of the Delhi Games inside a wider picture of the Games being part of a complex, even conflicted “Commonwealth” organisation.'
— The Economic Times, 5 Sept 2010
'Sellotape Legacy’s usefulness remains current—a chronicle of everything that’s gone wrong with the Delhi edition…The book is…solid— the research detailed, the language crisp, the scale wide. It throws up pertinent questions, which do not have clear answers but reiterate what’s already in the mind of Indians who can see their tax money turn into coffee machines at the Games Village.'
— Mint, 24 Sept 2010
'The book’s title, Sellotape Legacy, is prophetic in that it captures the mess the Delhi Games are in… Mehta foresaw it.'
— The Hindustan Times, 28 Sept 2010
'Majumdar and Mehta have made one of the few independent estimates of what the 2010 Commonwealth Games have cost India, including all related infrastructure. Their tally comes to around $17 billion – more than 110 times the first cost estimate prepared by organisers in 2002.'
— Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Oct 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta have produced the definitive word on the contentious event [Commonwealth Games 2010]… [The authors] reconfirm their expertise in drawing the bigger picture on issues of sports and placing it in a historical context. At its core, this is about the politics of the games, urban development and the artificial ambitions of India Rising. The picture they paint is not pretty.'
— India Today, 27 Sept 2010
'Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta talk about the intransigence, the false promises and the mad budgets that have come to symbolise the event…At their heart, the Commonwealth Games are about the politics of development and the raging ambitions of a rising India that so animate the middle classes and many decision makers in this country. Fuelled by the unrelenting fear of global ridicule that so drives our weak egos – and by the colour of money – politicians, bureaucrats and India’s sports czars have taken the citizens of Delhi on a ride that will change their city forever.'
— The Times of India, Crest, 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy reveals actual Games’ spending… The startling figures, which appear in Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and The Commonwealth Games (HarperCollins India) by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, can only cause further embarrassment to the Sheila Dikshit government, which has been on a taxation spree on the pretext of the Games.'
— Mail Today, 27 Aug 2010
'As Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta set out to unravel the layers of the Commonwealth Games 2010, they zeroed down on the title ‘Sellotape Legacy’ with “some degree of disappointment.” They were “absolutely convinced that from here on what India can best achieve at the Games will be a Sellotape Legacy— it’s a last minute patch up job to get the event going.'
— The Financial Express, 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy (Delhi and the Commonwealth Games) by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta is very timely and on the dot. As more and more details of sordid corruption and financial profligacy surface with unfailing regularity, here is an extremely well-researched book on the Commonwealth Games (CWG) by two authors who probably had a bead on all the major players involved.'
— Afternoon Despatch and Courier, 20 Sept 2010
'In Sellotape Legacy: Delhi & The commonwealth Games, sports scholar Boria Majumdar and historian Nalin Mehta have sought to put the Delhi Games in a larger perspective, not just from a historical point of view, but also bringing in aspects of sociology, of the politics involved, of governance, and most importantly, of a legacy…It is a damning indictment…a well put-together, referenced and annotated document.'
— Deccan Chronicle, 29 Sept 2010
'There seems to be no end to the skeletons that are tumblings out of the Delhi Commonwealth Games organisers’ cupboard. While making the bid,organisers had promised that the ‘Post Games’ Village (residential place for the sportspersons) will be utilised to provide hostel facility for the Delhi University… This plan was published in cold print but was never heard of once Delhi won the bid. Delhi’s Games masters had always intended on selling the real estate and the much-needed DU hostel plan was given a quiet burial…This and several other unkept promises made by the Organising Committee and many things not factored in before Delhi made the bid have been highlighted by sports writers Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta in their book ‘The Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games’.'
— UNI (United News of India), 28 Aug 2010
'Sellotape Legacy’ by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta asks pointed questions, specifically with reference to Delhi and the Games – the costs, who benefits, who stands to lose. The book provides figures to prove this….When the government approved the Games in 2002, the budget estimate was just Rs 617.5 crore. In seven years, this shot up to Rs. 70,608 crore! Obviously someone got their math wrong.'
— The Times of India, 26 Sept 2010
'Scared of losing the bid to the Canadian city of Hamilton, Delhi had promised to make the Commonwealth Games (CWG) Village a university hostel after the event, but scrapped the plan when the city won the hosting rights of the October extravaganza, a new book claims. ‘Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games’ by noted sport-writers, Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, reveals that Hamilton’s extensive legacy plan, with regards to the Games Village, had rattled Delhi to an extent that the city made some changes in its final bid.. The book also says the bid commitment was quietly broken once the hosting rights were won.'
— Business Standard, 28 Aug 2010
For cricket enthusiasts there is nothing to match the meaningful contests and excitement generated by the game’s subtle shifts in play. Conversely, huge swathes of the world’s population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports. The Changing Face of Cricket attempts to account for this paradox.
The Changing Face of Cricket provides an overview of the various ways in which social scientists have analyzed the game’s cultural impact. The book’s international analysis encompasses Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Its interdisciplinary approach allies anthropology, history, literary criticism, political studies and sociology with contributions from cricket administrators and journalists. The collection addresses historical and contemporary issues such as gender equality, global sports development, the impact of cricket mega-events, and the growing influence of commercial and television interests culminating in the Twenty20 revolution.
PRAISE FOR THE CHANGING FACE OF CRICKET
'a painstaking and commendable effort to study the complex cultural impact of cricket from imperial times to the present day of globalization…a comprehensive and highly welcome multidisciplinary examination of the evolution of cricket against broader social and political context, covering an impressively expansive geography (Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe).'
— Sport in Society
'..main contribution of the book to the wider field of sport studies lies in the disciplinary fluidity, the rich detail provided regarding identity and the discussion of post-colonialism in association with cricket.'
— Journal of Sport History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Cricket and modernity: international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of the Imperial Game Dominic Malcolm, Jon Gemmell and Nalin Mehta
2. Naturally played by Irishmen: a social history of Irish cricket Jon Gemmell
3. South African cricket and British imperialism, 1870 – 1910 Dean Allen
4. Irish Australians, postcolonialism and the English game Alan Bairner
5. ‘From far it look like politics’: C.L.R. James and the canon of English cricket literatureAnthony Bateman
6. ‘Fiery Fred’: Fred Trueman and cricket celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s Jack Williams
7. Rebellion, race and Rhodesia: international cricketing relations with Rhodesia during UDICharles Little
8. A national(ist) line in postcolonizing cricket: Viv Richards, biographies and cricketing nationalism Malcolm MacLean
9. Brian Lara in poetic form: tradition, talent and the Caribbean ‘mwe’ Claire Westall
10. Wunderkidz in a Blunderland: tensions and tales from Sri Lankan cricket Michael Roberts
11. Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India Nalin Mehta
12. Different hats, different thinking? Technocracy, globalization and the Indian cricket teamStephen Wagg and Sharda Ugra
13. Malign or benign? English national identities and cricket Dominic Malcolm
14. ‘Look, it’s a girl’: cricket and gender relations in the UK Philippa Velija and Dominic Malcolm
15. International cricket – the hegemony of commerce, the decline of government interest and the end of morality? Russell Holden
16. A legacy deeply mired in contradiction: World Cup 2007 in retrospect Boria Majumdar
17. Burning down the house Rob Steen
18. A strong sport growing stronger: a perspective on the growth, development and future of international cricket Ehsan Mani
19. ‘Bombay Sport Exchange’: cricket, globalization and the future Nalin Mehta, Jon Gemmell and Dominic Malcolm
543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament).
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept all 26 Gujarat Lok Sabha seats in 2014. In 2019,
Gujarat, the home ground of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP President, Amit Shah,
remains a major prestige battle. The Congress is counting on making inroads into the state
after doing well in the assembly elections in December 2017 but the BJP seems to have
recovered some ground here since then.
Maharashtra, with 48 Lok Sabha seats, sends the second-highest contingent of members of
parliament to the Lok Sabha after Uttar Pradesh (UP). Like in UP, the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance is facing a tough battle in Maharashtra with a renewed Nationalist
Congress Party leading the United Progressive Alliance’s charge. It has emerged as a major
battleground in 2019 whose result could be decisive for government formation in Delhi.
This paper summarises the political outlook in both these western Indian states and examines
the key factors at play.
The known story of colonial India’s encounter with hockey and the Olympics so far rested on four pedestals: it grew out of colonial institutions; it was appropriated by nationalist elites, who saw modern sport as an identity marker to accelerate India’s journey to modernity; Indian hockey, unlike Indian cricket and Indian football at the time, was not divided in these early years along regional and class divisions remaining largely meritocratic; and fourth, the symbolism of the rise of Indian hockey was not lost on the colonial overlords, who after England lost a practice game to India in 1928, chose not to participate in Olympics hockey from 1928 to 1948. Documents now made available in South Asia Archive show how the fourth pillar, the role of British administrators, now needs revising, strengthen our understanding of the third pillar, the region–nation divide, while significantly altering what we know of the social profiles of the leading players – especially with respect to the role of the United Provinces and the Central Provinces. They also add much more colour and detail to the second pillar – the interplay between the nationalist aspirations of the promoters of Indian hockey and the shifting role of the British supporters of Indian hockey at the highest levels of the British administration. Separately these pamphlets open up fascinating new lines of enquiry into the role of advertising and big capital in the growth of colonial hockey and early attempts by Indian publishers to tap into the sport-loving public as a market for media products.
Until 2014 or so, Chinese films hardly depicted any military conflict beyond World War II or the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. This trend changed completely with a new range of Hollywood-style Chinese war movies. They showcased a new kind of PLA and the idea of China as a global military superpower, as the journalists Charles Clover and Sherry Fei Ju noted in a perceptive 2018 overview of this phenomenon. The shift started, they said, with ‘Wolf Warrior’ in 2015, ‘Sky Hunter’ in 2017 and ‘Operation Red Sea’ in 2018.
All these films had one thing in common: Chinese commandos fighting in global conflict zones from the Middle East to Africa, often against ‘White’ American mercenaries. Like the Rambo films of the 1980s that reflected America’s idea of itself as a superpower, this set of Chinese films reflected the emerging Chinese self-image of a muscular global power. So much so that when Chinese diplomats now respond to diplomatic tussles with verbal aggression, they are said to be practising ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy, as Gideon Rachman recently noted.
Many of these Chinese films were produced with direct support from the Chinese military and had real military equipment — ‘Operation Red Sea’ featured the Chinese Navy’s frigates, ‘Sky Hunter’ had the J20 stealth fighter and ‘Wolf Warrior 2’, the biggest blockbuster in Chinese history, had PLA tanks.
In contrast, Indian war films have always had a local canvas: remaining focused almost entirely on Pakistan. There have been exceptions like Chetan Anand’s masterly Haqeeqat on the 1962 war or the odd Madras Café on Sri Lanka — but they have all been rooted in past Indian conflicts. As in the world of fiction, in the real world too, our security imagination as a society has almost entirely been Pakistan-focused. China was always in the background, but most people took the calm of the last 40 years on the eastern borders for granted. Now that this illusion is broken, it is time to do an honest stock-taking.
Make no mistake: the Indian Army is more than capable of giving the Chinese a bloody nose and is well-matched in the mountains as we have seen in recent clashes. Yet, at structural levels, there is a huge asymmetry that we must fix.
First, China spends $182 per person per year on defence. Indian per capita spending on defence is less than one-third: $52 per person. Even though India has been spending more than China on defence as a percentage of government spending — 8.8% compared to 5.4% by China — Chinese defence spending completely dwarfs India’s in real terms because China’s economy is much larger. China, in 2019, was estimated by SIPRI to have spent $261 billion on defence, more than three-and-a-half times India’s estimated $71 billion. In the last 10 years, Chinese military spending more than doubled, from $115.7 billion in 2010 to $261 billion in 2019. Indian military spending, on the other hand, is estimated to have gone up only by half from $46 billion in 2010.
Second, though India’s defence budget gets the highest allocation of all ministries, much of it goes into wages. This year the defence ministry will be spending almost as much on pensions (28.4%) as on salaries (30.2%).
Third, China’s increased military spending is part of a clear strategic ramp-up. The PLA was not a modern force until a decade ago. Xi Jinping termed the problems with the Chinese military as the ‘Five Incapables’ and publicly set a target in 2012 to turn the PLA into a “world class force” by 2030.
Since then, China not only downsized its Army personnel by 300,000, it reorganised the army, navy and air force into five integrated “theatre commands” for greater battle efficiency. In contrast, India’s army (7), navy (3) and air force (7) operate a total of 19 commands, all separately managed by each service (except two joint commands).
Fourth, there is a weapons gap. The Indian Navy is deployed on the eastern seaboard but has only 16 submarines, compared to China’s 74. Indian Air Force has 538 combat aircraft, China’s has 1,232. India has 8,686 armoured vehicles, the Chinese over 30,000.
India has a battle-hardened Army while the PLA hasn’t fought a war in over 40 years, but in the long run, India will need to rebalance its huge military asymmetry with China. Beijing has reset its strategic calculus. It is time New Delhi does so too.
The British saw the European smallpox lockdown as an unnecessary exaggeration and the dispute threatened the global movement of people and goods at a time of severe economic crisis. Nothing the British health ministry said would convince the French. The crisis was only defused, as information historian Heidi J Tworek has documented, when the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) – the precursor of WHO – issued a reassuring epidemiological bulletin that was seen by all to be impartial and credible.
At a time when President Donald Trump has wrongly suspended US funding for WHO, accusing it of a pro-China bias in handling the coronavirus, the SS Tuscania episode underscores just how critical the flow of credible, impartial and scientifically sound medical information is at a time of global crisis. The LNHO officials seized on the Tuscania incident, Tworek has shown, as “an opportunity: they could defuse the dispute and simultaneously showcase the League as a new and indispensable broker of information.”
Much like our present day crisis, the inter-war period is largely remembered for the retreat of globalisation. Yet countries even then agreed to honest data sharing with the LNHO, because they saw the benefits of having what one official called “a central fire-station in a municipal system of fire prevention”, overseeing “the world’s alarm system”. So, Germany continued to send out medical data even after Hitler withdrew in 1933 from the League. The need to keep data flowing also helped investments in wireless infrastructure, which later became the centrepiece of our modern telecom network.
There is no question that the world needs a neutral arbiter of medical data. This is why Trump is wrong to suspend funding to the WHO, an organisation he accuses of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus” by kowtowing to the Chinese view. His bellicosity, of course, helps deflect attention from his own delays in dealing with the virus as a national emergency. The Americans must restore WHO funding.
Second, the crisis at WHO represents a deeper malaise at its heart, one that plagues almost all multilateral organisations. Make no mistake, Covid-19 has brought to the fore what many who work in global institutions have known for years: without strong and independent leadership, many have been hostage to politicisation and manipulation, lacking legitimacy for years. Credible international organisations work only when they are seen to be neutral and impartial.
In reality, many of our global institutions are so dependent on their donors for funding that they often become pawns for their political agendas. This has contributed to what Shashi Tharoor and Samir Saran have termed the “new world disorder”, with countries slipping back into 19th century style spheres of influence. This decline of the post World War II global order has been fast forwarded by the retreat of the US and the West from globalisation, with China trying to fill the vacuum.
As international organisations become more dependent on China, their bureaucrats will be more reverential to Beijing. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was praising China for its efforts till mid-February. Similarly, strategic affairs scholar C Raja Mohan has pointed out how UN secretary general Antonio Guterres was quick to jump into Indo-Pak arguments over Kashmir in 2019 and raised concerns over CAA and NRC, and was making offers to mediate between Delhi and Islamabad as late as February. “But when it comes to China’s role in the spread of the coronavirus, Guterres can’t seem to find the words.” All his appeals so far “consciously avoid getting into anything specific,” as Raja Mohan has pointed out.
Without credible independent leadership and secure funding, the legitimacy of many international organisations is broken at precisely the moment they are needed the most. The UN system, the World Bank, the IMF and many other international institutions were all created after World War II as tools to reconstruct the post-war world. That system is now facing its greatest crisis ever with war-style falls in GDP globally, and what the IMF calls the “biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression” of 1929.
IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook notes that for the “first time since the Great Depression, both advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies are in recession.” This is precisely the time we need our multilateral institutions to work optimally. Without them, the task of recovery will be more difficult. IMF’s Gita Gopinath has rightly argued that “multilateral cooperation is vital to the health of the global recovery” and “collaborative effort is needed to ensure that the world does not de-globalise, so the recovery is not damaged by further losses to productivity.”
Multilateralism is crucial to fighting this crisis and maintaining the global commons is vital to get through this. Yet, on the other side of this crisis lies a drastic restructuring of the world order with Washington retreating into isolationalism and China’s credibility dented. Covid-19 is accelerating many existing fissures in the international system. How we go about addressing them will be fundamental to our political and economic futures.
Those who have studied economic reforms know that seldom has India undertaken paradigmatic shifts at a governmental system level unless pushed by a deep crisis that renders current systems simply untenable. And so it is with defence.
The urgency and the positive winds of change in the newly revamped ministry of defence with its new department of military affairs, that the CDS heads, cloak the single most fundamental challenge now facing India’s military. India may be the fourth largest defence spender in the world and the defence budget gets the highest allocation of all ministries. Yet this year, for the first time, the standing army will be spending more on pensions (38.1%) than on salaries for its serving soldiers and civilian employees (37.5%) or what it can spend on modernisation (8.8%).
The defence ministry overall, a PRS analysis shows, will be spending almost as much on pensions (28.4%) as it will on salaries (30.2%), leaving less than half of our defence spending for other tasks. The current system is clearly unsustainable and radical change of the kind that the CDS is talking about is a necessity.
At a time when the fiscal deficit is ballooning and government expenditures are stretched, there is simply no money for expansion unless it can be found by a major internal reboot of the way India has traditionally organised its soldiering.
At a strategic level, China has conducted similar reforms in the last decade. Under President Xi Jinping, China not only almost doubled its military spending but completely reformed its military organisation. Much like the United States after its landmark 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, China in February 2016 reorganised its army, navy and air force into five “theatre commands”.
Its western command based in Chengdu is focused on India and South Asia, for example; its southern one based in Guangzhou is more maritime-focused on the South China Sea. This means that, like in American theatre commands, all soldiers, sailors and air personnel in these commands report to a single joint commander. These theatre commands came up in tandem with the new Strategic Support Force focused on cyber-space and electronic warfare.
In that sense, India’s military reforms are long overdue. The current structure of 19 military commands: (7 of the army, 7 in the air force, 3 naval commands and 2 joint commands) is simply too unwieldy. As Vijai Singh Rana has pointed out, “None of these are co-located and their geographical zones of responsibilities have little commonality… In contrast, the US which has a global role has a total of nine combatant commands that include three functional combatant commands: Special Operations Command, Strategic Command and Transportation Command; and six geographic combatant commands – Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Northern Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command.”
In that sense, ideas like a new Peninsula Command (merging the two eastern and western naval commands) or separate ones for China, Kashmir and Pakistan are good ones to cut the flab and create a leaner force.
Importantly, Xi undertook China’s reforms in tandem with a pledge to reduce Chinese defence forces by 300,000 soldiers. In the Indian case, the salaries and pensions bill includes the cost of about 4 lakh civilian employees in the defence services. For reducing soldiering costs, one option is to start side-posting soldiers to central armed police and other police forces after a few years (which is strongly opposed by these forces).
Another option, as an MoD committee of experts had recommended in 2015, is to expand short service commissions in tandem with a smaller core cadre. A version of this can be adapted, as lawyer Navdeep Singh suggests, to a system where a large number of soldiers are retired after shorter service – say 10 years – and get pensions as part of the national contributory scheme while a smaller core receives regular pensions. This will greatly reduce costs.
Yet, such measures will require larger policy changes that the CDS currently has no control over. The devil lies in the detail. The proposed joint Air Defence Command, combining the army, navy and air force’s anti-aircraft weapons and personnel is a good idea. It can be restructured on the model of the Special Forces Command, under the CDS.
Clearly, the new department of military affairs which has been carved into the ministry of defence, has a lot riding on it. Yet, as military scholar Anit Mukherjee says, the way it has been structured, no other democracy has “any institutional structure of this sort”. It may have to deliver much more than what it has actually been empowered with.
Either way, difficult choices will have to be made. The real hard work of internal military reform begins now.
Yet, in terms of what Modi’s complete political ascendance means for India it is not with Indira, but with the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the prime minister’s persona must be compared with.
Modi may be the mirror opposite of most things Nehru stood for, but in terms of impact, the tectonic shifts he has heralded in the wellsprings of the nation are Nehruvian in scale. In fact, so deep ranging is the wider societal impact of Moditva that he can only be compared with Nehru.
This may seem a strange comparison to make. Nehru, after all, is the most reviled name in the Right’s political lexicon. He is often lampooned as soft, wimpish and placatory as opposed to Modi, who embodies for his supporters strength, manliness and resoluteness.
So, what are the similarities? First, at a fundamental level, just as Nehru created a new Nehruvian order, a new idea of India as a modernist, reforming society that came to be accepted by both the elites and most mass voters as the dominant narrative of what it meant to be Indian, Modi’s electoral triumph embodies an alternative idea of India: soaked in a hard nationalism and an unapologetic espousal of Hindu identity wrapped within a more efficient welfare state.
Ideationally, Indira did not represent a radically new idea of the nation from her father’s. She only took over the Nehruvian template on secularism and socialism and altered it by centralising power as part of a hard-nosed realpolitik approach. The Modi era, whether you agree with it or not, represents a radically different moral reordering of the nation.
Second, Modi like Nehru is uncompromising and unambiguous about ideology and ideals. As the PM emphasised in his victory speech his party’s journey from “do se dobara (from two to once again)” stood out because “we never stepped back from our path, never let our ideals dim. We never stopped, nor got tired, nor did we bend … We will never leave our ideals, nor our sanskaar.”
This stout defence of ideas echoes Nehru’s stringent insistence in the 1952 election campaign – against reservations by conservative elements within his own party – on what he called “an all-out war on communalism”, against “sinister communal elements” which would “bring ruin and death to the country”.
Similarly, Modi is unambiguous on the secularism question and what he sees as its cynical manipulation. “Especially for the last 30 years in this country” he said in his victory speech, “there has been a printout, a tax, label so fashionable that you could do anything and treat it like a purifying bath in the Ganga. It was completely false, and the tax was called secularism.” As he later told his NDA partners, minorities were made to live in fear by vote-bank politics and that this must end with ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ being extended to ‘sabka vishwas’.
Third, like Nehru’s conception of a “tryst with destiny” and an India awakened after a long slumber, Modi offers to his supporters the vision of a radical break with the past and of a future “new Bharat”. This is unlike Indira, whose politics was largely about fixing the present, continuing the skeletal outline of the Nehruvian dream and keeping power. As he stressed in his victory speech, “You will have to leave the thought process of the 20th century. This is the 21st century, this is a new Bharat.”
If the Nehruvian order and his idea of development was represented by his characterisation of big dams as the “temples of modern India”, Modi’s India in this realm and outside of identity politics, is best symbolised by toilets as the new vehicle of upward mobility and progress.
Fourth, just as Nehru saw economics essentially as a tool for development and delivering millions out of poverty, so does Modi. His declaration that there are only two castes of Indians now, those that are poor, and those engaged in alleviating poverty is intellectually not too dissimilar to the Nehruvian idea of a welfare state and what came to be known as the Bombay Plan to harness private capitalism for nationalist goals.
If Nehru was Chacha Nehru to an entire generation of Indians and appealed especially to newly empowered women voters, Modi too has assiduously courted a new generation of young voters with his direct outreach to exam taking students and an aggressive new wave of women voters. If Nehru was Gandhi’s anointed heir, Modi too has explicitly sought to appropriate the Mahatma’s legacy, including in his new call for a national renewal mission to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Gandhi’s Quit India movement call.
Modi, like Nehru, has argued that while the government is run by a majority, the country is run by consensus, promising to govern for all, including for those who didn’t vote for him. The PM has changed the conventional paradigms of politics. His legacy will hinge on the fulfilment of this promise.
Similarly, Israel served as a benchmark after post-Uri surgical strikes, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi compared the military action to the prowess of the Israelis. Speaking at a rally in Himachal Pradesh on October 18, 2016, he had said: “We used to hear earlier that Israel has done this. The nation has seen that Indian Army is no less than anybody.”
The reference to Israel itself was not surprising. After all, Israel’s anti-terror policies have long been held up wistfully by many in the security establishment as a prescriptive template. Security cooperation was one of the reasons why PM Narasimha Rao formally opened diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, followed by the purchase of India’s first IAI Searcher unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and an air combat manoeuvring system from Israel in 1996.
Since then, India has become the largest single market for Israeli arms. Israeli arms sales to India, second only to those by the Russians, have gone up 650% in the past decade, amounting to $715 million in 2017 alone. Indeed, IAF missiles fired in Balakot reportedly used Israeli-made SPICE-2000 guidance kits.
Beyond defence connections alone, the idea of Israel always held a seductive attraction for the political right in India. This is why, though security cooperation with Israel consistently expanded under all regimes since the late 1990s, under Modi the broader India-Israel relationship achieved much more public salience. First, when Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Tel Aviv in July 2017 and then with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s return visit to Delhi in January 2018.
Given this backdrop, it was an easy if facile next step to compare what Modi has called “new India” with the Israeli ethos on defence. To the extent that India publicly attacked cross-border terrorism at its source, India has certainly moved closer towards that paradigm. But there are significant differences in strategic culture between India and Israel.
First, one of the defining features of Israel’s defence posture is its aggressive counter-terrorism, either through covert actions as when it lethally pursued those who killed Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympic Games for years, or through almost-immediate punitive air strikes in response to rocket attacks on Israeli soil. At an operational level, the ability to launch such regular cross-border actions at will takes time to build and entails a huge shift in strategic culture. Undertaking such punitive or preventive military actions as a symbolic demonstration of intent versus doing it each time a terror outrage happens are different ballgames altogether.
Second, Israel does not face nuclear armed adversaries. A policy of imposing heavy military costs on the enemy’s turf when you are facing armed militias or even smaller sized militaries carries a very different risk and escalation calculus from an adversary who is somewhat similar in conventional terms, like Pakistan, and has a nuclear sabre to rattle as well.
Third, Israel’s offensive posture was originally an offshoot of its reality as a very small country geographically facing an existential crisis from the very moment of its birth. It has always been helped by unparalleled support from the United States to do what it liked. India’s diplomatic latitude on such actions has historically been much more limited, even though it has significantly expanded now.
Fourth, at a deeper level there is a marked difference between the civilian-military cultures of Israel and India. It was striking after Balakot that while the greatest sabre rattling and emotional rhetoric came from the Indian middle classes and political actors, some of the more prominent public voices of restraint happened to be from military families.
Herein lies the rub. Israel, as a virtual “nation-at-arms” has always had conscription. Every Israeli man (who’s a Jew or Druze, excepting those with medical disabilities or religious scholars) above 18 serves in the military for 36 months, every Israeli woman for 24 months.
By contrast, most Indians have an emotional and patriotic stake in military retaliation, but may never actually pay any personal cost for it. It is easy to pound drumbeats of war when your family’s lives are not really at stake, except in an abstract sense. Of course, this doesn’t mean that having families serving in uniform automatically makes you pacifist. The Israeli example is a case in point.
The dilemmas of Israel’s conscription approach were encapsulated in a discomfiting debate last year when a controversial ad for a top Tel Aviv hospital portrayed a fetus wearing a military beret, with the caption “recipient of the presidential award of excellence, 2038”. The ad was later withdrawn but the idea it spoke to was very clear.
Finally, India is the world’s largest democracy forged in a plural ethos. Israel is the only mature democracy in the Middle East. But the religious establishment has always had a special place at the heart of the Jewish state.
Its Nationality Bill, passed in 2018, specified Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. This makes the Israeli state closer to a theocratic one. This is fundamentally why India is not Israel, although it also explains why many who aspire to a Hindu India may be inspired by Israel in more ways than one.
Consider the latest job numbers. While the quarterly employment survey is being rejigged with a new methodology and economists continue to argue about the quality of the government’s larger economic numbers, survey data from the independent Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) released right in the middle of the poll campaign in April 2019 showed that unemployment had increased to 7.6%, the highest point since October 2016.
Plot these job numbers on a national map and the reddest states showing unemployment over 10% are bang in the middle of the BJP’s core Hindi heartland base: Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. Yet look at the campaign in these states and its not jobs or candidates but other local factors that dominated. Like in UP, the entire election rests on the caste debate and whether constituency-level arithmetic of the gathbandhan calculus can trump Modi’s chemistry or not.
So, does this mean that the economy does not matter politically in today’s India? The idea that politics follows economics has been conventional wisdom at least since the American political strategist James Carville put up a notice saying ‘The economy, stupid’, outside Bill Clinton’s campaign office in 1992. But has it been checkmated in India by the Modi blend of personality politics and a virulent Hindutva-induced cocktail of post-Balakot muscular nationalism?
Conversely, are economic concerns over-hyped by naysayers, as the government has been arguing? Or are people being hoodwinked by clever propaganda and identity politics, as the Congress has argued?
The Opposition’s beliefs are best exemplified by Congress’ caustic ‘Bhakt ka chashma’ video, which shows a young man looking to buy goggles and being taken for a ride as he tries out a magic saffron pair that tints the way the world looks to him. Where there is poverty, the saffron goggles show a vision of prosperity; where there is sickness, they show neat and clean hospitals; and where there are pakoda sellers, they show happy degree-wielding job holders.
The broad elite assumption is that people are gullible, may not be as aware of their own realities as they should be and are being carried away by a “propaganda machinery” as Priyanka Gandhi put it.
But the poll dynamic may be far more complicated than that. Reserve Bank of India’s periodic consumer confidence surveys show that net public opinion about what people think about their own employment prospects rose sharply just after the Modi government came to power in 2014, but collapsed after demonetisation, falling to much worse than UPA 2 levels in 2017-18 before suddenly recovering in March 2019 (see chart).
This contrast becomes even starker when people are asked about their future prospects. Unlike the complete despondency on this question at the end of UPA 2, net future expectations about the economy in India clocked in at 48.6% positive in March 2019. This, astoundingly, is at a higher level than when the Modi government was sworn in.
Politics is about emotion and perception. It seems that while people may personally be unhappy in economic terms, they have been much more positive about how they view the larger economic direction of the country.
Now, Indians have historically been much more hopeful about the future than those in developed western countries. Yet, even within this frame, the distinction between what they believe is good for them as opposed to what they see as good for the nation is striking.
This explains why Modi shifted the election discourse from jobs to wider touchpoints like nationalism, dynasty politics and other such themes.
Secondly, there is no question that the new government will face a huge economic challenge with several worrying economic indicators like falling two-wheeler sales, oil prices and problems in the financial sector indicating an upcoming reckoning. The point is that people have somehow not felt it has reached a crisis point yet for it to override other factors.
Though there has been a fair bit of fatigue, Brand Modi may have weathered better than what the economic numbers might otherwise suggest. The final tally will tell us how much.
Such a hard-nosed focus on media companies and their liabilities – as opposed to those that produce and promote such fake news and police forces on the ground who are meant to uphold the law – means that we may end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The IT secretary’s comments this week, warning multi-national internet giants to “behave in a responsible manner” for swift action on “disturbing” content is only the most recent salvo in a series of steps encapsulating the current hardline view in New Delhi on this issue. It was preceded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issuing a notice on fake news to WhatsApp on 3 July, and then a second one on 19 July, as it was dissatisfied with the response. Separately, the department of telecommunications on 18 July wrote to telecom companies and industry associations reportedly asking them to “explore various possible options and confirm how Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp/Telegram and such other mobile apps can be blocked on internet.”
First, bans never work. While social media platforms are indeed misused by some, they also offer invigorating possibilities of connectivity and growth that simply weren’t possible earlier to millions more. From the Dalit protests in Maharashtra to the LGBT movement against Section 377, social media is the primary medium of mobilisation of our times. It offers an avenue for protest and speaking truth to power in new ways that have irrevocably changed traditional social hierarchies.
While fake news vitiates the political atmosphere, there is even greater risk in government having the powers to shut down an entire media platform on grounds of public order or national security. From the Arab Spring in the Middle East to protests by ex-servicemen on OROP in recent times, social media platforms, by allowing people to communicate with each other, have been crucial enablers of democracy.
This is why thinking of turning them off is problematic because of the fear that a future government fearful of political dissent may misuse such powers. Terms like ‘public order’ and ‘national security’ are often too vague and can potentially be misused for political purposes.
Second, social media has been blamed for spreading fake news rumours that led to lynching cases. This is like blaming telephone companies if people spread rumours in phone conversations. Will we then shut phone networks down too? Rather than blaming the platforms through which information travels, it is far better to pinpoint those who spread the misinformation.
The impulse to blame social media or the messenger, in effect, passes the buck. The real issue in cases of public lynching triggered by fake news is of a breakdown in law and order. That is where our focus must be. Law and order is a state subject under the Constitution. In recent months, the central government has issued several security-related advisories: on untoward incidents in the name of protection of cows on 9 August 2016, on lynching by mobs after rumours of child-lifting on 4 July 2018 and an MHA directive on 23 July to all states for implementing Supreme Court orders on preventing mob violence.
The big question to ask is how effectively have these been implemented by state police forces on the ground? Did relevant police forces in these cases act on time and effectively enough? If not, why not? How many people have since been arrested after these outbreaks of violence?
The minister of state for home affairs recently told Parliament that the central government doesn’t collect specific data on lynching cases. From Bidar in Karnataka to Dimapur in Nagaland, research by TOI from public sources unearthed reports of at least 55 cases of lynching across India between March 2015 and July 2018. These cases occurred across both BJP-ruled states (like Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan) and non-BJP rules ones (Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka). Of these, about 17 were linked to rumours of child-lifting, two were against African student groups and the remaining cases were all linked to issues around cattle transport, beef or religion. While arrests were subsequently made in most of these cases, crucial questions about the effectiveness of law and order in these states must be answered. What we need is better intelligence and rapid responses in policing.
Third, social media platforms must have better flagging mechanisms as well. WhatsApp, for example, now allows its users to see if a message has been forwarded. But, one should also be able to track the originator of a message as well. Accountability cannot be wished away. Twitter recently began a move against fake accounts. Facebook, Google and WhatsApp have started making serious moves against fake news as well. They must do more.
Fourth, in an age of information overload, it is finally up to readers and consumers of social media like us to be more discerning. Creating a culture of looking at the sources of what is flooding our news feeds, whether it has been authenticated at all, and by whom is key in this new mediascape.
This is particularly important at a time when a great deal of fake news created is being attributed to political parties themselves or their affiliates. From the Trumpian diatribes on fake news in Washington to the daily cut and thrust of politics in Delhi, fake news warriors raise the decibels levels in our politics every day. As we head into election season, this din will become even greater.
Finally, at a time when we are promoting Digital India and the knowledge economy, the top-down impulse to clamp down on entire digital platforms for the misuse of a few, instead of targeting the wrong-doers themselves, is lopsided. It risks taking a sledgehammer approach to a problem that is far more complex.
After all, the imagery of the hard-pressed exploited farmer running the engines of the nation – deified from the beginning of the republic in films like Mother India and Do Bigha Zamin – remains an unshakeable shibboleth of the Indian political imagination. So, will the kisan agitations prove to be an effective political lever for a desperate opposition looking for evocative handles to block BJP’s electoral juggernaut or will this crisis taper off?
At the political level, BJP has, of course, been acutely focussed on the power of the farmer vote. Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly declared his government’s intent to double farmers’ income by 2022 and BJP’s 2014 manifesto promised to ‘ensure a minimum of 50% profits over the costs of production’ in agriculture. Yet, at the policy level, it has been confounded by the fact that the toolkit that our governments have traditionally used for managing agriculture is outdated and faulty. It is essentially trying to fix the wrong questions with the wrong answers.
The irony of MP’s predicament is instructive. Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan farcically went on a fast after his own police fired at farmers but agriculture is the one thing he has focussed consistently on since taking power in 2005. As the agricultural economist Ashok Gulati and his colleagues point out, the state’s agricultural GDP grew at a staggering 14.2% over the past five years and over thrice the national average over the last decade. “This is unprecedented in the annals of India’s agricultural history. Even Punjab did not grow at this rate during the green revolution period.”
Yet, despite this, average earnings of agricultural households in MP continue to lag far behind the national average. This is basically because while farmers have been producing more, their input costs – water, diesel, fertilisers, etc – have increased substantially while prices for their products went down. A TOI analysis shows that between 2004-05 and 2014-15 in MP, the cost per hectare of fertilisers and seeds for wheat doubled while irrigation costs also increased substantially.
This is of piece with the national agriculture story where after two years of drought, Indian farmers finally delivered a good crop for most commodities but saw their net margins going down – in many cases into the red. That greater farm production in 2016-17 would lead to a glut in the market, prices would collapse and farmer incomes would consequently go down is Economics 101. Yet, the problem is that most of our policies have been fixated on giving farmers a minimum support price (MSP) and not enough on creating conditions for market mechanisms to play out effectively.
Government fixes MSP for 23 commodities but official procurement is limited to only two – wheat and rice – and that too in only a few states. It is estimated that over 90% of India’s farmers do not get the MSP price and are dependent on markets, which are circumscribed by arbitrary government over-regulation and the shortage of godowns and mandis.
A good example of policy as a problem is the case of pulses farmers. After a bumper harvest, in February 2017, the India Pulses and Grain Association petitioned the Union commerce secretary to remove an old 2006 export ban since market prices in India had slipped below MSP. Tur dal was being sold at the time between Rs 35,000 and Rs 47,000 per tonne in MP, Karnataka and Maharashtra, against the MSP of Rs 50,500. Yet, inexplicably, the ban remains in place, along with limits on stocks, making it impossible for farmers to even recover their costs. Artificially choking the market and not letting it play out is a recipe for disaster.
Second, farmer loan waivers only push the can further down the road. They don’t solve the problem. After BJP came good on its UP loan waiver poll promise, Maharashtra caved in to a similar demand and Haryana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are all facing the same music. In Punjab, Congress came to power promising exactly this.
States simply don’t have the money for such largesse. The combined debt-to-state GDP ratio of all states taken together hit an alarming 3.6% in 2015-16, breaching the mandated 3% ceiling under fiscal prudence rules. It will go through the roof with new waivers. A similar waiver by UPA in 2008 had no discernible long-term impact on improving agriculture.
As TV pictures of the kisan agitations show, the blue jeans and T-shirt clad farmers of 2017 are very different from the downtrodden peasants of our collective national imagination. They ask why only big corporates should get loan waivers. It is a fair question.
Yet, instead of temporary sops each year, government must do a fundamental rethink and address this Kisan 2.0 with a new deal on market pricing and a comprehensive deregulation of policy instead of old mai-baap sarkar type solutions that are past their use-by date.
If their evidence, published in Nature – the world’s most highly-cited interdisciplinary science journal – and using the ‘optically stimulated luminescence’ method on ancient pottery shards, is correct then it substantially pushes back the beginnings of ancient Indian civilisation. It proves that it took root well before the heyday of the pharaohs of Egypt (7000-3000 BC) or the Mesopotamian civilisation (6500-3100 BC) in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The researchers have also found evidence of a pre-Harappan civilisation that existed for at least a thousand years before this, which may force a global rethink on the generally accepted timelines of so-called ‘cradles of civilisation’.
This is a quantum leap. The scientists are not just shifting a few years here and there. Their claim pushes back the mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilisation (with significant remains in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in modern Pakistan and Dholavira in Gujarat) from its current dating of 2600-1700 BC to 8000-2000 BC and the pre-Harappan phase to 9000-8000 BC. This demands a fundamental rethink of old assumptions about Indian civilisation’s antiquity and reopens the debate on whether Aryans were the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Right from Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayanand Saraswati, to B R Ambedkar who rejected the idea of an ancient Aryan invasion as “absurd”, the Aryan question has been a lightning rod in debates over Indian identity. The Aryan invasion theory originated with William Jones, who postulated in 1786 that Sanskrit and other ancient languages were part of an Indo-European language family which must have had a common source, the subsequent identification in 1816 of a separate Dravidian language family and finally the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation by John Marshall in 1924.
The huge gap between the standard historical dating of 1500 BC for Rig Veda (though Bal Gangadhar Tilak used astrological evidence to argue for 4500 BC) and the much older physical remains of the Indus Valley drastically complicated the Indian story. That gap has now grown much wider and the questions it raises are even bigger.
The standard academic view so far, accepted in textbooks, is that Aryans were immigrants to India, entering around 1500 BC. The alternative view – that they were indigenous creators of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro – has often been scorned by traditional academics because this argument is also appropriated by the Hindu right wing.
On current evidence, both theories are inadequate. The standard view itself has changed from a theory of white-skinned Aryan invaders who subjugated dark-skinned locals to a notion of slow Aryan migration and diffusion over centuries. The invader theory was essentially based on a racial reading by colonial scholars like Friedrich Max Mueller, who thought the Rig Veda used racial terms for Aryans as having beautiful noses (susipra); and depicted their enemies, dasas, as nose-less or bull-nosed (vrsasipra). Language experts later showed this was a wrong reading.
Circumstantial evidence on which the Vedic “Indra stood accused” as the destroyer of Harappa simply because the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler found a few skeletons there in 1946 and Rig Veda talked of Indra as the destroyer of forts (purandra) was debunked long ago. In 1964, the American George F Dales found that only two Harappan skeletons showed evidence of a massacre.
Just as Galileo changed the centuries old wrong understanding of the earth as the centre of the universe, new evidence should make us question old beliefs. Thomas Trautmann, who used mathematical modelling to date the Arthashastra, has pointed out gaps in both theories. The only reason why the standard one is still considered standard is because it came first and the “burden of proof must be on the shoulders of those who are urging us to abandon the standard view”. This is just semantics. If facts show either idea could be plausible, so be it.
In fact, there are a number of historical continuities such as prototype Shiva figures between Harappans and Aryans and cultural gaps are not as wide as previously thought. Even the absence of the horse, despite silly attempts to fake evidence, may not be unsurmountable. Horse-bones from Surkotda, for example, were identified as such by the late Sandor Bokonyi, one of the world’s leading archaeo-zoologists. We must step away from ideological hardlines of left and right for an objective reassessment.
Why should this matter? Whether Indians were the world’s first civilised nation or whether Aryans were indigenous is, of course, irrelevant to modern challenges. It does nothing for those struggling with drought or mired in deep poverty. The past may be irrelevant as a guide to the present. Yet the past has always cast a shadow on Indian politics, from Jyotiba Phule who argued that adivasis were the original Indians to the Ramjanmabhoomi movement today. To the extent that myth making remains a political pastime, it matters. Relying on received wisdoms is self-defeating.
The intellectual response to the Yogi has ranged from dire predictions of a looming end of the republic, to renewed calls for a hallowed battle in defence of secularism versus Hindutva, to Rajmohan Gandhi’s evocative invocation of Tulsidas and his portrayal of a ‘virath’ Raghubeera (chariot-less Ram) girding up in the Ramayana’s final battle against a ‘rathi’ (charioted) Ravan.
Talking chiefly to the converted, these angry responses – calling for a renewed defence of what liberals see as a huge breach in the great wall of Indian secularism – may make them feel better about their notions of resistance. But, politically speaking, they miss the plot entirely.
First, highfalutin talk of ideological battles is always intoxicating and comforting to one’s own self-image. But election after election has shown that a large section of Indian voters are not ideological any more. They, and especially the younger ones who make up the bulk of our electorate, vote for what suits them best materially in a given local context.
BJP’s Hindutva credentials have never been in doubt. With its audacious gamble on Adityanath, who was among its most popular state leaders in pre-poll internal surveys, the party has done nothing more than pin its own colours to the mast, making a clear play for a Hindu consolidation leading up to 2019. Critics saying with horror that the saffron party is Hindu don’t tell voters anything they didn’t know already.
With Yogi as its political UP mascot, BJP’s political signalling couldn’t be clearer. Hindutva is not something we use only instrumentally to get votes, the party seems to be saying, and then junk after winning elections. It is intrinsic to its development focus too, with a notion of progress that is intertwined with notions of Hindu-ness. The two are inseparable, not separate compartments to pick and choose from.
No appeasement, no apologies, no double meaning: this is the political message. The collapse of UP’s caste praxis and the Mandal vote has led to a hard calculation that the party has very little to lose from such a gambit.
It is betting that those who don’t like it ideologically will never vote BJP anyway and the rest of the voting public won’t care as long as developmental gains keep coming, and as long as Hindutva aims are pursued within the bounds of constitutionality.
Second, the secular versus Hindutva fault line has lost its power as a rallying cry because of the sheer hypocrisy of the secular side of the argument. Mayawati’s unambiguous pursuit of the mullah constituency, politically discredited clerical voices like the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid and criminal types was a case in point.
From the notorious Shah Bano case in the 1980s to the promotion of stereotyped meat-trader-musclemen candidates in 2017, nothing has been more damaging to the cause of secularism than repeated cynical manipulations of the Muslim vote by avowedly secular leaders themselves. From Azam Khan to clerics whose only aim is to protect a more obscurantist view of the shariah than practised in many Muslim countries – witness the debate on triple talaq – secularism has long been an empty slogan.
Its degeneration from its lofty origins as a principle to defend cultural plurality, to a fig leaf that ended up protecting the backward-looking Muslim religious right, damaged its legitimacy. Little wonder then that invocations to secularism, like critiques of demonetisation before it, may excite well-heeled drawing rooms in Delhi but elicit little enthusiasm where it matters: on the political streets.
Third, a saffron-clad monk holding political office is not new by itself. Uma Bharti preceded Yogi Adityanath. In the end, he will be judged by what he does in office.
From leading the love jihad campaign to asking those who didn’t do the surya namaskar to leave India, the founder of Hindu Yuva Vahini has long been seen as embodying the fringe. But his parliamentary record is interesting.
The five-time Lok Sabha MP has participated in 55 debates since mid-2014 and asked 284 questions. The documented record shows only eight of these debates (14.5%) and two questions (0.7%) were related to Hindutva-related causes. The majority pertained to other issues, on topics ranging from inclusion of Bhojpuri in the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule to encephalitis.
This indicates that the firebrand political monk is more than a one-trick pony. The real question is, which side of his will be dominant in running UP?
From chasing illegal slaughter-houses to setting up Romeo squads, Adityanath has done nothing so far that BJP did not promise in its manifesto. His publicly stated course-correction after the negative feedback on harassment of couples by Romeo squads shows tactical awareness and most of his first detailed speech since taking office focussed on BJP’s developmental objectives, including Rs 6,000 crore of farm loan-waivers.
As long as he can keep polarisation from spiralling into violence, like that seen at a meat shop in Hathras, demonising the Yogi plays into the old anti-Modi model. The more you criticise, the more it strengthens his vote base.
Liberals need a new narrative and a fundamental rethink, that goes beyond the old secular rhetoric.
If this scenario were true, wouldn’t an Indian CEO taking such a position immediately be condemned as “anti-national”? If JNU’s Kanhaiya Kumar can be charged with sedition for allegedly chanting antiIndia slogans (and without direct evidence, except doctored videos), then it stands to reason that any Indian company refusing a specific government request to nail terrorists might also be liable for sedition.
Precisely such a case is currently unfolding in the United States where the world’s most valuable company, Apple, is taking on the world’s most famous law enforcement agency, FBI, challenging a specific court order to unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s framing of it as “chilling … government overreach” has thrown down the gauntlet. The progress of this case in the world’s most powerful democracy also holds interesting lessons for the guardians of patriotism in the world’s largest democracy.
Farook and his wife, self-starting Islamic State sympathisers, shot and killed 14 people in November 2015. Apple has opposed a California federal court’s order and a request from FBI director James Comey to write software code sidestepping an iPhone feature that erases data after 10 unsuccessful attempts. In the trade-off between security and personal freedoms – which most of us are willing to give up some of in the fight against terrorism – it doesn’t get much clearer than this. Yet, Cook refused.
He argued that enabling hacking into the phone is “too dangerous” and that “it is not just about the phone, this is about the future”. Apple says following the court order would threaten customers’ fundamental rights, breach American First Amendment free speech guarantees, and Fifth Amendment restrictions on police powers.
Interestingly, if the Kanhaiya case hangs on a colonial-era sedition law, the American case against Apple hangs on an even older law: the 1789 All Writs Act, signed by George Washington to empower courts to issue any necessary orders if no other tools are available. Cook’s public reasoning against creating a “backdoor” to the iPhone which can be used again and again is of course, also about protecting Apple’s corporate image at a time when Edward Snowden’s revelations raised serious global concerns about what has been called a “golden age of surveillance”.
Whatever your view on Cook’s position, of particular immediate interest to us in India, is how the debate is playing out in America. Virtually the entire Silicon Valley elite, who Prime Minister Narendra Modi serenaded last year, is backing Apple. Google, Facebook and Twitter have all supported Apple’s legal position. So has Microsoft, despite Bill Gates’s public backing for the FBI in this case.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke for many when he tweeted that though Google complies with lawful requests, enabling hacking by law-enforcement would set a “troubling precedent”. Pichai, who grew up in India, is a first-generation American. But no one questioned his patriotism.
The Apple case is turning into a watershed in the relationship between national security and personal freedoms but nobody has called these worthies “anti-national”. With the exception of Donald Trump, who says “who do they think they are”, the American political system has not degenerated into taunts of “anti-nationals” against the Silicon Valley giants.
When the Kanhaiya and Umar Khalid case first erupted on our screens, every nuanced argument for free speech was met with a simple jibe: Would any other country allow such slogans? Try doing this in the United States, angry patriots argued. Well, they should draw salutary lessons from Apple nationalism.
It is also instructive that the United States is also a country whose Supreme Court in 1989, and again in 1990, upheld the constitutional right to even burn the American flag. Tellingly, this is despite poll surveys consistently showing that most Americans didn’t like this. Fortyeight of 50 American states passed laws against burning flags but the US Supreme Court overturned them all.
Many of us in India are disgusted by slogans like “Bharat tere tukde honge”. But there is a difference between opposing such ideas and the slogans in and of themselves amounting to sedition.
Those who think this is sedition should read Walter Isaacson’s comment in Time magazine after the US Supreme Court’s 1990 judgment on the legality of burning the national flag. “The patriotic mind recoils,” he argued. “Reverence for the flag is ingrained in every schoolchild who has quailed at the thought of letting it touch the ground, in every citizen moved by pictures of it being raised at Iwo Jima or planted on the moon, in every veteran who has ever heard taps played at the end of a Memorial Day parade, in every gold-star mother who treasures a neatly folded emblem of her family’s supreme sacrifice.”
Yet, he went on, that was precisely the reason why the court declared against banning flag burning because such a ban violated free speech protections. The flag is revered precisely because it “represents the land of the free, and that freedom includes the ability to use or abuse that flag in protest”.
Simply being an angry national is not enough. We also need thinking nationals and to remember that the idea of the nation is far bigger than just the state.
Everyone salutes those who fought and died. Yet, patriotism and gratitude alone cannot substitute hard-nosed self-examination. The bitter truth is that India’s security management is still run almost exactly as it was designed by two British grandees in 1947: Lord General Hastings Lionel Ismay and Lord Louis Mountbatten. The first baron of Ismay, Churchill’s military assistant in World War II, designed independent India’s defence framework as chief of staff to Viceroy Mountbatten who, in turn, recommended it to Nehru. The new Indian leadership, unfamiliar with the intricacies of managing national security, put this system in place 69 years ago and there it remains even today. Babudom and the absence of a strategic culture among the political class made it worse over the decades.
The Kargil Review Committee (KRC), set up by the last BJP government, concluded in 2000 that since the Ismay-Mountbatten jugalbandi, “there has been very little change over the past 52 years, despite the 1962 debacle, the 1965 stalemate, the 1971 victory, the growing nuclear threat, end of the cold war, continuance of proxy war in Kashmir for over a decade and the revolution in military affairs.” These words ring true even today, despite serious calls for change after every big security disaster.
After Kargil, both the KRC and the subsequent GoM on National Security, chaired by L K Advani and comprising the ministers of defence, finance and external affairs, found serious deficiencies in India’s defence management and intelligence structure in Delhi. The GoM concluded on February 19, 2001 that the “apparatus and systems we have inherited from the British are no longer suitable in this day and age”, asking for sweeping changes.
These included creating a joint Chief of Defence Staff for single-point military advice to government, integrating service headquarters into ministry of defence (instead of the current practice of them being “attached offices”) like in all major democracies, setting up of a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a National Defence University. Apart from DIA, bureaucratic resistance ensured that none of these are a reality even today.
Similarly, after 26/11, P Chidambaram as UPA’s home minister pushed for creating NATGRID, aiming to combine 21 databases for 11 security agencies. UPA’s cabinet committee on security allocated Rs 1,003 crore for its first phase in 2012. In 2014, it was given two more years for completion. Eight years after 26/11, NATGRID is still not functional. Among the delaying reasons: its official building got environmental clearance only two years after its foundation stone was laid!
In contrast, the US created the department of homeland security after an internal government revamp within two years of 9/11. It still publishes updates on implementation of the 9/11 Commission. Even China, a non-democracy, has published nine white papers on defence since 1998.
India is the world’s largest arms importer, but without an internal overhaul all this looks like ‘arming without aiming’, to borrow from the title of a telling book by Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta. India’s problem is that security is not an electoral issue. Few politicians understand defence matters. The KRC and Advani panel reports were tabled in Parliament but never debated. The BJP’s 2014 manifesto looked to change this with an unusually high defence focus in a section called “Secure Indians — zero tolerance on terrorism, extremism and crime”. Those promises need fulfilment.
The Nirbhaya case showed how public anger can force politicians to act, forcing the passage of two legislations. We now need similar pressure on defence. Parliament must debate the KRC’s recommendations and change our national security structure. India needs this and our soldiers deserve it.
That changed with the Third Pay Commission, which brought military salaries in line with civil services. It set us down the road to the current fight over one-rank-one-pension (OROP) by military veterans.
With ex-soldiers going on relay hunger strikes in over 50 towns, putting up posters across cities with the A R Rahman-Rockstar catch-line ‘sadda haq-aithe rakh’ [put our right here], circulating internet memes showing soldiers turning into skeletons as they wait for their dues, and at least one former army vice-chief writing publicly to veterans to pose a “viable and potent threat of sabotaging the aspirations of BJP” in the upcoming Bihar election, OROP has become a political hot potato.
Yet, listening to the agitators it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the fight for equal pensions is at its heart a proxy battle for what soldiers see as restoring their lost ‘izzat’, for getting what they see as their rightful place in the civil-military balance where political control of the military has translated into bureaucratic control.
The biggest argument against OROP – the notion that every pension-eligible soldier who retires in a particular rank should get the same pension irrespective of when he retired – is: What happens if other uniformed services like BSF, CRPF and so on also demand the same right?
This is a facile question because unlike bureaucrats and paramilitary forces who all serve till 60 years of age, most military soldiers retire at 35-37 years of age, while officers below brigadier-or-equivalent do so at 54. The nation retires soldiers early to keep the army fit and young. They must be compensated adequately.
Secondly, the Sixth Pay Commission granted what bureaucrats call “non-functional upgrade” (NFU) to officers in all-India Group A services. This is a sort of ‘pay-promotion’ allowing them to draw higher pay than their rank under certain conditions. Almost all civil servants benefit from this while defence services officers do not. As lawyer Navdeep Singh points out, NFU is a sort of “OROP by backdoor for civil servants”.
Third, for some unfathomable reason, serious disparities seem to have crept into other field allowances. For example, army special forces soldiers get an extra Rs 800-1,200 per month as allowance, while Cobra commandos of the paramilitary forces earn an extra Rs 7,200-11,000 per month.
Fourth, compared to the bureaucracy, police and paramilitary, defence forces keep their career pyramid much steeper to ensure professional standards. Only 0.8% of defence officers make it to the rank of major general after 28 years of service, compared to a much higher rate of civil servants who are eligible to become joint secretaries, an equivalent rank, at 19 years of service.
Fifth, other democracies privilege their soldiers better. In salaries and special allowances American soldiers have a 15-20% edge over other government employees, British 10%, Japanese 12-29% and French soldiers 15%. In pensions, while Indian soldiers get 50% of their last pay per month, American soldiers get 50-75%, Australian 76.5%, Japanese 70% and French soldiers 75%.
The UK has embraced one-rank-one-pension for soldiers. Our two biggest strategic challenges, Pakistan and China, have of course always privileged their military. This is why the Supreme Court on 9 September 2009, parliamentary standing committee on defence in May 2010, and Rajya Sabha committee on petitions on 19 December 2011 all backed the OROP demand.
The question is how much it will cost? This is where soldiers allege bureaucratic games. In 2011, the defence ministry told a parliamentary committee that annual costs would be Rs 3,000 crore while the finance ministry calculated a figure of Rs 1,300 crore. In 2014, the defence ministry’s controller general of defence accounts reportedly estimated Rs 9,300 crore and current reports point to a figure closer to Rs 8,000 crore.
Whatever the final number, it is much more than the Rs 1,000 crore that finance minister Arun Jaitley allocated to OROP in his 2014-15 budget. Even so, for a country with an annual defence budget of Rs 2,20,000 crore and which relies so much on its soldiers, we should be willing to bear this.
The longer the fight drags on, the longer India’s soldiers feel unappreciated. Nehruvian India, fearful of military coups which engulfed every other post-colonial democracy from Asia to Africa, gradually reduced the place of soldiers in the administrative hierarchy in orders of precedence and pay. The time has come to go beyond patriotic slogans and meaningless jingoistic saluting and reset the civil-military balance, restoring the military its rightful place in a confident democracy.
With military veterans asking “where are acche din for us”, returning their medals and sitting on relay-hunger strikes, the prime minister must heed to Chanakya, the architect of the first pan-Indian empire, who is said to have advised Chandragupta Maurya: “The day a soldier has to demand his dues will be a sad day for Magadha. From then on you have lost all moral sanctions to be king.”
Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s current dynastic fiefdom is very different from the living and breathing internal debate that marked Congress under the Mahatma. But his point about real power residing in the hands of only a few rings even truer today. Rahul’s continuing mysterious absence during a crucial Parliament session is still raising questions.
Some angry party workers in Uttar Pradesh even put up ‘missing’ Rahul posters and a number of old family loyalists have begun raising uncomfortable questions about the leadership in public. But there is little public sign yet of the tumult outside reflecting on the few inside who wield real power.
A crucial AICC session seemingly planned for April – which many thought would draw a line under Congress’s internal catharsis with the possible anointment of Rahul Gandhi – has reportedly been pushed further into the distance. A year after the Congress suffered its worst electoral defeat in history, it is yet to find even the beginning of an answer to the many questions it faced in its annus horribilis of 2014.
The rise of fall of political fortunes is normal for any political party and Congress has faced many troughs before. But its current crisis is of a different order, it is an existential one. Political parties remain relevant only as long as they can provide a credible avenue to power and tap into a wide enough social constituency, else they fade into oblivion.
While the ‘dream’ of a Congress-mukt Bharat that Amit Shah began his presidential tenure of BJP with may be a bridge too far, there is no question that Congress today is at the same crossroads that the Liberal Party in Britain faced in the 1930s – when it was reduced from a dominant pole of the polity into an irrelevant also-ran. Or that faced by the Whigs, the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, important players in 19th century American politics before the party system coalesced into a set pattern of Democrats versus Republicans.
Comparisons across time and space are tricky. But even so the decline of British Liberals offers a cautionary tale to Congress. Best symbolised by William Gladstone, the legendary counterpoint to the great Victorian imperialist Disraeli, it was a party that created the first basic British social welfare state.
As one permanent end of London’s politics, it never won less than 40% of vote share in every British election from 1859 to 1910. It was almost sunk by World War I, fought back somewhat in the 1920-1930s where it fluctuated between 13-29% of vote-share in successive elections, but was wiped out in 1931 when its support fell to just 6.5%.
Liberals had remained politically strong for almost a century because of their appeal to British working classes but the rise of the Labour Party, which articulated the concerns of lower classes better, combined with poor Liberal leadership eventually made them irrelevant as a major player.
Like the British Liberals Congress consistently polled over 40% of votes in every Indian election from 1950 to 1984 except for the post-emergency low of 1977. After the reverses of the early 1990s it managed a national vote-share percentage in the high-20s through the coalition-building years from 1996-2009.
In 2014 though its national vote-share fell below the 20% threshold for the first time, an astounding 178 of its 464 parliamentary candidates lost their deposits and its total number of state assembly legislators also fell to the lowest point ever. Even more serious for Congress is its inability to weave a convincing new narrative about itself.
With the exception of Assam, every state with over 50% of youth voters (UP, Rajasthan, Delhi, Jharkhand, Haryana, Bihar and MP) delivered astonishingly high returns to NDA in 2014. Politics is never static and fortunes may change. But the harsh fact for Congress is that the ‘there is no alternative’ argument that won it many state elections by default through the 1990s doesn’t hold water any more.
AAP emerged as an alternative in Delhi and did the unthinkable. Just as the Labour Party in Britain usurped the narrative of social equality from the Liberals, Congress is finding itself increasingly speaking an idiom that few new voters relate to, even if its core message of left-of-centre economics and social equity may still be relevant.
Congress needs a reboot but is losing previous time. BJP is already claiming to be the world’s largest party. But across the world, the trend is towards a decline of the traditional hold of political parties as permanent tribes. Instead, they are turning into platforms which grow or shrink with swing voters on the strength of their message and leadership in every election. Party leaders need to keep the platform alive and viable. Simply relying on history or a glorious past as a guarantee of survival will be a grievous mistake.
So in this cauldron of caste, Emperor Ashoka whose lion seal adorns our rupees, whose dharma chakra is on the national flag, who was the greatest communicator of ancient India reshaping much of Asia with Buddhism — as Constantine would later reshape Europe with Christianity — has now been repackaged as a Kushwaha leader.
The Rashtravadi Kushwaha Parishad, which is aligned with BJP, has held several commemoration functions in Bihar since last year, arguing that both Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka were Kushwahas and therefore ancestors of present-day Bihari Kushwahas or Koeris who make up about 9% of voters. State BJP leaders like Sushil Kumar Modi have publicly argued in these ceremonies that if voted to power, their party would restore the glory that Kushwahas supposedly enjoyed during the Mauryan empire.
They have likened the JD(U) regime to the capricious regime of the last Nanda king, Dhanananda, who was uprooted by Chanakya and the Mauryas. In May this year a celebration of 2,300 years of Ashoka in Patna turned into a political advocacy event, with posters coming up across the city of a bejewelled and moustachioed Ashoka image, sitting side-by-side with Kushwaha caste leaders and BJP satraps.
A senior Union Cabinet minister from Bihar even announced a postal stamp to honour Ashoka and that a big statue of the emperor would be installed in Delhi and Patna if the party was voted to power. The prime minister, who is fronting BJP’s campaign in Bihar, has specifically focused only on development in his speeches and the contradictions in the opposing JD(U)-RJD-Congress mahagathbandan. Yet, it is clear that at the micro-level, this electoral battle is as much about getting the caste arithmetic right as the larger atmospherics of the Modi model of development versus the Nitish model of good governance.
The perplexing appropriation of Ashoka as a caste leader is part of these ground-level machinations. Kushwahas, an OBC caste who claim their descent from Ram’s son Kush, were part of the social axis of forward castes and extremely backward castes that combined with the slogan of good governance to hand Nitish Kumar his 2010 triumph in Bihar.
Union minister Upendra Kushwaha’s break with JD(U) in 2013 and his formation of Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP), which in alliance with BJP won three Lok Sabha seats in 2014, was an attempt to break up the old Nitish coalition. Along with RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustan Awam Morcha, essentially aimed at Musahars, and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Dalit-focussed Lok Janshakti Party, BJP’s social coalition is essentially one of upper castes and those at the very bottom of the caste pyramid to take on the Yadav-Muslim-Kurmi-MBC combine that the mahagathbandhan is banking on.
Historians have been aghast at the bizarre appropriation of Ashoka as a caste leader. There is no evidence whatsoever of the emperor’s caste credentials in Mauryan records. Yet, Kushwaha Parishad members insist they can prove it. The emperor has become a tool in the politics of social engineering in Bihar.
Just as the legendary Hindi poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar has now been recast as a Bhumihar icon, Maharana Pratap of Mewar as a tool to woo upper-caste Rajputs and Baba Chuhar Mal as a dalit leader. State leaders have embraced all of these, including Kunwar Singh who fought the British in 1857, and held caste functions to commemorate these figures.
Rewriting history to serve modern political ends is not new. In UP, for example, BSP focussed on recasting and highlighting the stories of dalit veeranganas as a way of forging a new dalit identity. Bihari politics seemed to have turned a corner in 2010, moving from caste to bijli, sadak and paani like the rest of India. Yet, with Lalu Prasad talking aggressively of Mandal-II and threatening a rerun of the caste wars that laid waste to much of the 1990s, the 2015 campaign evokes deja vu, like an old film we have seen before and want to forget.
What Bihari politicians often forget is that the ground is shifting beneath their feet. In a Bihar that is 88% rural, next only to Assam, 98% rural homes don’t have toilets. At least two different studies have shown that Bihari women have started out-voting men since 2005 and are increasingly voting differently from men, changing outcomes in a large proportion of constituencies.
The absence of rural jobs and negative agricultural growth in 2013-14 in Bihar may matter more than appeals to primordial caste loyalties. In any case, electoral data since 1991 shows that caste loyalties don’t translate into neat vote divisions as we think, even in Bihar.
Simply appealing to caste loyalties and notions of pride won’t make the cut anymore. The casting of Ashoka — whose edicts on good governance moved Nehru to describe him as “a man who though, an emperor, was greater than any king or emperor” — as a Kushwaha leader does not diminish the Mauryan monarch, it diminishes us.
Having once looked down upon those speaking vernacular languages and seeing Hinduism as backward, these people are insecure with the rise of people not-likethem and have rebranded themselves as “liberals”. If, “Modi and Amit Shah had gone to Doon School, or studied in college abroad, or at least spoke English with a refined world accent,” Bhagat argues, “the liberals would have been kinder to them”. Sorry, but he is completely wrong. Though India’s literary snobs have long dissed Bhagat’s commercial successes he remains, as Aakar Patel argues, “our most remarkable novelist”, one who is “more read by the middle class than were P G Wodehouse, Irving Wallace, Sidney Sheldon and James Hadley Chase – all put together”. This is why it is important to point out the ignorance and falsehoods in his claims.
First, Indian liberalism in general and protests against intolerance in particular have never been about only a small, privileged English-speaking class. Of the three dozen or so writers who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards, only three received it for writing in English. As many as nine got it for writing in Punjabi, ten Hindi, four Kannada, two Telugu, and one each for Malayalam, Assamese, Urdu and Kashmiri.
Among liberals who have been murdered: Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi was a noted epigraphist of Kannada; Govind Pansare wrote his best-selling Shivaji biography, ‘Shivaji Kon Hota’, in Marathi; and Narendra Dabholkar’s courageous work against superstition as part of his Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti was primarily in the heat and dust of public meetings, not air-conditioned drawing rooms.
Indian liberalism, which is essentially about respecting all equally, is not an elite creation of those “sipping tea from fine china cups” or a sleepover party of hedonistic elites. It is at least as old as the syncretic fusions created by Nanak and Kabir and can be traced all the way back to the Rig Vedic tradition that “there is only one truth, only men describe it in different ways”.
The great Swami Vivekananda, revered among others by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was also a torchbearer of this liberal tradition of ancient Hinduism. He wowed the West with his iconic Chicago speech in 1893 by highlighting precisely this stream of tolerance as the heart of Hinduism. Vivekananda’s later comment that “You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita” would have earned him censure from the Hindu Sena were he to say it today.
India’s Constitution was created by a great liberal, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, whose iconic ‘Annihilation of Caste’ remains one of the most original critiques of Hinduism. The man he fiercely criticised as a traditionalist Hindu, Gandhi, was also a liberal in the sense that he wanted “the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible” even as he refused to be “blown off my feet by any”.
From the late Hindi journalist Prabhash Joshi who wrote ‘Yeh to Raghukul Nahi’ after the Babri masjid was demolished to Mahasweta Devi who only writes in Bengali to the Hindi TV anchor Ravish Kumar who was born in Motihari but still returned from Dadri “feeling like a corpse” at the lack of remorse over the killings, Indian liberalism lives precisely because it is rooted in Indian tradition, not because it is some artificial creation of whiny English speakers at a cocktail party. India, in other words, is not Pakistan, where columnist Khaled Ahmed argues the only way you can keep writing about fundamentalism or terrorism is to “touch foot” and apologise to those offended.
Second, the charge of elitism echoes the derogatory charge of ‘Macaulay-putras’ that the right wing has long furnished. Macaulay started English education in India with his infamous 1835 Minute which argued that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
It was nonsense, of course, but to speak English in India today is not a crime. It is at the heart of our revolution of aspiration as everyone from Kapil Dev who once modelled for ‘Rapidex English Speaking Course’ to the millions of poor who queue up for admissions for their children in private English schools can testify.
Third, yes, among the liberals, some identify with Congress or the Left but the vast majority do not. There is nothing that connects a Dibakar Banerjee or a Krishna Sobti with any party-political position except for a general abhorrence for intolerance.
Chetan Bhagat
Fourth, many liberals do respond to Islamic fundamentalism and to Congress intolerance. The charge of being “pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-liberal” applies much more to Muslim politicians but not intellectuals like Javed Akhtar, who has often spoken against it, or Syeda Hameed, who authored a detailed report on reform in Islamic marriage laws.
Secular liberals do have solutions, just as Ambedkar did. Going to elite institutions, like he did to Columbia and LSE on a scholarship, is not necessarily a sign of privilege but of academic excellence. Just as it was for Bhagat.
Yet, step away from the miasma of daily headlines and it is clear that the real problem of Indian governance lies not in Delhi but in the states. For a decade, 2003-13, Lok Sabha met for an average of 68 days per year (18.6% of each year). That might seem low but in contrast, in the same period, Delhi assembly met only for an average of 21 days (5.7%), Goa 26 days (7.1%), Bihar 31 days (8.4%), Himachal Pradesh 31 days and Haryana assembly for a shocking 13 days per year (3.5%).
In the absence of any legal requirement for minimum sittings of Parliament or state assemblies — except that no more than six months should elapse between successive sessions — they have all evolved their own working standards. In fact, Parliamentary Research Service data show that in the last five years Parliament improved marginally, with average Lok Sabha sittings going up to 71 days per year (2009-13). In the same period, state assemblies like Haryana actually dropped average annual sittings to an abysmal 11!
Overall, among states for which data is available, only Kerala’s Niyama Sabha with an average of 50 sittings, West Bengal assembly with 46, Maharashtra with 41 and Tamil Nadu (2011-14) with an average of 38 annual assembly sittings came even within sniffing distance of Parliament but fell well short of it. Chhattisgarh and Gujarat with an average of 32 days each per year, Madhya Pradesh 30, Rajasthan and Assam with 24 days each (in 2014) make up the middle rung in this report card.
Purely in terms of simply meeting for legislative work even the best-performing state assemblies physically do only about 50-70% of work done by Parliament, the middle rung ones about 40% and the laggards less than 30%. This is much less than what successive conferences of legislative presiding officers have recommended in the past.
Constitutional expert and former Lok Sabha secretary general Subhash Kashyap points out that repeated recommendations seeking a minimum of 120 sittings a year for each legislature have been ignored and respective governments continue to decide how much business to provide to legislative houses and how many days they will sit.
How much does this matter? There is a direct co-relation between legislative transparency and governance. It is surely no coincidence that Punjab is the only Indian state whose assembly does not have a fully-functioning website, that it met for less than an annual average of 20 days in recent years and its total outstanding debt crossed Rs 1 lakh crore in 2013-14. Irrespective of their output, the better state assemblies like Kerala and Maharashtra transparently provide details on every minute of business, just as Parliament does. This is an essential watchdog function whose absence is detrimental to good governance.
What about quality of discussion and debate? Here again Parliament does far better than states. During the years when Haryana’s then-Congress government was reeling under charges of favouritism towards Robert Vadra, the state assembly’s performance is instructive. Between 2011-13 Haryana passed 121 Bills, a whopping 56% without any discussion in the assembly, 6% with less than five minutes of discussion and only 5% were discussed for more than 20 minutes.
Except for finance and appropriation Bills, this kind of lack of scrutiny is par for the course in several states. Surprisingly, Bihar does well. Its assembly discussed each of the 21 Bills that it passed in 2013 for an average of 39 minutes. But this pales in comparison with Parliament where, despite all its failings, average time spent on discussing each Bill is upwards of three hours.
We may be the world’s largest democracy but Parliament still fares poorly on international norms. Britain’s Parliament met for 162 days in 2013-14. India’s Parliament has also not passed a single private member’s Bill — an important indicator of MPs’ independence from party lines — since 1970. Current protections to coverage of parliamentary proceedings, for example, come from one such private member’s Bill chaperoned by Feroze Gandhi in 1956.
Paradoxically, the state of Indian state assemblies is quite similar to state legislatures in United States which also has a federal system. Since the 1980s, American state legislatures have gradually reduced annual sittings. Some like South Dakota have limited such sittings to only a maximum of 40 a year.
Ambedkar famously argued in the Constituent Assembly that, “If things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile.” With the fulcrum of governance shifting to states, the time has come to set minimum standard of legislative accountability in India.
It was this sense of loss that led to Sanskrit being introduced into the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule as a national language in 1949. But so poor was its health at Independence that the first five Sahitya Akademi Awards in Sanskrit literature (1956-1966) were given to English and Hindi works on Sanskrit culture. Official patronage meant that Sanskrit survived only on “government feeding tubes and oxygen tanks”, as scholar Sheldon Pollock memorably argued.
As the sublime language of Kalidas, of Kalhana’s Rajtarangini and as mother of most modern Indian languages, it is imperative to keep Sanskrit alive. But this can’t be done by compulsory education for all children. Even at its height in antiquity, Sanskrit was rarely a mass language. It was the language of learned discourse, high literature, scientific and metaphysical enquiry. The Ashokan edicts, for example, were not in Sanskrit but in Prakrit using Brahmi script and even in Aramaic and ancient Greek.
Languages cannot be divorced from their social function. It is futile to try and artificially transform them into mass tools of communication by ministerial fiat. The prudent path is to create centres for Sanskrit excellence, promote cutting-edge new scholarship and translations. For all the nationalist noise about Sanskrit, high learning of it has dwindled to such a low that few renowned experts remain in India.
The best work on classics is now being done abroad by foreign scholars. Even a philanthropic project like the Murty Classical Library of India, which aims to make ancient classics from the last two millennia available in English, is run by distinguished scholars based out of the universities of Columbia, Heidelberg, Boston and Jerusalem. This was not so a few decades ago when home-grown institutions like Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute flourished. Scholars point out that thanks to the decreasing number of Indian linguists in most other ancient Indian languages as well, we may be in danger of losing not just our knowledge of ancient works but our historical memory itself.
Contrast this with China where star scholars like Yi Zhongtian and Yu Dan have massively expanded contemporary interest in ancient knowledge and languages by creatively using the power of television and writing ‘fast-food’ bestsellers to make Confucius cool again.
Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich observed that a “language is a dialect with an army and an air force”. HRD Ministry’s enforcement directives on Sanskrit have also given it a bureaucracy. Yet as long as it is not seen by students and parents as a language of upward mobility in a globalised world, this powerful army will have no lands to conquer.
Cut to 2014 and Amit Shah began his first presidential address to the same body with a very similar message, albeit in much more measured, calculated terms: “There are more than 1,200 political parties in India,” he declared. “But there is hardly any party where a worker could be elevated to the highest position of national president.”
Irrespective of ideological filters and discomfort in the liberal intelligentsia about the new Modi-Shah combine now leading BJP into its future, there is a powerful message of upward social mobility wrapped in this packaging. At 49, Amit Shah is not only the youngest party president ever of India’s ruling party, his age is also much closer to the Indian median age of 27.
In an intensely political country where 65% of the population is below the age of 35, BJP is also positioning itself as an open house for an aspirational youth bulge where talent, of whatever shade and hue, can and does rise. Notwithstanding the ever-present shadow of the Sangh, it is certainly a much more open house than its contemporaries, barring AAP.
In contrast, accession to elite levels in the six other national parties is a relatively closed shop. Congress remains hostage to dynasty, not only at its apex level but at state levels too where access and patronage arguably remain far more important than winnability. Nationalist Congress Party has the same problem and BSP remains Mayawati’s personal fiefdom despite its crushing loss in UP.
Communist parties are more structured but much more secretive with power residing in closed cabals. Go further down the pecking order and in state after state, regional parties are essentially family-controlled units: from Parkash Singh Badal’s Akali Dal to Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party and of course the Dravidian parties.
Keeping aside the visual imagery of BJP’s “man of the match” of 2014, as PM Modi called him, there is a much more structural transformation that his ascent signifies. “Social engineering” is a term he stressed in his inaugural speech and its success in UP in the general election and the manner in which it was pushed through signifies a major shift in BJP’s politics.
To be sure, social engineering is now new to BJP. Social scientists have long documented the strategies of identity-building and appropriation of lower castes that the broader Sangh Parivar adopted in the 1980s in the wake of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and Mandal agitation, which took BJP from a paltry two seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections to Raisina Hill in the mid 1990s. Its successes in Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, in particular, owed to a systematic co-option of adivasis and dalits within the broader frame of a Hindu identity, which supplanted older notions of ‘suvarna’.
Spearheaded by the likes of Kalyan Singh in UP, these were the fruits of BJP’s first wave of social engineering. These gains, however, were frittered away almost immediately thereafter amid party factionalism, the headiness of power under the Vajpayee regime and a general drift in direction after the shock of the 2004 defeat.
What Amit Shah is now promising is a second wave of social engineering. This is what is so different about BJP this time and UP was the first test of this new thrust.
In the first wave of social engineering, while backward caste voters moved towards BJP, their real influence remained limited. Social scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has shown that their proportional representation in the party’s national executive and that of MPs returned from the Hindi belt did not change significantly in the 1990s.
In contrast, in UP in 2014, Amit Shah spearheaded a realignment which saw the projection of Modi as India’s first OBC prime minister, the promising of a Bharat Ratna for Kanshi Ram, and a concerted effort to break the dalit vote. This meant replicating older BSP strategies of venerating dalit icons, except that BJP chose to focus oncommunities like Valmiki, Pasi, Sonkar and other non-Jatav categories that were unhappy with Jatav dominance in Mayawati’s BSP. This was combined with ruthless ticket selection, a tech-savvy rural communications campaign and 27 seats to OBC candidates despite strong opposition by local apparatchiks. The result was an unprecedented 73 seats.
This second wave of social engineering is different because it is backed by a newfound layer of managerial efficiency, and a ruthless clarity of purpose about ideology and its goals. This is why both Amit Shah and his mentor, Narendra Modi, stressed the idea of what they called “Congress-mukt” Bharat. How their equation and this project unfolds could fundamentally refashion long-held certainties about Indian politics. BJP’s new president is a man to watch and his rise necessitates an intellectual rethinking in other political parties.