Historically, the encounters between Islam and Hinduism have been beneficial to both.

Din-e-Ilahi was a restatement of Dharma in a contemporary form. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The idea of religion as a set of beliefs that have to be practiced and not simply professed is not limited to Hinduism, Buddhism and other mystical religions, but has managed to carve out a niche in Islam and Christianity as well. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it found a home in a Christian sect called the Cathars (or Albigenses) in southern France and Spain, and in some branches of Shia Islam such as the Alawis of Syria, Iraq and Turkey.

Not surprisingly, both sects have been treated as heretical apostates by the clergy of orthodox Christianity and Islam. In AD 1200, Pope Innocent III launched a little known Fourth Crusade against the Cathars, and instructed the knights and Barons who joined it to kill all they met without mercy, and leave it to God to sort out the heretics from the true believers. As for the Alawis, the most recent of innumerable attacks upon them in Syria has still not ended.

In the sharpest possible contrast, the confrontation between Dharma and Islam in India has been peaceful. Dharma’s first contact with Islam occurred when Arab traders came to Gujarat and built mosques there in the 8th and 9th centuries. Not only did this not spark religious conflict, but as contemporary Jain texts recorded, two centuries later, when Mahmud of Ghazni attacked the Somnath Temple, Arabs, who had by then been living there for generations, joined in the defence of the temple and died to protect it.

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Mahmud of Ghazni. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The fact that Somnath was a Hindu temple did not matter to them. It had to be defended because it was important to the Hindus among whom they lived.

The second, more prolonged, interaction between Dharma and Islam occurred after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. This is the period that the RSS would like to erase from memory, if not history. It is what has motivated the Modi government to change Aurangzeb road to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Marg among scores of other such changes in the BJP-ruled states.

But it is a period in which there was an unprecedented flowering of art, music and literature. It is the time of Amir Khusro, it is the time when khayal gayaki and Kathak dance were born, when the delicate penmanship of Persian miniature painting fused with the vivid colours of Hindu art to create a profusion of Moghul, Rajput, Kangra, Basohli and other schools of miniature painting. It is the time when Indo-Islamic architecture was born, and reached the heights scaled byHumayun’s Tomb, the Taj Mahal and scores of other monuments spread across the length and breadth of northern India.

Hindutva’s selective memory 

Hindutva ignores all this and prefers to dwell on the defeat of the Rajputs, the destruction of temples and the conversion of large numbers of Hindus to Islam during this period. But here too its memory is selective and distorted. The Rajputs, who then ruled most of north India, were driven into the wilds of Rajasthan. But these defeats arose from the superior military technology of the invaders, such as the superiority of cavalry over elephants, and of archers over infantry – and not from any innate superiority of the (Muslim) fighters. On the contrary, the conquerors recognised the valour of the Rajputs and quickly inducted them into their armies.

The votaries of Hindutva harp endlessly about the damage the Muslim invaders did to the Hindu polity and society, but they choose to ignore the fact that the same Muslim dynasties saved India from the greatest scourge of the Middle Ages – the Mongol invasions that ravaged Europe.

Mongol invasion. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Like other impoverished groups from the Asian steppes, the Mongols first tried to invade India. The first foray, in 1243, took the Delhi Sultanate by surprise and the invaders were able to come all the way till Lahore and sack it to their leisure. But that was the last time they were able to enter the plains of India. Balban, the ruler in Delhi, created a standing army – India’s first – built a string of forts along the border and prevented all subsequent invaders from getting far into the plains of Hindustan. After his death, Alauddin Khilji inflicted two successive defeats on them in 1304 and 1305, with such great slaughter that they turned towards Europe and never returned.

Temples were admittedly destroyed, and precious art, sculpture and architecture irretrievably lost, but the motive of the invaders was pillage, not conversion to Islam. All but a fraction of the conversions that took place in the next 400 years were voluntary. The converts came from the lower castes. They converted because Islam offered an escape from the iniquities of caste – in much the same way as Buddhism had done two thousand years earlier, and as the Bhakti movement in south India had been doing since well before the arrival of the Muslims. Far from being a blot on the conquerors, the conversions were a protest against the Brahmanical, temple-centred Hinduism from which they had been systematically excluded.

Reconciliation between Hinduism and Islam

In northern India, the encounter between Islam and Hinduism proved beneficial to both in important ways that the Sangh parivar prefers not to remember. In Hinduism, it weakened the link between religion and the state by cutting off the single most important source of patronage to the temples. As state patronage dwindled, Brahmins, who had previously flocked to the peeths and mutts were forced to remain in their villages and tend to the spiritual needs of the villagers. The emphasis in their functions, therefore, shifted from presiding over elaborate temple rites to providing guidance on the issues they faced in everyday life. The importance of ritual in Hinduism therefore declined and that of Dharma increased.

The Bhakti movement spread to the north and met the challenge from Sufi Islam by disseminating the core ideas of Dharma through the literature, poetry and song of Tulsidas, Surdas, Kabir, Rahim, Mira Bai, Tukaram, Chokhamela and a host of lesser-known poets, bards and singers. The interaction between the two made Hinduism accessible and mellowed Islam further, to the point where except for scripture, little remained of what divided the one from the other. No couplet I know captures this more succinctly than one by Kabir that I learned as a child and have never forgotten:

Moko kahaan dhoondhate bande, Mai to tere paas me;
                 Na Mai Mandir, na Mai Masjid, naa Kaaba Kailash me.

(Where dost thou seek me oh devotee, for I am right beside thee; Not in a temple, nor in a mosque, not at the Qaaba, nor on Mount Kailash, shalt thou find me).

This profound reconciliation between Hinduism and Sufi Islam is perhaps best reflected in the writings of Guru Nanak and the other gurus of Sikhism. And it was not confined to the villages. It was codified by no less august a person than Emperor Akbar and his counsellors in the Ibadat khana, as the Din-e-Ilahi, the religion of God, at the height of the Moghul empire. Some British historians have described it as an attempt at finding a new religion based on universal tolerance. The Encyclopedia Britannica dismissed it as a religion that never had more than 19 followers.

Emperor Akbar. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In fact, Akbar had no such intention. The Din-e-Ilahi was no more than a distillation of what today’s corporate world would call “current best practices” of the heterodox population of India. It propagated sulh-i-kul – universal peace – and urged ten virtues upon the realm. Among these were: liberality and beneficence; forbearance from bad actions and repulsion of anger with mildness; abstinence from worldly desires; frequent meditation on the consequences of one’s actions and “good society with brothers so that their will may have precedence over one’s own”, in short, putting the well-being of one’s fellows ahead of one’s own.

Unlike Emperor Ashoka, Akbar issued no edicts. Nor did he create a religious police to oversee their observance. The significance of the Din-e-Ilahi lay in what it did not prescribe: It did not ascribe primacy to Islam, and it did not give a special place to Muslim clergy within the structure of the state. Instead, it declared emphatically that “he (the emperor, i.e. the state) would recognise no difference between [religions], his object being to unite all men in a common bond of peace”. The entire document was, therefore, a restatement of Dharma in a contemporary form.

Dharma in Hinduism

In Hinduism, the practice of Dharma has been – and remains – sullied by its endorsement of the notion of ritual purity and pollution that is associated with caste. But its core idea, that true religion is not what we preach but what we practice, has remained the driving force behind all movements for religious reform from the Buddha till the present day. It is what Swami Vivekananda electrified the ‘Parliament of Religions of the World’ in Chicago in 1893 with, by explaining that Hinduism does not merely tolerate, but accepts, all the great religions of the world because they are like different paths up the same mountain, or different rivers that flow into the same sea.

In Pakistan, the same impulse has led to a sustained study of the writings of Dara Shikoh, Shah Jahan’s eldest son and heir apparent, a scholar of Sanskrit and translator of the Bhagavad Gita, who had wanted to promulgate the Din-e-Ilahi before his life was cut short by Aurangzeb. In 2010, the noted playwright, Shahid Nadeem, wrote a play, ‘Dara’, that highlighted his syncretism, as a protest against the rampant Islamic sectarianism that Partition had unleashed upon Pakistan and was, even then, tearing it apart.

Three years later, two Pakistani historians from GC University, Faisalabad, published a peer-reviewed paper in the International Journal of History and Research titled ‘Dara Shikoh: Mystical And Philosophical Discourse‘, which highlighted his belief that the fact that “the mystical traditions of both Hinduism and Islam spoke of the same truth.”

In 13th-century France, Roman Catholicism gave no quarter to the Cathars, and decimated them. In Syria, the attack on Bashar Assad’s secular Baathist regime was preceded by two years of relentless demonisation by Wahhabi and Salafi clerics. In Pakistan, Salafi extremism has come close to killing the syncretism that the country had known before Partition. But that syncretism is still very much alive in India.

It is what made Indian Muslims virtually immune to the lure of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Numbers tell the tale: against 27,000 to 31,000 Europeans, only 106 Indian Muslims joined it. Of these, only three went directly from India. The rest were recruited while they were migrant workers in the Gulf.

This is the awe-inspiring syncretism of religion in India that the votaries of Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra are bent on destroying.

The Congress needs to rediscover the idealism of its early days to succeed in harnessing the idealism of youth.

A bike rally during the Ram Navami procession in Kolkata in 2018. Credit: Shome Basu

Almost four weeks have gone by since the Congress suffered its second crushing defeat at the hands of the BJP, but Rahul Gandhi, still the titular head of the party, has yet to break his silence. So far, only one of its senior leaders, Veerappa Moilly, has had the courage to tell him what every member of the party knows: that every day of silence is strengthening the impression that he has thrown in the towel and bowed out of politics altogether.

For a party that has severely discouraged the development of collective leadership and relied ever more heavily on the fading charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to woo voters, this is the kiss of death. Rahul Gandhi may have been a reluctant Congress president. But he did accept the responsibility that goes with the position. So, however disappointed he may be, he has a duty not to destroy the party along with himself.

The challenge he faces is a Promethean one. It is to transform a once-dominant party that has been fighting only rearguard actions to prevent a further erosion of power for the past four decades, into one that admits that it has nothing more to lose and go back on the offensive again.

To do this, he has to infuse the Congress party with a renewed commitment to the nation that Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel and Maulana Azad had set out to build. This was an India free from religious and caste prejudice, in which people belonging to more than a score of ethno-linguistic nationalities could live as equals and prosper. Only if the Congress succeeds in rediscovering the idealism of its early days will it succeed in harnessing the idealism of youth to the freedom fathers’ idea of India once again.

File picture of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar vallbhbhai Patel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Soft Hindutva

The first step on this road must be to formally repudiate its policy of “soft Hindutva”. Soft Hindutva is the descendant of ‘soft secularism’, a policy of continual appeasement that the party adopted in the 1980s when it began to lose its dominant party status within Indian democracy. The turning point was its opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid in 1985, followed by its overruling of the Supreme court on the triple talaq issue in 1985.

Since then, it has made one compromise after the other till it lost its moral standing with the people. Thus, it allowed Tasleema Nasreen to be chased out of India by Muslim bigots after she had fled to India in search of safety from the bigots of Bangladesh; banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses; allowed Gujarat to ban Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Mahatma Gandhi; allowed  the removal of A.K. Ramanujam’s study of the Ramayana from the Delhi university Syllabus, and banned Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism altogether. Most shamefully, it did not lift a finger to enable M.F. Husain, the great artist who was chased out of India by the goons of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad for daring, as a Muslim, to paint images of scantily clad gods and goddesses, to return to his beloved India even to die here.

After its defeat in 2014, the Congress’s soft secularism has degenerated further into soft Hindutva. This  reached its nadir when the party began to highlight Rahul Gandhi entering temples, praying and emerging with a teeka on his forehead before the Gujarat elections. Automated calls began asking subscribers, “Don’t you know that Rahul Gandhi is a Janeu-dhari Hindu(i.e. a Brahmin)?”

Soft Hindutva has not only further marginalised the already besieged secular elements in the country, but also legitimised the Sangh’s ‘hard’ Hindutva. This is abundantly clear from Narendra Modi’s brazen claim to the legacy of Swami Vivekananda; his appropriation of Sardar Patel for the RSS without a murmur of protest from the Congress, and the outrageous claim to the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi he made on Gandhi Jayanti last year. Both Rahul and Sonia Gandhi attended the function, but instead of walking out in protest, they sat silently while Modi took away India’s proudest legacy. It was as if, for them, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse was an accident of history: the act of a single deranged fanatic like Gavrilo Princip’s at Sarajevo in 1914, and that the carnage at Ahmedabad in 2002 never happened.

The Congress needs a long period of introspection on its own past errors, before it can even hope to make a comeback. If there is a single “good” outcome it can take away from its defeat, it is the realisation that there is no middle ground in the battle of ideas that lies ahead. To combat the poison of Hindutva, the Congress needs to stop parroting imported words like secularism and pluralism, both of which have  clichés, and rediscover the guiding philosophy that has underpinned the practice of all religions in India over the past two-and-a-half millennia. This is ‘Dharma’.

What is Dharma

Dharma is the original faith of Vedic India. There is no reference in the Vedas to Hindu Dharma, because the word Hindu was brought to India from Persia more than a millennium later, ironically, by the Muslims. Dharma was not a religion in the modern, contentious, sense of the word because the Messianic religions that now dominate discourses on religion had yet to be born. Dharma defined the right way of living: it prescribed how people needed to relate to each other and to the wider world around them.

The Rig veda differentiates between different forms of dharma, such as prathama Dharma, Raj Dharma and Swadharma. But every one of these centers around the concept of human Duty, which was “to Uphold, to Support, to Nourish”. Dharma is what became Karma Yoga in Hinduism during the classical period.

“Dharma” was the word  Gautama Buddha used to describe his sermons on the four noble truths and the eight-fold path. Western students of comparative religion, have done Buddhism a disservice by presenting it as a new religion, because this has made it one among several religions, including the three Messianic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Buddha’s use of the Vedic term suggests that he considered himself to be a social reformer and not a prophet. What he had rebelled against was the corruption of Dharma, and the growth of Adharma. These were  caused by self-absorption, avarice, expensive and impoverishing ritual, and Brahminical control. Buddhism was, in fact, the first great recorded rebellion against organised religion in human history.

Buddha’s use of the Vedic term suggests that he considered himself to be a social reformer and not a prophet. Photo: PTI

A critical difference

Describing Buddhism as one of several prophetic religions has obscured a critical difference between Hinduism, Buddhism and other mystical religions, and the Messianic ones. This is that Messianic religions have to be professed. Belonging to one of them requires a profession of faith in it and a repudiation of other faiths. It is a surrender of oneself to the ‘true’ God, whose reward is the possibility of gaining absolution for one’s sins through repentance, in this life.

Dharma, by contrast, has to be lived. Only virtue in this life can gain the soul freedom from the chain of rebirth. It requires no profession of faith, no submission to a single prophet. And it offers no easy absolution from sin. It is the Hindu way of referring to Buddhism, as Bauddha Dharma, and the remark that Hindus frequently make even today – “yeh mera Dharma hai” – that capture its essence.

Most of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s supposedly chameleon-like behaviour, and his failure to act decisively at critical moments, stemmed from his conviction that the battle against Hindu extremism could only be fought from within the Sangh parivar.

There is no limit to the lengths to which politicians will go to deceive the public. Facing a general election that they can lose, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have got the jitters. So they have suddenly developed a profound admiration for Atal Behari Vajpayee. Ministers in the Uttar Pradesh state government went out carrying urns containing his ashes for immersion in the 16 rivers of Uttar Pradesh. But it is this same party that rejected each and every tenet of government that Vajpayee had espoused, carried out an internal coup d’etat against his successors L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, rejected Advani’s nominee for leadership of the party, Sushma Swaraj, and handed the baton to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. And it is Modi who has handed over Vajpayee’s BJP, which was a mildly right-wing, only culturally Hindu party, to the RSS. That is what has wrecked the Indian economy, and turned India into a county ruled by vigilantes.

What has given Modi and Shah the opportunity to turn Vajpayee’s death into an apolitical circus? It is the English speaking, Left-leaning, secular intelligentsia of this country. Instead of remembering Vajpayee for his contributions to peace and communal harmony, one writer after the next has delved into his motives, with the purpose of showing that he was either ‘the right man in the wrong party’ or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That was all that Modi and Shah, with their so far infallible killer instinct in politics, needed.

What our secular intelligentsia missed, or did not wish to acknowledge, is that it was not Vajpayee who changed during the 65 years between his joining the RSS in 1939 and his resignation from prime ministership in 2004, but the world around him. Most of his supposedly chameleon-like behaviour, and his failure to act decisively at critical moments, stemmed from his conviction that the battle against Hindu extremism could only be fought from within the Sangh parivar. His ambivalence resulted from the compromises this harsh truth imposed upon him.

It must be remembered that Vajpayee joined the RSS in a completely different world. It was a year before the Muslim League had even committed itself to the creation of a separate Muslim state at Lahore. At that point the RSS was still headed by K.B. Hedgewar, who was a Hindu nationalist, but not virulently anti-Muslim. In his youth, Hedgewar had belonged to the Anushilan Samiti, a revolutionary group that counted Shri Aurobindo and Bankim Chandra among its members. Hedgewar founded the Hindu Mahasabha, which became the parliamentary wing of Hindu nationalism. The extent to which it was part of the nationalist mainstream is reflected by the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru asked its leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee to join his cabinet, and Mookerjee accepted.

All that changed, of course, with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. We know very little about how this affected Vajpayee, who was a very junior member of the RSS, having become a pracharak only six months earlier. But an essay he wrote many years later suggests that one of the things that had attracted him to the RSS and possibly made him decide to stay in it was its explicit rejection of caste within its cadres. His brother had joined the Sangh before him, and at its first training camp had refused to share food from the common kitchen. Vajpayee wrote, not without a touch of humour, that it had taken the Sangh only 44 hours to make him change his mind.

But there can be little doubt that on other issues, Vajpayee found himself increasingly at odds with the RSS as it developed under Hedgewar’s successor, M.S. Golwalkar. The key issue, that Ramachandra Guha has so succinctly described, was Golwalkar’s virulent hatred of Muslims. For, in the same essay, Vajpayee wrote:

It was Islam, not Hinduism, Vajpayee went on, that found it difficult to come  to terms with religious pluralism, because of its Messianic origins.

This statement is of profound significance because it defines the limits of his “Hindutva” and explains his growing distaste for the direction in which the RSS was trying to drag the Hindu community, which is Hindu majoritarianism. For while his observation was probably true for the Muslims who wanted Partition and left India in its aftermath, it was not true for the 45 million who did not leave, and showed, with their feet, their trust in free India.

Narendra Modi, A.B. Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. Credit: PTI/Files

In the decades that followed, Vajpayee could not but have noticed what the RSS so studiously chooses to ignore – that while sectarian strife continued and became more entrenched in Pakistan, there has not been a major Sunni-Shia riot (an annual feature in British days) in India in the half century since independence. What this showed him was that the Hindu ethos of “Sarva Dharma Sambhava”, enunciated explicitly by Swami Vivekananda at Chicago in 1893, and explicitly rejected by Muslims in Pakistan, had been increasingly internalised by the Muslims of India.

This was the understanding of India that Vajpayee brought to the BJP, and when the chance finally came, to government. It explains why he did not speak, at least publicly, at moments of crisis like the destruction of the Babri Masjid, or after the Gujarat riots. For the dilemma he faced is perhaps the oldest in politics: “Will I achieve more by resigning, or by staying in office and waiting for an opportunity to repair the damage?”

It explains why he took the BJP into a merger with the Janata Party in 1977, instead of simply lending support from the outside. It explains why he initially opposed the party’s withdrawal from it. It explains his distancing himself from Advani’s Rath Yatra; it explains his determination (shared by Advani) to broaden the base of the BJP by opening its doors to scholars, journalists, retired administrators and army officers who had had nothing to do with the RSS. It explains his willingness to jettison core elements of the RSS’s agenda, such as the imposition of a uniform civil code, and the revocation of Articles 370 and 35(a) of the constitution to abolish Kashmir’s special status within India, and a tacit decision to put Ayodhya on the back burner where there was neither a mosque nor a temple but, by implication, every one was free to worship whomsoever they wished.

Vajpayee’s true nature surfaced when he became the prime minister in 1998. He began by not including a single member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in his cabinet. The VHP took its revenge by raping Christian nuns, burning churches and killing missionaries in the Dang region of Gujarat, and thrusting him right back into the dilemma that he thought he had escaped. Vajpayee responded by repeatedly demanding that the BJP state government control the situation. When it did (not could) not, he went on a fast unto death. Given his love of good food and drink, it is doubtful that he would have sustained it for long, but it had the necessary shock effect on the state government, and the attacks on Christians stopped.

Four months later, Vajpayee muzzled the zealots in the Sangh parivar by hammering out an agreement with his coalition partners to control the extremists in the Sangh parivar if they stopped criticising the BJP in their public utterances. To implement this, he created a coordination committee with defence minister George Fernandes as its convener. When the Ahmedabad riots broke out and Modi refused to take Vajpayee’s frantic phone calls through the morning of February 28, it was George Fernandes whom he sent to Ahmedabad to call out the army late that afternoon.

As has been extensively described, Vajpayee’s vision of peace extended beyond the boundaries of India and encompassed Pakistan and the whole of South Asia. It is difficult not to conclude that he chose to swallow the personal insult of the Kargil war, declared a unilateral ceasefire in Kashmir in 2000, and extended the hand of friendship to Pakistan from Srinagar in April 2003 because he understood that Indian Muslims would remain a threatened species so long as India-Pakistan tensions continued. Finally, while his overtures to Kashmir and Pakistan are well remembered, no one has commented on the way in which he blocked the dispatch of Indian troops to Iraq at a meeting of the cabinet committee on security in July 2003, hours before they were scheduled to board the ship for Basra, after this had been agreed to by both Advani and Jaswant Singh during their visits to the US.

For me, however, Vajpayee’s finest hour was the way he accepted the NDA’s defeat in the vote of confidence in 1999, and submitted his government’s resignation to the president, when he knew that the vote had passed only because Giridhar Gamang, who had already taken over as chief minister of Odisha, had come back  to vote against Vajpayee because he had not yet submitted his resignation from the Lok Sabha. It was not only his, but Indian democracy’s finest hour.

Such a long career in politics cannot be without its blemishes and Vajpayee is no exception. The two that stand out in my mind is his staying on in the RSS after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and his ringing endorsement of Modi at the Goa meeting of the BJP’s national executive in April 2002, when the killing and post-riot persecution of Muslims had still not ended.

Speaking for myself, I can try to understand the first, but cannot condone the second. Vajpayee knew from intelligence reports that Modi had ordered the corpses of the Godhra victims to be sent to Ahmedabad because the RSS and VHP had well laid plans to start a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. It is now common knowledge that he intended to sack Modi at the national executive meeting in Goa two months later. So when he was checkmated by, among others, Arun Jaitley, who brought and presented Modi to the assembled members as the hero of Gujarat before Vajpayee’s address, why did he not assert his pre-eminence and explain to the audience why Modi had to go inspite of having won the Gujarat assembly elections? Worse, why did he go on the dais and put the blame for the riots in Ahmedabad on a still-to-be-proven Muslim conspiracy in Godhra?

The truth is that this single failure of nerve has set off a chain of events which today jeopardises India’s very future as a viable nation state. Its first victim was he himself. As both Ram Bilas Paswan and Chandrababu Naidu said while leaving the NDA after the 2004 election defeat, they and the coalition paid the price for Ahmedabad in the 2004 elections. Its second victim was the moderate, forward-looking BJP that Vajpayee and Advani had fashioned in the years after 1991. The RSS pinned the blame for the defeat on “the Vajpayee line” of cosying up to the opponents of a Hindu rashtra, staged an internal coup within the BJP and reimposed hardline Hindutva upon the party.

Vajpayee’s evasion thus changed the course of history, for had the NDA won in 2004 there would not have been the revolt in the RSS against Vajpayee and Advani’s attempt to modernise and civilise the BJP. Narendra Modi would have remained in Gujarat; Amit Shah would probably have been in jail for murder; the Kashmir dispute would have almost certainly been resolved; and the economy would not have collapsed, robbing 40 million youth of their future, after 2011. Most important of all, India would have remained a country governed by law instead of vigilantes posing as saviours of Hinduism

Today, the budding opposition alliance does not have to take on the Modi government’s performance point-by-point to prove its ineffectiveness and its contempt for the canons of democracy. All it has to do is to hold up the mirror of the Vajpayee government’s performance to Modi’s face, and let the public see the image it reflects.

https://thewire.in/politics/atal-bihari-vajpayee-narendra-modi

What really happened at the not-at-all-secret meeting with former Pakistani officials at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s house.

When Congress party chief Rahul Gandhi threw Mani Shankar Aiyar to the wolves after he described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a ‘neech kism ka aadmi‘, he presented Modi with a juicy target. On December 8, at a rally in Banaskantha, Modi alleged that after he became prime minister in 2014, Aiyar had travelled to Pakistan to get him “removed” to improve relations between the two countries. Modi said the Congress had then tried to muffle the episode, and did not take any action against Aiyar.

Two days later, at a pre-election rally in Palanpur in Gujarat, he roared, “Now, news is that the Pakistan high commissioner, the foreign minister and Manmohan Singh met at his (Aiyar’s) house just before the Gujarat polls…This is a serious issue. I want to ask what was the reason for this secret meeting with Pakistanis”. To this he attached a seemingly unrelated statement: “Former Pakistan Army Director General Arshad Rafiq was willing to help make [Congress leader] Ahmed Patel the chief minister.”

Political mudslinging is routine in democratic elections, and its pitch invariably rises as voting day draws near. But I can think of no parallel in history to this relentless public demonisation of a single individual who holds no political office and has been disavowed by his own political party. It tells us two things about Modi: that he is seriously rattled by the feedback the BJP  has been getting from Gujarat; and that he will stop at nothing to secure victory in Gujarat.

Here is a list of falsehoods that Modi has been relentlessly propagating.

First, as almost everyone who attended the dinner (including this writer) has emphasised, there was nothing secret about the meeting. The invitations were not sent on WhatsApp, Express VPN, Viber or any other encrypted messaging system, but on ordinary Gmail. The first invitations were sent out almost a month earlier and were followed up by Aiyar’s office. This was followed by phone calls from either Aiyar or his secretary to determine if one was coming. It is difficult to imagine that none of these calls are monitored.

The government was fully aware of the meeting because two of the guests, Manmohan Singh and Hamid Ansari, have  ‘Z’ category protection from the Special Protection Group (SPG). The SPG not only inspect the premises and cordon off access points if they feel it is necessary, but have to be given a full list of the guests for pre-vetting. Modi has asked why Aiyar did not “inform” (i.e. get permission from) the Ministry of External Affairs when he was entertaining the Pakistan high commissioner and foreign minister (he conveniently forgot the word ‘former’). The answer is that since Aiyar is neither a minister nor a government official, no such prior information is required nor expected.

Third, there was no speculation about Delhi’s hottest topic – the Gujarat elections. The polls were not mentioned at all at the meeting. Even the word Gujarat was not uttered during the discussions either before or after dinner.

Fourth, Ahmed Patel’s name never came up at any point during the meeting. Modi’s repeated assertion that the Congress party is taking help from Pakistan’s intelligence to oust the BJP in Gujarat and intends to make “their man” the chief minister is based on a single Facebook post by someone calling himself Sardar Arshad Rafiq. The post has been shunned by every news channel in India except the notoriously pro-Modi NewsX, and is almost certainly manufactured by the same BJP troll factory that dubbed ‘Pakistan zindabad‘ onto a video of the JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar’s February 9, 2016 speech on campus to facilitate his arrest and incarceration in Tihar Jail two days later.

How easy it is to do this was demonstrated on December 4 when, hours after Modi reminded listeners at a rally in Gujarat that Aurangzeb too had come to the throne because he inherited it, a fake video began to circulate on YouTube, showing Rahul Gandhi signing his nomination papers at the party office in front of a portrait of Aurangzeb. The video had been morphed from the real footage which showed a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. Modi, of course, twisted history completely out of shape, for Aurangzeb came to the throne through war and fratricide.

So if the invitees did not talk about Gujarat or Ahmed Patel, what did we talk about? The short answer is the quest for peace. The bond that united everyone in the room was a firm belief that neither India nor Pakistan could ever achieve their full potential without burying the hatchet. And this could not be done without burying the past. Contrary to what Modi wants people to believe, the gathering was not one of doves. On the contrary, the majority of the former foreign secretaries and high commissioners to Pakistan present that evening were sceptical of the possibility of restoring peace in the near future.

The discussion centred on the obstacles that needed to be removed first in both countries. These included not only the intensifying militancy in Kashmir, but also the role of the Pakistani army in nurturing terrorism and of the ISI in Kashmir. Several of us asked what the point was in seeking a diplomatic solution, when the Pakistan army so obviously had the final say on relations with India. Some suggested that it might be better to involve the armies of both countries in the talks, but this did not gain much traction.

Former Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri took pains to dispel this pessimism. He reaffirmed, not for the first time, that there was indeed a four-point agreement between our countries signed by Manmohan Singh and former Pakistan President Parvez Musharraf; and that despite everything that had happened since 2007, this remained the only viable framework for peace. He  asserted, as he had in his book Neither Hawk nor Dove, that Musharraf had constantly kept four top army commanders, including former army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and the ISI chief in the loop.

He was emphatic that this was the only way forward and that the Pakistan army was not as rabidly Islamist as the Indian media often portrayed it to be. He pointed out that by the time an officer got to be a general, he had spent several years obtaining a degree at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), where there were students from 30 countries, and had attended several courses at military academies abroad. Thus no matter where he began, his entire life was spent broadening his perspectives.

However, Kasuri expressed great anxiety over the worsening situation in Kashmir. “No government in Pakistan will be able to take a step forward towards a settlement if the situation in Kashmir continues to worsen.”

Why is Modi going to such extreme lengths to rouse Islamophobia in Gujarat? The only possible explanation is that some difference in the response of his audiences during his recent spate of rallies has made him sense the possibility of defeat in Gujarat. Islamophobia had enabled him to snatch a victory after the Gujarat riots in 2002. He believes that it will enable him to do so again.

At first sight this looks like exaggerated paranoia, for in the 2014 elections the BJP had secured a mammoth 60% of the vote in Gujarat, while the share of the Congress had plummeted to 33%. But a closer look shows that a large part of this resulted from the abstention of Congress voters from casting their vote. The voter turnout in Gujarat was the third lowest in the country, after Kashmir and Bihar.

This time, the turnout in the first phase, although still lower than in 2012, has shown a substantial recovery, especially in the traditionally Congress Saurashtra region. Reports from Surat suggest that a substantial protest vote has developed there as well. So Modi’s apprehension may be well-grounded. That would explain his willingness to play with fire and stoke Islamophobia once more.

https://thewire.in/204631/mani-shankar-aiyar-pakistan-meeting-gujarat-polls/

Rahul has committed the cardinal sin of politics: he has abandoned his bravest general at the height of a battle that he could very well have won.

By disgracing Mani Shankar Aiyar and virtually throwing him out of the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi may think that he has improved its chances of winning the elections in Gujarat. But if there is any conclusion that not only Gujarat’s but also India’s voters will draw from his hasty rebuke of the Congress party’s most senior, most loyal, most eloquent and most fearless member, it is not that the Congress is morally superior to the BJP, but that he is unfit to lead the Congress and unfit to govern the country. For Rahul has committed the cardinal sin of politics, and statecraft: he has abandoned his bravest general at the height of a battle that he could very well have won.

What is worse, he has cut down the only member of the Congress party who was doing any serious damage to the image that Narendra Modi has built of himself in the eyes of the people. That is, of course, why Modi singled him out for destruction. Instead of defending Aiyar or, better still, leading a counterattack on Modi, Rahul and the entire Congress party joined in his destruction. No matter what gloss his party’s spin doctors now try to put on this action, there is only one conclusion that the public can draw from this: Rahul does not have what it takes to be a leader, let alone the prime minister of the second largest country in the world.

To appreciate the sheer magnitude of Rahul’s loss of nerve, it is necessary to follow the train of events that preceded his public rebuke of Aiyar closely. While inaugurating the B.R. Ambedkar International Centre in Delhi, Modi said that the Congress had, for years, suppressed the memory of Ambedkar and belittled his contribution to nation building, solely to promote the “interests” of one family. No one was left in any doubt about which family he was referring to.

Modi’s remark was, to say the least, in poor taste. As the British had found out during the first Round Table Conference in 1931, Ambedkar was an ardent nationalist and the respect the Congress held him in is writ large on every page of the constitution. The Ambedkar Centre was conceived by the Congress government of Narasimha Rao in 1992, and if there was any reason for the delay in its creation it has to be shared by every political party in the country including the BJP. Modi could have taken credit for expediting it, but it was a truly national project so there could not have been a better moment to remind all Indians of their common commitment to the removal of the inequities of caste from our country. But Modi could not resist the temptation to take a cheap, unsubstantiated dig at not just the Congress, but the Gandhi family.

It would have been surprising indeed if this had not left a bad taste in the mouths of many of those present. So Aiyar had every right to voice his distaste for what Modi had said. Why, then, did Rahul turn so hastily, and so publicly, upon him? The official excuse is that by calling Modi a “Neech kisam ka aadmi”, he had given Modi a chance to claim that the Congress was denigrating him as a member of a ‘neech’ jaat (caste). This would alienate some of the lower castes who traditionally supported the Congress and give Modi a victory in Gujarat. Rahul swallowed this hook, line and sinker. As Congress president, he did not even ask Aiyar for an explanation first. He simply joined Modi in denigrating a senior and loyal member of his own party.

Rahul is so far removed from the party he now commands that he did not remember that Modi had tried to play the same card when Priyanka Gandhi had similarly called him ‘neech’ during an election rally in Amethi in 2014. But Modi’s ploy did not work, for the Congress candidate won in Amethi by 1.07 lakh votes. He should have remembered, because he was the candidate.

In Hindi, there is no automatic connection between the words ‘neech’ and ‘jaat’. The closest translation of ‘neech’ in English is ‘immoral’ or ‘unsavoury’. But Modi’s attempt to link it to caste in Gujarat had nothing to do with attracting lower caste votes. His precise statement was, “They have called me a neech jaat. This is an insult to Gujaratis.” This was therefore an appeal to Gujarati nationalism, but one designed to capture the vote of upper caste and upwardly mobile Gujaratis only – so the Patidars. That he felt compelled to use it again shows how uncertain the BJP is of retaining the Patidar vote.

How much damage has Rahul’s abandonment of his own general done to the Congress? There is no way to tell for sure, but it will be greatest among the swing voters who voted for the BJP and forsook the Congress for the first time in 2014. The BJP’s vote share jumped by 12%, from 48% in the 2012 assembly elections to 60% in the parliamentary elections of 2014. The Congress’s vote fell by 7%, from 40% to 33%. If the 12% switch back to the Congress, the BJP will still have a wafer-thin margin of 3%. This is what Modi is sparing no effort to retain. Rahul’s action has made it a lot easier for him to do so.

https://thewire.in/203789/rahul-gandhi-narendra-modi-mani-shankar-aiyar/

The Emergency may be the most controversial part of her legacy but Mrs Gandhi’s greatest contribution to India was the way she handled the economic, political and foreign policy challenges the country faced after 1966.

Indira Gandhi is the most controversial prime minister that India has had. A third of a century after her tragic and untimely death, an older generation of Indians remembers her mainly for India’s victory in the 1971 war, and the Emergency. Scholars have also accused her of undermining democracy by splitting the Congress in 1969, repeatedly sacking chief ministers to concentrate power in her own hands, and splitting the party a second time for the same purpose in January 1978. But the poor of India remember her for her programme of ‘Garibi Hatao’ and still call her ‘Amma’. On the foreign policy side, all of us, without exception, remember with pride the way in which she stood up to Nixon and Kissinger during the run-up to the Bangladesh war. . .

The end of the Nehruvian honeymoon

So vivid is the image we have of the later Indira that very few remember the young and unsure, woman who came to power after the sudden death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966. Even fewer, therefore, appreciate the difficult circumstances in which she did what she did and her immense contribution to stabilising the nascent India she inherited. For in January 1966, the country was in the grip of a multi-faceted crisis, and did not even know it.

The production of food grain had hit a plateau in 1961. The resulting food shortage had combined with two wars in 1962 and 1965, and the worst drought of India’s history in 1965, to generate the kind of inflation the country had never known and therefore had never dealt with. Inflation and a closed economy had landed us in a foreign exchange crisis – the first of many. Devaluing the rupee was the only way forward, and the World Bank had been urging India to do this since 1961. But the Nehru and Shastri governments had procrastinated till India had run out of time.

As if this was not enough, two wars in four years had emptied India’s coffers. And two successive droughts had brought the poor to the verge of starvation, to be saved only by PL 480 wheat from the United States.

The challenges she faced within the party were no less severe. In 1966, most people believed that Indira Gandhi had been chosen as prime minister because of her father’s charisma and because the “syndicate” believed that she would be more malleable than her seasoned opponent, Morarji Desai. But the party’s organisational leaders were also disenchanted with Nehruvian socialism. Huge sums of money had been sunk into heavy industries in the public sector that had yet to yield even a notional surplus on investment, let alone profits and dividends that could be ploughed back into growth and employment. The increasing uncertainty about finding jobs had created a rising wave of discontent among students. In mid-1966, this had turned violent.

These challenges could not be met without taking hard decisions, but the country was not aware of the need for them because it did not know that it was in a crisis. The glow of independence had not faded. The 1950s had been a honeymoon period in which almost nothing went wrong: food production grew rapidly because cultivation was extended to most of the remaining arable land in the country. Industrialisation was not hindered by foreign exchange shortages because of the sterling balances inherited from the war. Nehru had carved a niche for India on the world stage. People, therefore, trusted the government implicitly and could not imagine that the difficulties they had faced were anything more than temporary.

The first devaluation and after

Indira Gandhi’s first important decision therefore shattered this cocoon of security. In June 1966, she devalued the rupee by 57.5%. The move shocked the country and aroused bitter criticism in parliament from both Left and Right. Had it succeeded in rebalancing the economy speedily, her future economic policies might have been very different. But first, a $900 million aid package that the World Bank had promised to meet the increased cost of imports till exports picked up was held up in the US Congress. Second, India was hit by its second consecutive, and equally severe, drought in 1966. As a result, by the time the promised aid began to trickle in, prices had risen by a full 32% and neutralised the price advantage that devaluation had been intended to give to India’s exports.

The devaluation did eventually boost India’s exports. From barely one per cent a year between 1952-53 and 1965-66, export growth jumped to 14% a year between 1968-69 and 1982-83. The Green Revolution, which had been piloted through a recalcitrant Congress by food minister C. Subramaniam, also took off in 1967. So good was the response of the economy in the years that followed that despite another drought in 1972 and a four-fold rise in oil prices the next year, India began to record balance of payments surpluses in January 1976, and continued to do so till the second oil price hike in 1979-80.

But it took two years for this recovery to begin. By then, the Congress had lost four major state assemblies and come within 10 seats of losing its majority in parliament in the 1967 general elections. This, and a pronounced leaning towards the left-wing of the party under the influence of ideologues like P.N Haksar and Mohaan Kumaramangalam, was the true reason behind the Congress split of 1969.

Who split the Congress?

Critics have accused Indira Gandhi of being an autocratic prime minister who weakened Indian democracy split, citing her splitting of the Congress in 1969 and her declaration of the Emergency in 1975 as proof. The truth is rather more complex. Space does not permit a study of the Emergency, but there is ample evidence that the 1969 split was forced upon her by the party organisation in an attempt to wrest control over economic policy

The spark that set it off was the selection of a successor to President Zakir Husain after his untimely death in 1969. The syndicate chose N. Sanjiva Reddy over the incumbent vice-president and briefly acting president, V.V Giri, and did it rather obviously without consulting Mrs. Gandhi. She had every good reason to oppose this. First, V.V Giri was already the acting president. Second, choosing Reddy broke an immensely important unwritten convention drawn from Westminster’s democracy, that like the British constitutional monarch, the Indian head of state had to be an eminent, non-political, person. V.V Giri fulfilled this requirement because, as vice-president, he had not only been far removed from current politics but was a highly respected veteran trade union leader. Sanjiva Reddy was, on the other hand, very much a practicing politician.

Despite this, Indira Gandhi first sought to avoid a showdown with the syndicate. She filed Reddy’s nomination but when Giri decided to compete as an independent, announced that she preferred an open vote. Had the syndicate agreed, there would have been no split in the party when Giri won. But by then, its members had the bit between their teeth so when Congress president S. Nijalingappa found that two-thirds of the Congress parliamentary party had declined Indira Gandhi’s implicit invitation to revolt against the organisation, he took the unprecedented step of expelling the sitting prime minister from the Congress party, nor renamed Congress (O) while Indira Gandhi’s party was called Congress (R). In the March 1971 general election, she won handily, securing 350 seats to the 51 seats won by the ‘National Democratic Front’ led by the Congress (O), Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the Swatantra and socialist parties.

Over the years, many personal motives have been ascribed to Mrs. Gandhi for defying the collective will of the party organisation and refusing to resign. But history will back her because she was defending not only the primacy of the prime minister over the party but the party in parliament over the party organization. As the eminent French political scientist, Maurice Duverger, pointed out in his classic 1957 work Party Politics, these are the two fundamental principles that distinguish democratic from ideological political parties.

The birth of Bangladesh

Indira Gandhi’s determination to be a prime minister in substance and not only in form was vindicated within only days of the 1971 election, when the Bangladesh crisis erupted. Only a leader with a clear vision of India and immense national pride would have been able to resist the subtle blandishments of western leaders who wanted India to absorb the 10 million refugees from East Pakistan and let sleeping dogs lie. The members of the syndicate were all seasoned politicians, but they were, in the end, provincial leaders without this vision. It is, therefore, doubtful whether they would have remained unmoved. Indira Gandhi, by contrast, had inherited a clear-cut idea of India from her father, and developed it through her own education and experience. So she had no difficulty in giving the West a clear-cut warning of her intentions and developing a multi-pronged strategy to safeguard India’s security.

Contrary to a near-universal belief, Indira Gandhi did not have her heart set upon breaking up Pakistan from the very beginning. Confronted by a seemingly endless flow of refugees into West Bengal, Mrs. Gandhi first did her best to persuade General Yahya Khan to allow the Awami League of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman to form the government in Pakistan. When she failed, she sent emissaries to all major countries, and herself went to several European capitals and to Washington, to make they put pressure on Pakistan to release Sheikh Mujib. But to insure against failure she made the army train the Mukti Bahini, and draw up contingency plans to invade East Pakistan if it became necessary. This was her second use of both stick and carrot to achieve her goal, the first having been the election of V.V Giri as president. In both cases, force was her weapon of last resort.

The Bangladesh war, and the Congress’s sweeping victory in the state elections a year later, marked the high point of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. The Emergency is considered the lowest. But as I have argued earlier in these columns, it was the product of her understandable, and probably justified, belief that stepping down from the prime ministership then would have left the country in even greater turmoil than it already was in. She also redeemed herself in the peoples’ eyes by resisting every exhortation to extend the Emergency and holding a fresh general election in 1977 despite the near-certain knowledge that she would lose.

https://thewire.in/198267/birth-centenary-need-pay-tribute-early-indira-gandhi/

Gasification of rice straws can solve the problem of air pollution, and with it many others, if only the government was willing to employ it.

Delhi’s air pollution has reached a level of severity where alarm has turned into panic. Every morning its citizens wake up with dread in their hearts, to a dark grey sky. These are not clouds: take a flight to Mumbai, or anywhere for that matter, and at 3,000 feet you will burst forth into a crystal blue sky. Below, on the ground, visibility is down to between 100 and 200 metres; the air spells of smoke. Children waiting for school buses, or the hapless ones who are forced to live in slums cough and sneeze in the frigid, poisonous air. Every day for the past nearly two weeks, the air quality index has been between 400 and 478 – over eight times the permissible maximum. By contrast it is currently 16 at Ooty, Wellington and Coonoor in the Nilgiris and not much higher in Shimla and Kasauli. But only the rich and the retired have the privilege of escaping to these havens in the mountains or to others by the sea.

The threat pollution poses to people is increasing. But contrary to what some environmentalists would have us believe, it is an unequally distributed threat. If you are in your teens or even your 60s, healthy, active, do manual work or play sports, and don’t smoke, the impact is minimal. It is your infants, your children below five or six and your aged parents – who are frail, may be prone to asthma and cannot stop coughing – who are face imminent risk of death. Both the very young and the elderly cannot be treated with antibiotics, or for very long, without causing complications.

So the smog prevents their lungs from healing and turns these into factories for growth of bacteria. Pollution therefore kills mercilessly at both ends of the spectrum of life. As infant mortality dwindles and the aged live longer, the threat from pollution becomes more severe.

Till as recently as a year ago, environmentalists were blaming urbanisation, incessant construction, the rising number of cars and two wheelers on the road, lengthening traffic jams, Diwali firecrackers and the burning of  garbage in the open air for most of the pollutants that now regularly hang in the Delhi air. They were only partly right, for the annual pall of smog arrived in Delhi last year a week before Diwali. This year, Diwali came a month early, on October 19, and thanks to the Supreme Court ban, there were relatively fewer firecrackers let off in the capital. But still, the pall of smog came on October 30, almost exactly the same day as last year.

Residents of Delhi think this smog is their special problem, and the scores of environment watchers who have raised Delhi to the top of their lists encourage them to do so. But this smog is now a North India problem. The trail of cancelled flights and severely delayed trains, and the multiple car crashes on the Yamuna Expressway to Agra last week showed that visibility was equally poor hundreds of kilometres from Delhi. In fact, a blue pall of smoke hangs across the whole of northern India every year from late October till the winter rains finally come, if they come. Even Bharatpur, 200 km south of Delhi, is no longer spared.

Problem deeper than stubble burning

This new and deadly threat has been created by the burning of millions upon millions of tonnes of rice straw in the fields of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh after the crop has been harvested. It is a product of the Green Revolution – and is, therefore, the price we have been paying for the food security that it has given to the country. So it is hardly surprising that no one, either in Delhi or in Punjab, has the faintest idea of what to do about it.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has met Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar and asked him to enforce, and if necessary raise, the fines on stubble burning as an immediate measure. He has also been trying to meet Punjab chief minister Amrinder Singh for days, but to no avail. But even if both Punjab and Haryana agree to penalise stubble burning more harshly, it will have little or no impact on stubble burning. For if farmers cannot remove the stubble from their fields very soon after harvesting their paddy, they will not be able to sow the wheat crop. The dilemma they face was highlighted by the Aam Aadmi Party’s own party chief in Punjab, Sukhpal Singh Khaira, when he defied the state government’s order and ceremonially burnt crop stubble on October 15.

There is an impression in Delhi that the problem is only the stubble that is left after the crop is harvested. Based on this, there are proposals to deploy rotary root stubble digging machines to plough it back into the soil and enrich it. But stubble is the lesser part of the problem. The greater part is the rice straw and husk that gets left behind after threshing and milling. Punjab harvested a colossal 18 million tonnes of paddy in 2016, but with it came 34 million tonnes of straw and husk. Since rice straw is no longer fed to cattle in Punjab and Haryana, it too is being burned. In fact, what Khaira is seen setting fire to in photos of the event published in Punjab newspapers is mostly rice straw.

Possible solution

The only way to avoid burning straw and stubble is to find another use for the crop residue. Fortunately, there is a way. This is to not burn the straw and stubble but gasify it in a two-stage process that yields a fuel gas that can meet cooking, heating and power generation needs in the village in the first stage, and any type of transport fuel – diesel, aviation turbine fuel, methanol or CNG – in the second.

Gasification is the incomplete burning of biomass or coal in a limited supply of air or oxygen. While full combustion yields only large amounts of carbon dioxide, gasification yields a substantial   amount of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane.

Two other chemical processes, called the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and the water-gas shift reaction, which have been in use for more than a hundred years in the petro-chemicals industry, can  convert this mixture into any type of transport fuel one desires, from CNG to diesel, methanol and aviation jet fuel. They can also produce dimethyl ether, which is a heavy condensate gas that can effortlessly replace LPG as a cooking gas.

The technology chain described above has been perfected to the point where it is now possible to convert any form of biomass – from urban solid waste to crop residues – into transport fuels. In 2011, British Airways signed an 11 year purchase agreement with a US-based company, Solena fuels, to set up a plant outside London that would convert 575,000 tonnes of London’s municipal solid waste into aviation turbine fuel every year.

Three other airlines signed memoranda of agreement with the company to do the same. But those, and several other projects that were in the pipeline in Europe, went into cold storage in 2014 when oil prices crashed for the third time since 1985, making future fuel prices uncertain. However, earlier this year, a Texas-based company S.G Preston signed an agreement to provide Quantas with 800 million gallons of Aviation turbine fuel a year, obtained from biomass.

Benefits beyond combatting pollution

In India, the large-scale induction of this technology can not only end the annual invasion of smog, but greatly increase farm incomes and save the country valuable foreign exchange. It can therefore solve a multiplicity of problems: give urban solid waste a value and get it off the streets; stop the burning of straw and stubble; and give the farmers a valuable ‘lean’ gas to use for cooking and generating electricity locally and provide them with biochar, a solid, carbon-rich residue that they can briquette and sell to large scale modern bio-fuel plants of the kind that are being planned for Europe and the US.

Biochar is 70-80% pure carbon, and contains no sulphur, so it is similar to superior varieties of imported coal, and will fetch a similar price. At present, India is importing coking coal for blast furnaces at Rs 22,300 per tonne, if farmers can get half that price for their biochar from bio-fuels plants, they will add Rs 20,000 to the Rs 70,000 that they gross from every hectare of land under paddy.

Finally, it will save foreign exchange. Punjab, Haryana and western UP produce close 45 million tonnes of rice straw and stubble. This is sufficient to produce between 15 and 20 million tonnes of transport fuels. The reduced dependence upon oil imports will convert India’s 1.5% balance of payments deficit into a comfortable surplus.

These are not over-the-horizon technologies of the kind that are continuously being proposed by high-tech global corporates abroad to their own and developing country governments, but tried and tested ones, with some of which Indian industry is already familiar, that need only a stable transport fuel pricing environment to take off. India could, for just this once, be a pioneer in providing an enabling price and marketing environment instead of the eternal laggard that it is today.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of several books. His most recent book, on combating climate change, titled Dawn of the Solar Age: An End to Global Warming and to Fear, is being released by Sage Publications next month. He was a member of the Energy Panel of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1985-88.

Demonetisation has resulted in, at best, marginal improvements in India’s tax compliance and digitisation. But at what cost?

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise announcement of a year ago, demonetisation has been the single most hotly-debated issue in India. Modi and members of his government have given a series of justifications for the sudden move, shifting ground from one to the next as each in turn has lost its emotional appeal. One year after the move it is possible to make a dispassionate appraisal of its impact.

Modi’s first justification was that it would destroy large hoards of black money. In a way that he never explained, this would enable him to put thousands of rupees into the bank accounts of the poor. In fact, very little black money was destroyed: only Rs 16,800 crore in old money did not get converted into new. Needless to say, no money has come into any bank accounts.

His second justification was that it would cut off the funds for terrorists. This too has not had any perceptible impact on ‘terrorism’ in Kashmir, but even if had, the success would have lasted just till Pakistan’s ISI was able to forge the new bank notes. His third justification, that it would root out black money by forcing shell companies indulging in benami transactions out into the open has some validity, for the government has deregistered more than 217,000 companies and disqualified 319,000 directors.

But while this drastic sweep is welcome, it is difficult to see how it relates to demonetisation. This cleansing operation has been done by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and it is difficult to see why the weeding out of companies that had filed no returns or annual accounts could not have done it without the aid of demonetisation.

Modi’s final assertion, that demonetisation has been be a giant step towards a cashless economy, is equally open to question, for while both the number of taxpayers and the tax revenues have risen, neither has departed significantly from the long-term trend in India. The single most unambiguous indicator of a shift towards a digital economy would have been a sharp increase in the number of outstanding credit cards. But after a small surge from 829 million debit and credit cards in October 2016 to 886 million in March 2017, this has sunk back to 853 million in September 2017, an increase of only 3.1% over 11 months.

All in all, therefore, demonetisation has resulted in, at best, marginal improvements in tax compliance and digitisation, but at what cost? It is when we draw up the debit side of the balance sheet that the tally turns heavily negative.

First, whether well intended or not, demonetisation was badly bungled and therefore imposed not just severe but also unnecessary hardships upon the poor of the country. If the intention was to destroy black money hoards, then demonetising the Rs 1000 notes could have been justified, but demonetising the Rs 500 was little short of criminal. For in value terms by 2016, the Rs 500 was the most heavily-used currency note in the country, accounting for 45% or Rs 7,89,000 crore worth of the total currency while Rs 1000 notes made up Rs 6,32,000 crore. A better step would have been to issue Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 notes to which black money held as cash would have come flocking, and then withdraw them from circulation altogether.

But Modi was in a hurry; the crucial Uttar Pradesh elections were only three months away and he needed to do something dramatic to make sure the BJP would win. So he personally jumped the gun. There is an abundance of evidence that the central bank machinery, including governor Urijit Patel, did not approve of it. In the fortnight after demonetisation, he refused to say a single word in support, leaving the finance ministry’s economic affairs secretary to defend it day after day before the media.

As if this was not shortsighted enough, not only had the new notes that would replace the old not been printed, but the government did not remember that neither the new Rs 500 nor the Rs 2,000 note was of the same size as the old ones. So they could not be dispensed until all the million-plus ATMs had been re-calibrated. This prolonged the shortage of cash in the economy: as late as April 28, 2017, only 90% of the currency withdrawn had been replaced. By this time, a hundred people had died while trying to get their own money out of the banks.

What did demonetisation actually achieve? The simple answer is that by sharply reducing the money supply in the economy, it caused a huge immediate reduction in the generation of the Gross National Product (GNP). By how much can be understood by examining it through the lens of Fisher’s Quantity Theory of Money? The fundamental postulate of this theory is summed up in the equation MV = PT, where M is the supply of money; V is its velocity of circulation or the number of times money changes hands during a year; P is the average price level of all commodities in the market and T is the total number of sale transactions during a year.

After eliminating double counting (which occurs, for instance, when an intermediate product such as steel is first sold as steel and then re-sold as part of a car), PT is the GNP of a country. So when M nosedives, the GNP has to go down by the same proportion. By how much it will actually go down depends upon the proportion of total transactions that are carried out in cash, as against through bank transfers. In India, while 90% of the volume of transactions is estimated to be in cash, since most big ticket and bulk sales outside agriculture take place through the banks, the value of transaction in cash is in the neighbourhood of 68%. The demonetisation of 86% of India’s cash should have reduced PT, and therefore the GNP, by 58%.

How long this impact lasted would depend upon how rapidly the demonetised notes are replaced. Full replacement did not take place till some time in May, so assuming that the average shortage of cash tapered off evenly to zero by early May, the average reduction in GDP should therefore have been around 29% over these six months and half of that – 14% – for the full year. So how has the government been able to claim that the only impact has been a fall in growth of GDP from 7.3% in July till September 2016 to 5.7% in April to June this year?

A part of the reason is that employers and workers in the unorganised sector resorted to desperate stratagems to tide over the shortage of cash. Till December 31, the cut-off date for converting old notes into new, employers in the construction, other unorganised sectors of industry and trade, continued to pay their workers with the old currency notes leaving it them to queue at the banks to exchange it every week. Many vendors in the cities used this respite to install credit card machines or enrol in Rupay or other online payment portals. All this helped to prop up the money supply and therefore reduce the shock. By December 31, when the conversion facility was withdrawn, about half the old banknotes had been replaced.

But the second, more important reason is that the Central Statistical Office still relies on extrapolation of growth rates from the formal to the informal sector to estimate output and growth rates in a large part of the latter. Its projections in December 2016 of what GDP growth would be during the whole of the fiscal year, till March 2017, stated this explicitly. It does not, therefore, have a way of estimating the impact of a catastrophe that strikes only the informal sector.

How seriously this can distort its preliminary estimates was demonstrated by the Unit Trust of India’s crash in 2000. This was not reflected in India’s GDP figures till 16 months later because the CSO used to calculate growth in the non-banking financial Sector by extrapolating from the data for the banking sector. When the crash was factored in, the GDP growth estimates had to be reduced by 1.1%.

The full impact of the demonetisation only became apparent when the Economic Survey, Volume 2, noted that the rural India was in the grip of deflation, because while agricultural output had grown by 2.3%, its value had increased by only 0.3%. That meant that average prices had fallen by 2%.

The fall reflected the shortage of purchasing power in the rural economy and helped to complete the story of demonetisation. After the note conversion facility was withdrawn, construction and unorganized sector industry could no longer pay their workers, who were mostly migrant labour from other tates. So faced with having to choose between staying on in the cities and scrabbling for work, and going home to their villages to eke out a living on what they had saved till then, most of them chose the latter.

For weeks in January, therefore, newspapers reported that streams of migrant workers were returning to their homes. When they got back, many sought work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This was reflected in a 30% increase in the number of applications for MGNREGA jobs. But MGNREGA gave only 100 days of work. So by the beginning of summer, that income stream too had dried up. That is when the sharp drop in their cash savings began to be reflected in a decline in their purchasing power.

https://thewire.in/195246/supporters-will-clutch-straws-demonetisations-balance-sheet-stained-red-ink/

The first step towards reviving political dialogue and ending the rule of the gun in Kashmir is for New Delhi to announce that it is committed to restoring full autonomy within the constitution to the entire state.

The Narendra Modi government’s dialogue with Kashmir has died even before it got a chance to be born. The fault does not lie with the leaders of the Hurriyat’s unified command, who last week rejected talks with the Centre’s interlocutor, but with the government in Delhi that speaks in many voices and does not know what it wants.

Hours after home minister Rajnath Singh announced his government’s decision to seek peace in Kashmir through a dialogue, Prime Minister Modi ruled out any discussion of restoration of full autonomy for the state within the constitution as a possible solution by accusing P. Chidambaram, who has been advocating this, of speaking the language of Pakistan.

Not to be outdone, Dineshwar Sharma, the newly-appointed interlocutor, has given a spate of interviews to the media within a week of his appointment that have virtually eliminated the space for a dialogue even before Kashmiris got a chance to decide whether they would participate in one.

There is something so hasty and ill-informed about Modi’s Pakistan remark that one is forced to ask whether he is really capable of taking on the delicate task of restoring durable peace in Kashmir. For autonomy within India is absolutely the last thing that Pakistan wants, or indeed has wanted since the day it was born. Pakistan wants all; repeat all, of Kashmir Valley. It has tried twice to get it by force, in 1965 and 1989, and is trying to do so again today.

Ceding Kashmir to Pakistan and keeping Jammu and Ladakh was the ‘Dixon Plan’ that Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru had categorically rejected in 1947. This was also the plan with which the President Pervez Musharraf came to Delhi in July 2001. Musharraf learned a great deal from that visit and, for a brief period, Pakistan was prepared to trade a settlement that did not redraw boundaries in Kashmir, for the larger gains that would accrue from peace with India. But that moment has passed and may never come back.

Today, Modi’s unrelenting war on terrorism in Kashmir has revived Pakistan’s hope that the Valley will somehow shake itself free of India and turn to it for protection. It will, therefore, resist such a solution tooth and nail, and will kill, and kill again, as it did in the ‘90s, to prevent it. Its targets will once again be Kashmiris who are prepared to accept a solution short of breaking away from the Indian Union. So how, when he spoke of autonomy, was Chidambaram speaking the language of Pakistan?

Sharma has obviously not read the chapter in former French President Charles De Gaulle’s memoirs on the ‘virtue of silence’. But he could at least have asked himself why his two predecessors, K.C. Pant and N.N. Vohra, never spoke to the media throughout their tenures. He could also have waited till he had read theirs, and the Dilip Padgaonkar team’s, reports, not to mention those of the round table conferences of 2006, before he began to air his views. But he did no such thing. Instead, although he has tried to be non-committal in his interviews, every idea he has expressed has narrowed the space for dialogue till there is virtually none left.

For instance, his insistence on describing everyone who has picked up the gun in Kashmir as a terrorist amounts to an absolute refusal to make any distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters. But accepting this difference has been a precondition for negotiations to end insurgency all over the world, not to mention in Nagaland, Mizoram and Assam. In Kashmir, the V.P. Singh and Narasimha Rao governments fought the insurgency of the ‘90s with the intention of bringing the insurgents to the negotiating table. That is the goal that the Modi government has completely forsaken today.

Its treatment of all insurgents as terrorists has not only reversed this policy but goes against the grain of the most widely-accepted definitions of terrorism today. These are the US government’s Title 22, Chapter 38, U.S. Code no. 2656f, which defines it as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents,” and the definition proposed by a high-level UN panel in 2004 and endorsed by UN secretary general Kofi Annan, that terrorism is “any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act is to intimidate a population or government”.

Most of the attacks by armed Kashmiri youth in the past two years have been directed at the security forces and police. The few against civilians have targeted government officials and panchayat members. Unlike the last years of the 1990s insurgency, when some Kashmiri militants had taken to exploding bombs in crowded places, there has been no random killing of civilians in the past three years, let alone killings designed to intimidate the population. Nor are the insurgents in South Kashmir having to coerce villagers into giving them shelter as the insurgents, and fidayeen sent by Pakistan, had to do in the ‘90s. It is therefore difficult to categorise these attacks as acts of terrorism.

The way ahead lies in a dialogue within Kashmir

To grasp how far removed Delhi is from understanding the political reality in Kashmir, it is necessary to describe the risks that any Kashmiri leader willing to talk to Delhi has to run. First he or she has to live in constant fear of assassination. All the seven nationalist leaders who met George Fernandes in 1990 were assassinated in the following months. Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, the father of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was assassinated in May of the same year three weeks after he gave an interview to BBC in which he discussed how peace could be brought back to the Valley. Qazi Nisar, the mirwaiz of South Kashmir and a founding member of the Muslim United Front, which fought the state elections in 1987, was assassinated in 1994.

Among others who have met this fate are the brother of Hurriyat leader professor Abdul Ghani Butt, killed in 1996 to dissuade Hurriyat from even thinking about fighting the 1996 election; Hurriyat executive committee member and head of the Peoples’ Conference, Abdul Ghani Lone, shortly after he announced that his party would contest the 2002 elections; and Mirwaiz Umar’s completely non-political uncle, Mir Mushtaq Ahmad, killed in 2004 six weeks after the Mirwaiz had come to Delhi to meet the Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani.

In a deliberate act of intimidation, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence advertised its hand in the last two killings by choosing May 21, the anniversary of Mirwaiz Mauvli’s assassination to kill Lone, and by setting fire to Mirwaiz Umar’s 106-year-old school in Srinagar to virtually coincide with the killing of Ahmad.

The most recent reminder of the threat under which nationalist leaders live was the nearly successful attempt to kill Fazal Qureshi, the most respected member of Hurriyat’s executive committee, in 2009, six weeks after he formally announced Hurriyat’s support for the four-point agreement forged by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf in Delhi at a conference organised by the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation in Srinagar, at which I was present.

A spokesman for a shadowy organisation calling itself the al-Nasireen group claimed that it had carried out the attack because Qureshi had been playing an important role in a dialogue with New Delhi initiated by home minister Chidambaram.

The threat to their lives from Pakistan is not the only hurdle that Kashmiri leaders have to cross before they can enter into a dialogue with New Delhi. Another is the impossibility of entering into a dialogue with Delhi without losing influence, credibility and reputation in Kashmir. This happens when they come repeatedly to Delhi, meet leaders of the Indian government and achieve nothing.

The damage to them is multiplied when Trojan horses in the Indian or Kashmir government leak news of meetings that were supposed to have been secret to the media. It is completed when their interlocutors like former R&AW chief A.S. Dulat have disclose that they have been paying some Hurriyat leaders to keep them in line. This has happened so many times that there is no Kashmiri leader left who can guarantee that Kashmiris will abide by any settlement they reach with Delhi. All that the intelligence agencies’ discrediting of Kashmiri leaders has achieved is make the new generation of Kashmiris look for other leaders to follow and other ikons to emulate.

This is the background against which Hurriyat’s summary rejection of talks with Sharma needs to be understood. While this was only to have been expected, the wording of its criticism of Modi’s rejection of Chidambaram’s autonomy proposal sends a different message. Its crucial sentence: “if the GOI rejects the demand of its co-political party for restoration of autonomy guaranteed in the Indian Constitution, (then)… how will (it) address, or engage with, the Kashmiri people’s political will and aspiration of self-determination” is notable for the absence of the traditional red rags – the UN, a plebiscite, Pakistan and independence. Apart from reminding Delhi that there is an international dimension to the search for a solution it leaves the way to it through self-determination open.

Given the history of killings and betrayals, it will be futile for the present, or any future, government in Delhi to think that any of the separatist leaders will enter into a dialogue that has no clearly defined goal, no agenda and no overt commitment from Delhi. The only way to revive political dialogue and end the rule of the gun in Kashmir is for Delhi to announce that it is committed to restoring full autonomy within the Indian constitution to the entire state, ask the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh to define its contents, and offer to hold a fresh election to choose representatives of the three regions, if they so desire.

Seventy years after the Instrument of Accession was signed, it is perfectly possible that substantial changes will need to be made in the relationship of the three parts of the state. But they should be left free to decide what these should be, and bring their proposals to Delhi for ratification preferably with, but if necessary without, the involvement of Pakistan. This will replace the doomed dialogue between Delhi and Kashmir with a dialogue between the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and will be Kashmiris’ first step towards the empowerment they have been seeking.

https://thewire.in/194609/modi-government-kashmir-dineshwar-sharma/