A ROUNDUP OF 2012 – DOUBLES AS A NEWSLETTER

Adds to my reputation as a procrastinator. It’s already 8^th January 2013.

So we have come to the end of yet another year. I am older by one year, that much further away from my birth, that much closer to my inevitable end. But the interesting thing is, I draw great comfort from the fact that I don’t know when and how that end is going to be. This is very different from normal human behaviour – at least middle-class behaviour – we draw comfort from certainties. Not in this case.

But enough of macabre thoughts. Let's see how the year went, what was and wasn't done, what should have been done or undone.

Right now, as most people who know me know, I’m wearing three hats: Politics, the profession of dispute resolution in construction contracts (called Arbitration for short, which is 90%, but not fully correct) and writing. The second is my bread and butter, the last gives me great pleasure, and the first – it provides me with the hill that I must climb, without which to climb I’d be miserable. I can write any time – it is a no-threat thing. I now know, at the risk of presuming upon fate, that I will continue to get cases to arbitrate upon or otherwise resolve. In any case the ones that I have will see me through for quite a few coming years. But politics! And doing BJP in West Bengal! Ah, that's some hill to climb.

Nobody would be interested in my profession, except to know what it is all about, and how did I chance upon it. Construction Contracts (big sums of money, a middling-size contract in India would nowadays be around Rs. 100 crores or a Billion rupees) generate disputes, and disputes require resolution. And resolution requires knowledge of both Engineering and Law, which, begging everybody's pardon and risking a reputation for conceit, doesn't grow on trees. I happened to get involved in one such when I was working for the Metro project and when  seeking a way out of government service. One night, when I was sitting on the balcony of the Metro quarters at 200X, it flashed upon me that this is something I could do. So I'm doing it, and not doing badly at all, touch wood.

But politics? But the point is not that. The point is, after a gap of two decades, things are again beginning to look good for the BJP in West Bengal.

Why do I say so? Several reasons. Consider:

1.     The CPI(M) have been out of power for more than a year and by now almost all the men who worked as their instruments of terror, having no brand loyalty, have faithfully moved to the Trinamool Congress. Otherwise, the situation obtaining at the end of 2011 still holds good. What is that situation?

(a)   First, the bulk of CPI(M) members had joined the party after it came to power in 1977. They know what it is like to ‘do CPI(M)’ while it is in power. Most of them don’t know how to struggle for power, and I suspect most of them don't want to know. because, unlike the Communists of earlier generation they are not ideologically indoctrinated. They were in CPI(M) because it was in power, and if it isn’t they’ll go to whoever is. As simple as that.

(b)  Secondly, leadership: the last two great leaders -- both absolute &%$#@&*$ -- were Jyoti Basu and Anil Biswas. Also, arguably, Subhas Chakraborty. With them dead, the ones that are left, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Biman Bose, are frankly, not much. They can’t nurse the party back to power. Nor can Shyamal Chakraborty, Suryakanta Misra or Shyamali Gupta, or for that matter Mridul Dey or Abhik Datta or anyone else.

(c)   And thirdly, the CPI(M) had grown so accustomed to winning elections by misuse of the government machinery and spreading terror that today, with both weapons gone, they are completely out of their depths.

2.     What about the party that’s in power? Fortunately for us, and very unfortunately for the people of the state, Trinamool Congress has smeared its own face with egg.

(a)   First of all, the party has no structure, and Mamata runs the party like her own personal fiefdom. There is no organization tree and nobody works under anybody else except Mamata. She is less afraid of losing power in the state than of losing her grip on the party. That’s why she sacrificed Kolkata Municipal Corporation in 2005, because she could not let Subrata Mukherjee, the Mayor, grow too big for his boots.

(b)  She has an incredibly jealous and suspicious nature – she won’t let any minister work independently or even well, for fear that that person may steal the thunder from her and loosen her grip. Good governance, thus, is out of the question. That is why she keeps second-rate or even third-rate people like Mukul Roy, Sobhan Chatterjee or Dola Sen close to her and better people like Subrata Mukherjee, Saugata Roy or Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay at arm’s length. This is why she had driven Subrata out of the party in 2005 because she thought that after his good performance as Mayor of Kolkata he might pose a threat to her. This even applies to bureaucrats – the transfer of Damayanti Sen after she began to crack the Park Street gang-rape is a case in point. I also suspect that since most of the accused were Muslims she must have told Damayanti to go easy on the case and Damayanti did not listen.

(c)   Then, she can’t take any criticism. An extreme example of this is is the arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra for e-mailing a cartoon. She sincerely believes that since she has been able to dislodge the Left Front, she is now above criticism.

(d)  Her financial indiscretions are at some point of time going to come home to roost. When her Finance Minister says every now and then that he’s worried sick all the time about how to meet the salaries and pension payments at the end of the month, she merrily goes on distributing largesse, like grants to families of hooch-dead, grants to clubs, allowances for Imams and Muezzins, Dearness Allowance for State Government Employees, etc.

3.     So with CPI(M) discredited plus unable, and Trinamool fast on its way to being thoroughly discredited, who remains? The good old Congress? Ah, let’s not talk about them – even their central leadership don’t want them to win, would much rather have CPI(M) win, now that it is easier to make Karat see reason. That’s why the central leadership does not let a single leader emerge in the state, perpetuates the quarrels within the party, and doesn’t criticize the CPI(M). Apart from that their supporters and cadres are demoralized and their support base is decimated, at least in South Bengal. The Congress, no way.

             

So, as I said, for the state BJP it is now or never. therefore I have to work very hard.

Everything is fine on the family front. Anuradha is fine; so are my daughters Malini (Coco) and Madhura (Momo) both in the US of A; so are Coco's husband Kiran Rao and children, our dearest grandchildren, Surya and Uma and Momo's husband Ajinkya Khedekar. Thank God for everyone being well. However, my mother-in-law, Mrs. Arati Guha, a sprightly 86, living with us, sustained a fracture in her thigh-bone – the second one at the same location. She’s been operated upon, successfully, is back from hospital and is now recovering.

The year went pretty fast, as all years go these days – progressively faster, in fact. We made our annual trip to see our daughters in the US, and I along with a bunch of friends and a couple of relatives took off for a cruise to Alaska. Sailed from Seattle, called at Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway, and took bus trips around. Then got down at Victoria BC, saw the town, took the ferry to Vancouver and took a bus trip to the Canadian Rockies. Jasper, Banff, Lake Sulphur, Lake Louise, and a few more places. Dispersed from Calgary. Incredible. I have always l-o-v-e-d to travel – it appears God ordained that my dreams will come true, though a little late in the day. I wish Anuradha had accompanied me, but she preferred the company of her grandchildren.

  

My second book, a complete biography of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a man I have always immensely admired, has come out, and was released in Kolkata by Manishankar Mukerji (Shankar) and Justice Chittatosh Mookerjee; two months later it was released, with a Hindi translation, at Delhi by L.K.Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Kumar, Saha-Sarkaryavah.

So far so good. Can't complain. Let it stay this way – but of course it won't. Change is the law of life.

Happy New Year to everyone. May you all have a wonderful 2013.

RAPES AND MORE RAPES

The Delhi gang-rape is all over news now. Just read an article by Pratiksha Baxi on http://kafila.org/2012/12/23/rape-cultures-in-india-pratiksha-baxi/.  I had never gone to this kafila site before. Now about the article, which is my take on the gang-rapes and the subsequent protests in Delhi.
All very eloquent and full of vitriol against rightist parties for demanding the death penalty for rape or against the students for demanding castration, but at the end of the day no solution is suggested. Except platitudes, pious wishes, references to Scandinavian countries where light punishments have supposedly resulted in fewer rapes (forgetting that in those countries a small population, extremely good governance and relative absence of social tension all have a part to play). The article is just another Left-Liberal tirade which typically raises a lot of questions but answers none.
So what is the solution? Yes, I think the death penalty would be a real deterrent, although the judge should have the latitude to prescribe Life Imprisonment which must be without parole; castration is an option. Death penalty should be indicated in particularly bestial rapes, such as gang-rapes, rapes with serious and deliberate injuries inflicted on the victim, etc. Not just for rapes, but death penalty should also be an option for acid attacks on women which really subject them to a living death.
Marital rape must be brought within the purview of punishments.
And what about female foeticide? the doctors doing it should be liable for Life Imprisonment. That will be a step in favour of inculcating respect for women.
The Criminal Procedure Code must be radically rewritten to accelerate the trial process so as to complete it within no more than a year.
There is no point in asking the government to do social reforms to prevent rape. Government means bureaucracy and no one has ever heard about social reforms being brought about by writing notes on a file. It will have to be done the way Raja Ram Mohun Roy banned suttee, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar legalized widow remarriages for Hindus, Harvilas Sarda banned child marriage. Social Welfare organizations, intellectuals, opinion-makers will have to do that job.
And if in doing this if one tries to be politically correct the whole purpose will be lost. There is a dictum that a woman is a man’s tilling field, the man can go and till the field whenever he pleases. It effectively legalizes marital rape. There is even a dictum that the wife can be beaten by the husband if she refuses sex. And where are these dicta to be found? In the Quran, nowhere else (I think the second one is in some Haadis). So if the government or opinion-makers shy away from doing anything about it for fear of interfering in the minority religion (with the thought of the vote-bank at the back of the head) then we might as well continue to be politically correct and go on making empty noises. Till the next gang-rape.

THE EVIL THAT NEHRU DID

On 14^th November 2012 I had posted a tweet on twitter which ran: “Jawaharlal Nehru was born this day in 1889. I wish he wasn’t”. This brought forth outbursts, some angry, some sad, from some of my followers and others to the effect that it is in poor taste to wish someone had not been born. I had reconsidered the position subsequently; and I too feel sad to say that I find no reason to change my views.

Why? Consider the following:  

Nehru had, in spite of having ruled India for seventeen years, and out of that having enjoyed practically unchallenged power over the nation for no less than fourteen years (1950-64, from Patel's death to his own), failed to address the problems of food deficit, population explosion, governmental corruption and illiteracy ; despite his great predilection for foreign affairs willfully acquiesced in the Chinese annexation of Tibet and removed what could have remained as a buffer state between the two countries, and could have effectively ruled out any Chinese aggression of the type that took place in 1962 ;  aided by his trusted friend Krishna Menon, turned India into a virtual Soviet satellite, and made enemies of all western nations ;  needlessly internationalised the Kashmir dispute ; taxed the nation to its gills, gave birth to a ‘Black Economy’, and frittered away all that tax money in creating a semi-Stalinist command economy based on state-owned heavy industries – real white elephants – that he fancifully called ‘temples of tomorrow’ ; and finally foisted a hereditary rule on the country and his party, the latter continuing to this day in the person of his Italian-born granddaughter-in-law.

Even during Patel's lifetime he had committed the incredible folly of calling off the Indian Army in Kashmir in 1948 when they were in hot pursuit of the fleeing Pakistani irregulars, and declaring a cease-fire unilaterally. He is believed to have done this because he believed Lord Mountbatten implicitly, much more than he did his own Generals, and it is on his advice that he did this. We need not go into the romantic aspect of this belief, that is to say the relationship between him and Lady Edwina Mountbatten – even without that the folly had been committed. There must be very few instances indeed in the history of mankind where a nation, about to taste victory in a war not of its doing, has acted in such an inexplicable manner. Had the army been allowed to chase the irregulars out of the hills of Kashmir on to the plains of Punjab - which they would have done in another forty-eight hours - the Pakistanis would have lost all the advantage of the heights, and probably there would have been no Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and no Kashmir problem today.

His abandonment of the Hindu refugees of East Bengal (or East Pakistan has not received a fraction of the publicity it deserved. The facts are as follows: Unlike in Punjab, there was no mass exchange of population between the two sides following partition of the province of Bengal in 1947. There was, however, considerable  pressure from the East Pakistani government on the Hindus in the form of forcible requisitioning of their properties, etc. Many well-to-do Muslims in West Bengal at this stage had also decided to move to Pakistan, and in the period between 1947-50 there was a lot of amicable exchange of property between the two Bengals. However, in February 1950 the East Pakistan government, led by its Chief Secretary Aziz Ahmed (described as ‘notoriously anti-Hindu’ by B.K.Nehru in his autobiography), started a pogrom against Hindus as a result of which more than 50,000 Hindus were killed, and an enormous number of women raped and property destroyed. Nehru showed unspeakable vacillation in dealing with this crisis, but ruled out an exchange of population on the Punjab model or military action against Pakistan when the same was proposed by his cabinet colleague Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Then he signed a pact with Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan whereby it was agreed that either country will look after its minorities and take back the displaced ones. Pakistan treated this pact as no better than toilet paper and continued its pogroms, though on a milder scale, against the Hindus. But Nehru pinned his personal prestige to the success of this pact, as a result of which he refused to take any action for the rehabilitation of the east Bengali Hindu refugees. Syama Prasad Mookerjee and K.C.Neogy, the two Bengali ministers in the central cabinet, resigned in protest against the pact. As an act of political naïveté few acts could compare with this pact – it could not have been unknown to Nehru that the Pakistan government had engineered this pogrom, yet he entrusted the safekeeping of the Hindus to the very same Pakistan government!    

Nehru’s role before independence in bringing about the partition of the country is also reprehensible. Maulana Azad’s remarks (Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom, Orient Longman, Madras, Complete Version, Reprinted 1993) on the man in the context of his press interview which gave Jinnah an opportunity to retract his acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals, are quite instructive in this regard. These details have been deleted from our history books by the so-called historians receiving largesse from Nehru’s government (read Arun Shourie’s  Eminent Historians, Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, ASA, New Delhi, 1^st  Ed., 1998). Very briefly, what happened is this: in 1946 the British Cabinet sent a very high-powered team under the leadership of Lord Pethick-Lawrence to negotiate with Indian leaders (principally those of the Congress and the Muslim League) the modalities of granting independence to India. The team had talks with the leaders and came up with a plan in June 1946 which was called the ‘Grouping Plan’. The sum and substance of this plan was that India would remain one. There would be a weak centre with a few subjects such as currency, foreign affairs and communications, and the remaining powers would all vest in the provinces. The Congress accepted the plan and so did the Muslim League, though somewhat reluctantly. At that time Maulana Azad had just relinquished the presidency of the Congress in favour of Jawaharlal Nehru. However Nehru in a press conference held on July 10 in Bombay resiled from this position and declared that the Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly ‘completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’ ; and also that grouping of provinces, as proposed by the mission, will not work. Consequent upon this, the Muslim League on July 29 withdrew their acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals.

Maulana Azad has termed this act of Jawaharlal Nehru an ‘astonishing statement’ and “one of those unfortunate events that change the course of history”. He also deeply regretted that on April 26, 1946, while stepping down from the Presidency of the Congress he had issued a statement proposing the name of Jawaharlal Nehru as the next President of the Congress, and had appealed to all Congressmen that they should elect him unanimously. He called this the greatest blunder of his political life. He goes on to say that his second mistake was not supporting Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who, had he become the Congress President, would never have committed the mistake Jawaharlal made, and which gave Jinnah the opportunity of sabotaging the Cabinet Mission plan. The book was first published in 1958, after his death, but in accordance with his wishes, thirty pages of the book were withheld, to be published thirty years later. In this part of the book he writes “Jawaharlal Nehru was one of my dearest friends and his contribution to India’s national life is second to none. I have nevertheless to say with regret that this was not the first time that he did immense harm to the national cause. He had committed an almost equal blunder in 1937 when the first elections were held under the Government of India Act 1935 when he refused to honour a pre-election understanding with the Muslim League. M.C.Chagla in his autobiography has also been critical of this terrible mistake of Nehru.

Together with withdrawal of acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals the Muslim League also announced that August 16, 1946 will be a day of ‘Direct Action’ by the League in support of Pakistan. No explanation was forthcoming as to what would constitute such ‘Direct Action’. This Direct Action eventually turned out to as bloodbath known as the The Great Calcutta Killings of 16-20 August 1946.

Another very astute and knowledgeable person who saw him at close range is the relatively unknown Benoy Mukhopadhyay, Chief Press Adviser and Registrar of Newspapers, Government of India, around 1947 and later Secretary, Press Council of India. Mukhopadhyay is known in Bengali literature by his pseudonym Jajabor, and is credited with writing the classics Drishtipat and Jhelum Nodir Tire.  In an interview to the Bangla fortnightly Desh, he has described Nehru as a 'Political Somnambulist', a person living in his own dreamland of political make-believe. He reminisces on the Nehru-coined slogan of the 1950s, 'Hindi-Chini bhai bhai' (Indians and Chinese are brothers) which culminated in the Chinese attacking India in 1962. The attack was preceded by frequent border incursions by the Chinese across the McMahon line, a fact that Nehru simply chose to ignore, because it did not fit in with his pre-set notions of Sino-Indian friendship. Mukhopadhyay describes Nehru as imagining 'secularism' (one of the most misused words in India) to be the panacea for all centrifugal and divisive tendencies. He chose to forget that there was such a thing as pan-Islamism, that Islam called upon all its followers to unite regardless of nationality, that Allahu Akbar was not merely a religious slogan but a political exhortation as well.

All his misdeeds could be forgiven if, with his untrammeled power and his foreign exchange reserves in the form of ‘sterling balance’ he could take the country forward economically. Alas, he did no such thing. He did not believe in the creation of wealth or the profit motive as being the driving engine behind economic development. Thus, a strange phenomenon was manifest: while countries like Germany, Japan, Singapore and South Korea (which, unlike India did not have a single building intact in their country in 1947) went ahead with development and raised themselves to the first world in no time, India was left languishing with its begging bowl in hand, forever a poor country. Meanwhile Nehru, who had become something like an international busybody, created a ‘Neutralist Bloc’ with Tito of Yugoslavia, Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia, while at the same time losing his credibility by adopting a duplicitous policy between the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both of which took place at around the same time in 1956.   

RELIGIONS-QUEST FOR THE PERFECT ONE

[This is from a chain of email posts in which I had contributed. Someone from Nigeria had posted that one Dr Iyengar, while driving, was blinded by the headlights of a truck coming in the opposite direction, and had hit a Muslim family on the road of whom all but one died. Dr Iyengar was arrested but later released and went to ask for forgiveness from the surviving person. She said this was all Allah’s will, and Iyengar was not to blame. Some contributors then commented on the inner beauty of all religions, while some others joined issue. Now read on]

This has been a very instructive discussion. While on the one hand some have shown how an individual Muslim can be perfect human being, others have illustrated, and quite correctly, how Islam can be a threat to all non-Muslims; and while individual Muslims can be just like that Nigerian woman, Muslims en masse, driven by religious zeal, can rape, kill and maim with a clear conscience. No amount of Ahimsa would work against them at such moments. I should know -- my family are fugitives from Islamic persecution in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

This really brings us to the truth of what the much-maligned Dutch politician Geert Wilders is fond of saying: "There are many good Muslims but there is no good Islam".   I would like to add a few points.

First, while Islam has borrowed from Judaism and Christianity, Islam became a violently proselytizing religion and an immutable one. As opposed to that Judaism never proselytized. Christianity used to proselytize by violence (as they did in the Americas and Portuguese colonies), but they no longer do so; instead they now do it by persuasion (also known as evangelism), and if necessary by bribery and deceit. However much reprehensible the last two methods are, they are not violent, and therefore not in the same category as rape and murder.

Secondly, Christianity or Judaism are not immutable. Christians do not burn heretics at the stakes as they did in Joan of Arc's time nor do they sell indulgences for money like Pope Leo X did. Jews also do not any longer crucify their heretics. That way Hinduism is the most evolving religion; two hundred years ago suttee (widow-burning) was quite the norm. Today it is a capital offence. Islam on the other hand, takes pride in being immutable, and doing everything the way their prophet Mohammed did 1400 years back. Their Haadis, or Traditions, which are next to only the Quran in authenticity, are a description of what their prophet said, what he did, and what was done in his presence with his approval or without his disapproval. These are to be imitated to the letter by every devout Muslim. There cannot be any argument, any questioning of the edicts of the Quran or Haadis. Even interpretations are largely forbidden, and reserved only to big clerics. And these Traditions cover all facets of life from birth till death and covering diverse subjects such as study, bathing, inheritance, worship, excretion and sex. That is why it is said that Islam is a complete code.

Judaism or Christianity do not have anything remotely resembling these. Therefore, it is not correct to paint Islam, Judaism and Christianity with the same brush.

I personally think, and Kirpal Singhji would doubtless be pleased to hear this, that the Sikh religion (Khalsa Panth) is possibly the nearest thing to a perfect religion. So much so that I consider myself a closet Sikh, though I am Bengali Hindu, do not know Punjabi (except a few words), and do not wear a beard or long hair. I have visited Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar and Hemkund Sahib and have been greatly moved by the experience. The reason why I say this are principally fivefold:

1. The religion fosters great fellow-feeling and equality among its adherents. A Sikh can always find refuge in a Gurdwara and eat at a langar. I have seen very well-to-do Sikhs doing Kar Seva, polishing shoes at Harmandir Sahib and serving ordinary people at langar.

2. The religion teaches a fantastic work ethic and heroism. You will not find a Sikh beggar anywhere. Their over-representation in the armed forces is also significant.

3. There is a very good balance of spiritualism and worldliness in the religion.

4. They do not have a human Guru but accept an idea, that is the Guru Granth Sahib as Guru. A human being may have weaknesses, but an idea can be supreme. This was a stroke of genius that Guru Gobind Singh showed. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh also follows the same tenet and considers their flag, the Bhagwa Dhwaj, as Guru.

5. Most of all, it is their attitude about other religions that impresses me most. They do not proselytize, do not mess with other religions, and are totally tolerant. But if anybody messes with their religion they will teach him or them such a lesson that those persons will wish they'd never done it. This is one trait I find sadly lacking among my own people, Hindus in general and Bengali Hindus in particular, many of whom practice a kind of impotent acceptance in the name of 'secularism'.

It is not for nothing that they say,'Raj karega Khalsa'. I for one would not mind living under such a Raj.

TROUBLE IN BODOLAND

For the last one month or so (July-August 2012) the area around Kokrajhar, the centre of the Bodo area of Assam has been riven by communal and ethnic fights between the indigenous Bodo tribesmen and Bangladeshi Muslim settlers, especially from the erstwhile district of Mymensingh , who have settled there in enormous numbers, procreated and brought over their kin, and thereby managed to change the demography of the region. To understand the problem some insight into the region and its background is necessary.

So where is Kokrajhar and who live there? Kokrajahar is district headquarters town in ‘Lower Assam’ (Namoni Akhom in Assamese). Near Kokrajhar the mighty river makes a wide leftwards right-angle turn, changing its flow from westwards to southwards before it enters Bangladesh just below Dhuburi. It is also close to the border with West Bengal’s Koch Bihar district. Its topography is like that of any river valley, plains sandwiched between the Bhutan Himalayas and the Garo Hills of Meghalaya. The plains are alluvial, very fertile, were heavily forested and were the abode of the Bodos, a Mongoloid tribal people, with names like Basumatary, Narzary, Mahilary etc, worshipping deities within the Hindu pantheon.

In 1937, after the first election held under British oversight, Assam got its first Chief Minister (then called ‘Premier’), Sir Syed Mohammed Sadullah, who decided to ‘Grow more’ by importing Bengali Muslim cultivators, mostly from the district of Mymensingh in East Bengal, just to the south-east of the present international border near Dhuburi. He pursued an active policy of settling them on unoccupied lands, especially the fertile char lands along the Brahmaputra, deforesting them and cultivating them. The Bodos did not seriously mind, because there was enough land and to spare. Only the British understood what was going on (not that they disapproved) and dubbed Sadullah’s ‘grow more’ as more of a ‘grow more Mohammedans’. But they did not go public on this and let things take their own course.

The influx meanwhile took the form of a steady stream and gradually began to change the demographic composition of the place. It also continued after Independence. The immigrants acted with great political sagacity and in every census returned their mother tongue as ‘Assamese’ though most could not speak a word of Assamese, using only the Mymensingh dialect of Bengali (so much so that these Muslims are still referred to as Mymensinghias, as opposed to ethnic Assamese Muslims called Goriyas, with whom the Assamese do not have any issue). As a result, the Assam Congress, the major political party in the State also did not mind. Not only were the immigrants a solid vote bank for the Congress; at the time there was tension between Assamese speakers (inhabiting the Brahmaputra valley) and Bengali speakers (inhabiting the Barak valley) in the state, and the linguistic status returned by the immigrants helped the Assamese who were the majority in the Congress.

By the 1970s the Muslim population in the state had swollen to such proportions as to render several districts Muslim-majority. Now the Assamese people sat up and took notice. The All-Assam Students’ Union, and later the Assam Gana Parishad, started the ‘anti-foreigners movement’ which culminated in the horrendous massacres of Gohpur and Nellie. Rajiv Gandhi’s government tried to manage it by enacting an extraordinary piece of legislation: the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act - IMDT law — until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005.

In effect, the IMDT law formalised an Assam exception to India’s citizenship laws and gave legitimacy to the questionable citizenship practices prevalent in Assam. By the end of 2006 the Indian Supreme Court intervened once again; this time to nullify the pre-election notifications that had brought back the IMDT law by the back door. However, the most devastating judicial critique of citizenship practices in Assam so far is a July 2008 verdict of the Gauhati High Court. In a case involving as many as 61 people who had been found to be ‘foreigners’, the court said that most of them were able to avoid “proceedings against them as well as their deportation from India’ and that they have ‘incorporated their names in the voters’ lists on the basis of which they must have cast their votes”. One of them with a Pakistani passport even contested the State Assembly elections in 1996. Going further than any judicial opinion so far, the court said, ‘large number of Bangladeshis’ in the state now play ‘a major role in electing the representatives both to the Legislative Assembly and Parliament and consequently, in the decision-making process towards building the nation.’ Not mincing words, the court described their political influence as that of ‘kingmakers’.

That is where things stand now. And with things thus, riots of the type that the country has seen in Kokrajhar will be endemic. The indigenous inhabitants of Assam — an enormous pot-pourri of ethnic groups that are as varied as those in the whole of India, comprising Assamese caste Hindus (including the Assamized Bengali Hindus with names like Bhattacharjee and Chakrabarti), Ahoms, Assamese Goriya Muslims, Bengali Hindus of the Barak valley, and the large variety of plains tribals like Bodos, Miris, Rabhas, Cacharis, Lalungs, Mikirs, Dimasas, etc. — have realised that if the East Bengali immigrant Muslims continues to grow in political stature then one day they will demand an Anschluss with Bangladesh, and the result would be unmitigated disaster. They will therefore rebel — as they have rebelled in Kokrajhar.

As to the solution, things do not look hopeful primarily because of the reason that we Indians prefer to be politically correct and pretend everything is bhai-bhai. Behind this, of course, there is the solid realpolitik of vote banks, but there is also our innate reluctance to accept the truth and go for the solution. Unless the disease is diagnosed and accepted as such, no question of any cure can arise. The disease is what the Gauhati High Court had, without regard to political niceties, pointed out.

Let no one nurse the fond hope that this problem is going to go away if we, in our ‘secular’, ostrich-like fashion, wish it to go away. It is not a problem, it is a disease; and it will foster, spread, putrefy, until it is cured – or the patient is dead. And the cure lies in deportation, or at the very least disenfranchisement, of the immigrants. How this will be done is the next question. It will not be easy. But let’s not jump the gun — let’s accept the solution first – with disenfranchisement. Unless the truth is accepted, striving for the truth becomes impossible.

The judgment of the Gauhati High Court, in the case of Md. Abdul Hasim vs The Union Of India WP(C) No 1102 OF 2008 is very instructive. Those with a taste for law bay find it at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1189769/

REFLECTIONS AFTER A VISIT TO ALASKA AND CANADIAN ROCKIES
TOURISM AND WHY WE DON'T DO IT

I don’t have the figures, but I think there is no industry which generates employment per unit investment as much as the hospitality industry does. And I don’t need to have figures to prove that the biggest problem besetting our country, or at any rate my state of West Bengal, is unemployment – not Jungle-mahal, nor Darjeeling hills, nor the necessity to pay obeisance to our departed leaders and other prominent men and women on their birthdays. And two things generate hospitality: business and tourism.

So why don’t we develop tourism? This question has been asked by innumerable Indians visiting foreign tourists spots or even by Bengalis visiting spots in Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh? Why are our tourist spots (especially those in eastern India) so unpackaged, why is the infrastructure servicing them so inadequate and ramshackle, or even sometimes non-existent, why are we confronted by dour-faced babus stonewalling the most elementary enquiries, why aren’t there websites giving the necessary information? To give just two examples: once I asked a babu manning an enquiry desk at the India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) office in Kolkata the location of Mandu (the famous capital of Raja Baz Bahadur and Rani Roopmati, in M.P.), and received the indifferent reply that he does not know! And at another time I was visiting a business acquaintance at the ITDC Pataliputra Hotel at Patna. My host ordered a cup of tea for me, and received a cup of a lukewarm treacly substance 45 minutes later. He was visibly embarrassed, but it was not the poor fellow’s fault – he worked for a PSU, and his employers had legislated that all their officers must put up at (and put up with) a sister PSU hotel, the sister being ITDC.

I personally love – absolutely love – to travel, and have just finished a trip of Southern Alaska (Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway and a cruise on the Tracey Arm fjord and other parts of the Inside Passage) and the Canadian Rockies. I had earlier seen the Grand Canyon, the Muir Woods near San Francisco, the Swiss and Austrian Alps, the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York, the Cotswolds in England, the Black Forest of Germany; and I have also seen the Namdapha Tiger Reserve in the Changlang District of Arunachal Pradesh, the gorges between Laitlyngkot and Pynursla in Meghalaya, the wild rivers and greenery of the West Bengal Dooars, the incredible scenery of the Kumaon Himalayas and of the West Coast between Mangalore and Goa, the Sundarban delta. I am eager to see the Satkosia gorge and the mangroves of Bhitarkanika delta on the Mahanadi river, both in Orissa, but am told that all the last three are many times more interesting than the Florida Everglades. But people (including Indians) will visit and spend billions of dollars on visiting the Everglades or Adirondacks, but not Sundarban or Bhitarkanika, and they would not even have heard of Laitlyngkot and Pynursla. Why? Because they’ve never been told of them, don’t know how to reach them, where to live and eat there, how much it will cost to go there. And no wonder, because many of these places (such as Namdapha or Bhitarkanika) cannot be reached by ordinary means by ordinary citizens, and are far too dangerous (because of malaria, snakes or crocodiles). The celebrated Athabasca or Columbia glacier in the Alberta province of Canada, from which I just returned, and which I saw draws several thousands of tourists every day, is equaled or surpassed by the Amarnath glacier, and quite possibly many others. Amarnath is visited only during Shravani Purnima time for pilgrimage, and not at all at other times of the year.

Every major city, including Delhi and Mumbai have weekend getaways close by. You’d think Kolkata has none. In fact there are large water bodies called beels and fishing ponds called bheris north and east of the city which, properly developed, could serve as beautiful getaways and fetch money for the local population. On the road that leads from Kolkata to Bishnupur via Arambagh there is a jungle called Joypur which could serve the same purpose. Even existing getaways like Digha, Shankarpur, Mandarmoni or Bakkhali are miserable places compared even to the getaways out of Mumbai like Khandala or Lonavala, or those out of Delhi like Badkhal Lake or Suraj Kund.

Why are these getaways not developed? You ask the Bengali babu either in politics or in the bureaucracy, and you would be rewarded with the Bengali ingenuity for giving excuses for not doing things, like: (a) Developing these would displace existing users, especially cultivators (standard Mamata argument); (b) Such getaways would promote immorality and men would run there every weekend with their mod and meyechhele (liquor and women); (c) This is not a primary requirement – first we have to look to food and clothing for our poor, toiling masses; (d) Tourist traffic would spoil the environment and/or interfere with the pristine lifestyle of the locals. And so on, and so forth, ad nauseam.

And if places like Namdapha in Arunachal, or the gorges between Laitlyngkot and Pynursla, or the Mawsmai and Nohkalikai Falls in Meghalaya or the Sundarbans of West Bengal or Bhitarkanika of Orissa are properly packaged, served with infrastructure, rendered safe and advertised, they could attract thousands, even millions, of visitors from all over the world, bringing prosperity to these neglected and impoverished regions. Would we not all like that?

Interestingly, all would not. 

And to illustrate this point, I’ll finish this with a real-life anecdote. An ex-CPI(M) MP from West Bengal wanted to promote horticulture in his constituency by facilitating export to flowers to Europe and North America, especially during winter. His party colleagues retorted, “Has Comrade taken leave of his senses? If this is done there’ll be money in people’s pockets! Then who would care for the party (Tokhon party-ke ke patta debe)? Don’t even think of any such thing”.           

BANDHS AND VIOLENCE

Why did the BJP call a Bandh on 31st May? This is a question asked by many, and I shall try to answer truthfully.

First, I personally -- and I emphasize the word ‘personally’, because I have no mandate to speak on behalf of the whole party -- hate Bandhs. I am a Rightist by temperament, and so is our party by creed, and our motto is to keep life going as usual. Then why the Bandh, and why am I supporting it?

This Bharat Bandh call (which cannot possibly leave out West Bengal) was given in response to an unprecedented hike in Petrol prices which is the direct result of a gross mismanagement of the economy  by the UPA government. The BJP usually does not give Bandh calls, nor are bandhs a ‘fact of life’ (in the sense they are in West Bengal) in the states in which BJP is strong, such as Delhi, Gujarat or Karnataka. The bandh thus has thus to be seen differently in West Bengal from that in other states. In the other states it was an exceptional thing and to be taken with the utmost seriousness; in West Bengal it was just another bandh, similar to the innumerable bandhs called earlier by CPI(M), Trinamool, Congress, SUCI, Naxalites and several other parties (not to speak of the general strike call given by the ruling Muslim League in undivided Bengal on 16^th August 1946 which unleashed the Great Calcutta Killings).

I now come to the issue of vandalism, destruction of property, and obstruction of the arteries of transport. There cannot be two opinions on the proposition these are reprehensible, condemnable. But this is a political idiom in West Bengal, begun by the Left in the 1950s, the most notable among the incidents being in July 1953 when they burnt 13 tramcars on a single day in protest against a 1-pice hike in tram fares. Since then innumerable bandh calls have been given by them, the Congress and Trinamool, and there have been violent incidents in many of them. I remember something that happened almost in front of my eyes – following a bandh call by the Congress (possibly in 1986) during Left rule, Congress goons lobbed a petrol bomb into a double-decker bus near Charu Market in Tollygunge in South Kolkata. Two young girls were killed as a result.

The Left usually don’t regret such incidents, though the Congress and BJP do. Then why do leaders of such political parties countenance such violence? Is it simply the hypocrisy of politics? Partly yes, perhaps, but not wholly so. It is a fact that in India politics attracts the riffraff of society, and in a bandh-like situation there is no control on such elements, particularly when the government tries to resist the bandh. Of course, in the CPI(M)-sponsored bandhs during Left rule there was no government resistance to the bandh, so no violence. Boys comfortably played cricket on the main traffic arteries and government employees, having done their shopping the previous evening, had a heavy lunch and enjoyed their siesta.

So the only cure for such violence is not to have bandhs at all. But this cannot be achieved by a Mamata Banerjee who has reached her present position partly by calling bandhs, and now having come to power suddenly has had a change of heart and decides to pontificate against bandhs. No one will listen to her – as government employees paid no heed to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s ‘Do it now’ slogan, because they remembered that it this Buddhadeb’s party which had taught them the culture of cheating on work.

So bandhs can be stopped only by an all-party agreement. There again, the Left parties will never agree. It is the Left which created this political idiom, and it is the dominant idiom in West Bengal. So there is no hope for West Bengal so long as the Left parties remain relevant.

There is another aspect to this. After BJP's bandh on 31^st May (including the violence) many people sat up, took notice and said,  “Oh, we didn't know BJP had that many cadres in West Bengal”! Imagine what would have been the situation if, on the other hand, BJP had declared that they will never call a bandh, never indulge in violence? The same people would have said, “What, the BJP! Sour grapes! Does the BJP exist in West Bengal that they are talking about not calling bandhs”?

Now they say it no more. Very unfortunate, but that’s how it is.