Saturday, December 27, 2025

When Will She Get Justice?

By
Aradhna Wal
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Sandhya, Rape Survivor

On stage at THiNK, 16-year-old Sandhya, her back to the audience, declared to loud and long applause that she would fight her case no matter what. And, as she came off stage, she broke down into silent tears, brought on by recounting her harrowing tale of rape and caste oppression in Haryana. Last year in August, this Dalit girl was gangraped by two upper- caste Rod men on her way to school. Twenty days later, her mother was also gangraped and murdered in the most brutal manner in retaliation to Sandhya not returning to her rapists within 10 days, as they had demanded. Since then, she and her family have been ostracised by the landowning upper castes as well as their own community and family. They have faced police taunts, systemic corruption and people treating them like greedy beggars hankering for compensation money. Her father has no regular job and the upper-caste families routinely threaten her in court. Sandhya says she is very afraid, but her actions are a testimony to her courage. As she struggles for justice, for a better life for her siblings, perhaps the seeds of a revolution can be found in this young girl.

Can Computers Replace Human Thought?

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
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William Uricchio | Media Scholar
William Uricchio, Media Scholar
Photo: Ishan Tankha

Think of the Internet as a vast medieval capital. Labyrinthine alleys separate shops selling wares from every corner of the known world. Touts, pimps, slave traders, assassins, spies lurk in every corner. You are a young farmer’s son, come to make your fortune in this great city (or, in an example closer to home, an immigrant in Delhi or Mumbai). You meet people who take you in, guide you through the utterly discombobulating experience, and offer you a modicum of stability. They help you negotiate your way around the market, get the things you need to survive, to make some sort of life. You don’t really know these people from Adam. But you trust them, either implicitly (you are a fairly trusting guy), or on the basis of evidence (they have helped you in the past), or because of some shared familiarity (they come from the same part of the world as you), more accurately, because they seem to know you, where you come from, what you desire. But for all you know, they could be spies keeping an eye on an alien, or touts taking your money little by little, or slave traders or assassins or worse. You trust them, because you know you are better off with them than alone, because they make your life simpler, less lonely. But you keep an eye open.
This leap of faith is roughly what we make with the increasing influence of Big Data in our lives. At a time when the kindness of strangers is not something that can be counted upon, it is but natural that we lean upon technology to help us negotiate the virtual and, as the two integrate more and more, the real world. Everybody who uses the Internet in a meaningful way in their daily lives knows by now that their personal data, their usage habits, are being logged somewhere, packaged and sold to someone else. Few know where or how much. We could find out by painstakingly reading and analysing the privacy agreements that we lie we have read and understood while filling any Internet form, but these terms and conditions are often longer than entire constitutions. We reason that the potential consequences to our privacy are outweighed by the desire to play Angry Birds sometime in the next year or so, and click the check mark and hit submit.
The underlying reason, of course, to why we continue to make this trade-off, on an almost daily basis, is that this data about us is used to create services that pervade almost every aspect of our existence. Both in the developing and developed worlds, there is an online alternative to most everyday tasks. Even our cultural lives are being driven more than anything by the Internet. The books we read, the films we watch, the music we listen to has always been curated in some way. That screening process is now being delegated from the human eye to mathematical algorithms that have mapped your tastes and use them to recommend something new. With the development of what is called narrative science, entire articles can be generated by some version of Roald Dahl’s Great Automatic Grammatisator. Even the people we let into our lives, or into our countries, are determined increasingly by computer algorithms that analyse past behaviour and personality traits to predict future behaviour. “The cultural practices that help to construct the self, our status and friends, our texts, their meanings and our world,” says William Uricchio, “this is the stuff of reality. These are the very factors where we are seeing the emergence of the algorithmic.” It’s the stuff of every science-fiction dystopia, a condition where the individual is secondary to how technology perceives the individual.
The difference between the two, according to Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, is the difference between technological determinism and social constructivism. He is firmly of the latter school, believing that what technology does is what we make of it. Film, for instance, could have evolved in many different ways, if you look at the various debates that raged in the late 19th century (the dominant view at the time, for instance, saw it as some sort of proto-Skype). Algorithms, he believes, occupy a third space somewhere in the middle of the two, with “the purity of mathematics, but all the subjectivity and construction of language and categories”. Until the computer learns to learn by itself and becomes some sort of Skynet, there will always be human intervention. It is this human intervention that he studies to place this development in the context of modern history.
The reliance on algorithms, with all the messiness that comes with a predictive system, says Uricchio, represents a break from the insistence on precision that has characterised cultural progress in the last 400 years. The elimination of the human critic, teacher, even journalist, means that the reality we encounter through technology may not necessarily be the definitive one, but we trust that it is the most convenient one for us. That leap of faith might be far more insidious.

‘Gandhi’s myth needed to bust Modi’s myth’

By
Ajit Sahi
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Jyotirmaya Sharma Professor & academic
Jyotirmaya Sharma, Professor & academic
Photo: Vijay Pandey

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
You have argued that Swami Vivekananda created the foundational basis for political Hindutva. Few have had the courage to do that. Why is there a reluctance in the political classes to name Swami Vivekananda?
Because the hit list of the political class is longer than their reading list. What I have written about Swami Vivekananda is not something that I found in some dusty attic. For Rs 700, you can buy seven volumes of Vivekananda’s collected works. He was very much against untouchability. But he was also a radically empathetic proponent of re-establishing the caste system. In his conversation with a disciple, he says the Dalits should be taught the Bhagwat Gita and Sanskrit so that they learn to respect Brahmins and the upper castes better. The disciple asks, what if the Dalits become the intellectual equals of the Brahmins? Vivekananda says, “You really don’t understand the issue. Once the Dalits understand their place, the sweeper will sweep better, the cobbler will make better shoes.”
You have also written about Mahatma Gandhi, who too was often accused of inconsistencies. Where would you place his Hinduism?
I find a lot of Gandhi’s positions deeply problematic. But we still need the Gandhi myth to counter Hindutva. That is a political project. Politics is about myths, not number crunching as it has become today. And the most potent myth against the likes of Modi is still the Gandhian myth.
Do the youth identify with Hindutva politics?
Modi’s so-called transformational and development plank is really a middle-class version of what the young want. The young are disillusioned, disenchanted and impatient, and rightly so. And this entire development, progress, India-as-superpower, all these things, in a sense, are a secularised version of that very idea that impregnates Hindutva — a great Indian nation. Of course, nobody discusses within the Hindutva project, as nobody discusses within the developmental plank, what are the values that people will accept in common once development happens or once the Hindu rashtra happens.
Is there any punch left in the Ayodhya issue?
Political parties will do whatever they have to, especially if they are guided by religious ideologies, to polarise the electorate. Whether it has any currency left is for the voters to decide. After all, Ayodhya voted for a CPI MP not very long ago.

‘Most groups on the Left have moved to the merchants’ positions’

By
Ajit Sahi
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David Priestland | Historian. Photo: Ishan Tankha
David Priestland, Historian. Photo: Ishan Tankha

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
Your model divides society into the ‘castes’ of soldiers, merchants and sages. In what form and shape do you see that in today’s India?
People’s occupation matters a lot to their political values. What you do for work makes quite a difference to your political attitude. My book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage, uses quite an ancient idea, really, that society is divided into merchants, soldiers and the experts who are intellectuals or priests. The workers are a fourth group. These were called varnas in India. Hierarchies between these groups are bad and need to be combatted. Looking at these categories helps us to understand the world. Because our values are very much influenced by our occupations.
Of course, since those ancient times these categories have become many more, they have proliferated. So if we look at, say, what I call the sage group, originally they were priests, then they were divided between clerics and clerks, that is, between priests and bureaucrats, and in the 1960s the bureaucrats against bifurcated into the so-called creative groups who have had a lot of autonomy at work and were highly educated.
When it comes to India, you have big tensions between bureaucrats and the technocrats on the one hand, and the merchants on the other, at the elite level. Of course, you also have tensions between those elite groups and workers. The merchants are often interested in free trade and finance. The technocrats are interested in expertise. Those often come into tensions. And conflicts within societies are often structured along conflicts between these different groups.
Don’t the soldiers and the sages now work for the merchants?
Exactly. That’s the argument of my book. Over time, you find changes in the dominant group and the dominant value systems imported by it. Until the 1940s, warrior aristocrats were dominant such as in the British empire, Russia and Germany. In India, the British aristocrats had gone very well with the maharajas. And not only were these groups powerful but also those value systems — hierarchy, feudalism, caste system — were powerful. But since then, that group has declined in power and the other groups have been competing to take power.
Generally, workers have not been very powerful and the collectivist values they have had. Communism was, of course, not just entirely a worker thing. It had many other aspects. It was quite militaristic as well. Worker values had more power in Europe, particularly after World War II under the social democratic order. Although they didn’t have absolute power, as the technocrats had more power. But recently, it is the merchants who have become more powerful.
But social democrats in Europe face a crisis of identity. You can hardly think of them as social democrats of the 1960s. Is the concept of social democracy over?
The high point of social democracy was after World War II in the 1950s and the ’60s when new social contracts were built. These were quite technocratic regimes, really, but they did include many of the working classes. There was a major crisis in the 1970s and the ’80s as most groups on the Left moved to a more merchant position. I don’t know if that crisis is terminal. (The) 2008 (financial crisis) was a crisis of the merchant order. But it hasn’t overthrown the merchants yet.

‘If it wasn’t for the figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore, would you have read my report?’

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
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Vinod Rai | Former CAG Photo: Rohit Chawla
Vinod Rai | Former CAG
Photo: Rohit Chawla

In his tenure as the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), Vinod Rai breathed new life into the institution, turning what had been reduced to a mere accountancy firm into a watchdog of fiscal waste and corruption. His revelations ushered in a period of incredible social churn, with the citizens of the country demanding accountability from the leaders they elect. He says that instead of accusing him of bombast, the government should have taken steps to ensure that such a situation never came to pass.
Edited Excerpts from an Interview
You had a long career in the civil services before your appointment as CAG. You have seen both sides of the divide. What was your opinion of the post before you took over? Did you have any occasion as a secretary to the government to question the CAG’s findings?
Earlier, my view of the CAG was that it was getting into fault-finding exercises, and to that extent, was telling us what was wrong. Which means, he was shutting the door in our face. He was not recommending any procedures. See, when you shut the door, you must open a window. I did have occasions when I was in the defence ministry to contest the CAG’s findings, but in those times, we didn’t have the concept of entry and exit conferences — which we have now — where if you contest the findings, you can do so at the exit conference and have the CAG record your views in his report.
The incumbent government has argued that issues involving determination of policies are outside the CAG’s purview, and that the CAG ought to confine itself to reviewing lapses in policy implementation. Do you agree with this view as a principle of constitutional propriety?
Certainly. I’m of the view that policy formulation is the prerogative of the executive. After all, we are a parliamentary democracy. The CAG is not an elected body; I didn’t represent the public in that sense. Our job, then, is to audit whether the policies, which the government has announced, are actually implemented.
The most celebrated case brought to light by the CAG in recent memory is, of course, the 2G spectrum allocation issue and the 1.76 lakh crore figure for presumptive loss. Considering that the CBI pegged the figure at around Rs 30,000 crore, do you think your figure was grossly overestimated?
No, I don’t think it’s a gross overestimate. How was that figure arrived at? By comparing it with the 3G auction. In 2010, a figure of that kind did actually accrue to the government. So, while it is not accurate to say that all that money would have come to the government, but it did lose a significant amount that could have accrued to the treasury. Also, tell me, if that figure wasn’t there, would you have read my report? Would the public have had the benefit of time to understand what was going wrong? And, more importantly, a national resource is something that all of us own. That resource is being given to a crony for nothing. Shouldn’t society protest about that?
Auditors always have the benefit of hindsight, while the officers taking major policy decisions in a complex environment also have to deal with the element of uncertainty. How far is it fair to judge and find fault in these decisions after the event?
Absolutely right, but external audits are carried out only after the event. There are CAGs in 191 countries; all of them carry out audits after the event. But you have what is known as concurrent, or internal, audit that is supposed to be done by ministries as the event unfolds. This was pointed out to the telecom ministry, but they were not accepting it. For five years, I have been writing to the PM, asking him to beef up the internal audit. Unfortunately, he hasn’t done it.
 

Where Do We Come From?

By
Ajit Sahi
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Louise Leakey Paleontologist
Louise Leakey| Paleontologist
Photo: Ishan Tankha

Not too long ago, nearly everyone thought it was the Asian ape that jumped through the evolutionary ring to turn bipedal, thus becoming human. But, no. “As homo sapiens, we have been around only for 200,000 years,” says Louise Leakey, a paleontologist, on a visit to India to attend THiNK 2013 at Goa. “If you actually look at how long we have been around as an upright walking ape, which is going back eight million years, our species has been here only this tiny window in time.” And back then, the ancestors of everyone who is human today was negotiating life in Africa.
That Asia is the native land of all our ancestors is not the only myth the Leakeys — for she is the third generation of paleontologists — smashed. They were also the first to suggest that millennia ago, not one but several species of ape were marching up the evolutionary scale, most likely simultaneously, until the early ancestors of today’s humans went into overdrive and shot ahead.
The passion for searching our remotest past first flared up in her grandfather, Louis Leakey, the son of expat Christian missionaries. Even as a child, all of Louise’s vacations were spent excavating for artefacts and fossils.
By the time Louis passed away in 1972, his and his wife’s digging had thrown up more new explanations than all previous excavations put together. Louise was only 21 when her father, Richard, also a paleontologist, became an invalid from being in a plane crash. To build on the work of her grandfather and father was the natural course for her.
And some toil that has been. “If you want to become a fossil, you have to die in the right place and your bones have to actually be buried quickly,” she says. “It is a very rare event indeed that anything is ever fossilised.” But once it happens, the fossils are a revelation. “There is a lot you can do by looking at the context of these bones, by dating the volcanic ash horizons, between which the fossils are sandwiched,” she says. “If they’re above a known horizon, they’re younger; if they’re older, they would have fallen below the volcanic ash horizon.”
More clues are to be had from the sediments in which the fossils are preserved, the fossils of the animals found preserved alongside, the isotopes and the teeth. “There are many ways to look at the past,” she says. Indeed.

What Happens When You Stop Winning?

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
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Garry Kasparov | Chess Genius
Garry Kasparov | Chess Genius

Garry Kasparov keeps me waiting for half an hour before he comes for our interview. He’s busy watching the opening moves of Game Two of the World Championship match between 44-year-old Vishwanathan Anand, a longtime rival in the latter half of Kasparov’s career, and 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen, the chess wunderkind he previously trained and has been raving about for years, who “combines the positional knowledge of Anatoly Karpov with the determination of Bobby Fischer”. The day before, he was a little disappointed that he’d miss the endgame manoeuvring in Game One because of his session at THiNK 2013; he seemed relieved when the game ended in a quick draw well before he had to leave for the auditorium.
The World Championship being played in Chennai is a constant presence in Kasparov’s trip to India. He is asked about it extensively in the press conference. He refuses to pick a favourite; though Carlsen is clearly the better player, Anand has played more championship matches, an experience that cannot be replicated. The match format, where champion and challenger play 12 games, has faced criticism over the years, most notably from Carlsen himself, who boycotted the Candidates Tournament in 2011 because he felt the format wasn’t “sufficiently modern or fair, to provide the motivation I need”. “The great thing about chess,” says Kasparov, “is the unique status of the world champion. If we count classical champions, Vishy is the 15th. We’re talking about 127 years; it’s a unique line of succession. So the World Championship match always creates huge emotions. It’s the golden hen. How could you kill it for an event that had no value?”
The event he speaks of was the championship tournaments introduced in 1997 by Fédération Internationale Des Échecs (FIDE) President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, during an era between 1993 and 2007 when chess had two world champions. That schism took place after Kasparov, world champion since 1985, broke away with Nigel Short to form the Professional Chess Association (PCA) because he felt that chess administration had not evolved to take advantage of the end of the Cold War. “The PCA was no accident,” he says. “It was part of my belief from the mid-’80s that chess needed to move to a new level of management. We have a product that has to be packaged and sold, and FIDE was in no position to do it. [Then FIDE President Florencio] Campomanes was a product of the Cold War. He knew how to sell political elements, but he was not capable of selling chess as a game that would attract corporations.” He admits, though, that the PCA was a mistake, that he could have accomplished much more by remaining within FIDE.
It is a mistake he seeks to correct next year when he stands against Ilyumzhinov, who has been the undisputed strongman of world chess for the past 18 years since replacing Campomanes in 1995. THiNK, in a way, marks the launch of his campaign; after travelling from Goa to Chennai for Games Three and Four, he embarks on a tour of Southeast Asia, to meet national federations and garner support. Ilyumzhinov, the former president of the Russian province of Kalmykia, is a millionaire who is known less for his work for the development of the game than for his widely publicised claim in 1997 that he had been abducted by aliens (in 2010, he had to publicly declare he wasn’t working for an alien intelligence service) and for playing a game of chess with longtime friend Muammar Gaddafi shortly before the latter’s capture and execution. “If you search for Ilyumzhinov on Google, all you find are aliens and Gaddafi,” says Kasparov. “How is that going to attract sponsors?” Apart from the bad PR his eccentricities generate, Kasparov blames Ilyumzhinov for having scuttled hopes of a FIDE-PCA title reunification because of his obsession with knockout tournaments and for not possessing any long-term vision for the development of the game. He also blames FIDE for not following through on its pledge to bring chess to schools, even in a large country like India with an influential chess organisation that is close to the international body.
Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein in 1963 in Baku, now Azerbaijan, to a Russian Jewish father and an Armenian mother. He would later adopt a Russian version of his mother’s surname, Gasparyan, in what was perhaps a move to escape both antisemitism and a bias against non-Russians in the former Soviet Union. He began playing chess at the age of six and soon started winning tournaments with regularity. By age 13, he was Soviet youth champion; by 16, he had won his first international senior tournament. He wasn’t, he says, a moody, solitary chess player like, say, Fischer, but a fairly sociable child. “One of the problems is to actually defy the wrong image of the game that was created not only by Fischer but by chess literature. The two books everybody cites are Chess Story by Stefan Zweig and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. Both books give a portrait of a great chess player, but it’s not one you want your kids to follow. This does a great disservice to the game.”
He may have been a companionable person, but staring you down across 64 squares, he was ruthless, beating you not only through his inventive play but also his physical and mental stamina. The world learned all about that in 1984, when the then 21-year-old, one loss away from allowing the incumbent champion and star of the Soviet chess machine Anatoly Karpov to hold on to the title, managed to hold Karpov off for 21 games. Eventually — crucially, after Kasparov had won two games in a row to come within three wins of the title — Campomanes called the match off, citing fears for the players’ health after a five-month battle. On 9 November 1985, 28 years to the day before his session at THiNK, he beat Karpov for the title in a rematch. It was a title he would hold until 2000, when he lost to Vladimir Kramnik in a PCA-sanctioned match. He won almost 70 percent of all the games he played, held the record for most consecutive titles and the highest rating ever for a chess player, that is, until Carlsen overtook him in January this year.
In 2005, however, Kasparov retired from chess to take on a bigger challenge: Russian politics. He had joined the Communist Party in 1984, following, he says, the rules of the game. “I was not a big fan of the system, but I had experienced so many problems. To me, it was conditional to receiving support in Azerbaijan.” He would resign from the party in 1990, a year before the USSR’s collapse. He describes himself as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, who wants “the government out of my wallet and my bed”. Following his retirement, he tried to organise opposition to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic regime, which he says only works to enrich the country’s oligarchs. Support for his challenge was mixed; while many came together around his anti-Putin platform, he has been routinely criticised for leaving chess to join politics. And for not being Russian enough. (He now lives, and his family has for years, in the US, because most of his income is from the lucrative speaking circuit.) Nevertheless, he decided to run for the presidency in 2007.
It was a battle that he would not win. On 12 December of that year, he was forced to withdraw from the race because he had not managed to rent a hall to house enough people to endorse his candidature. Today, Putin seems as strong as ever, while the opposition has succumbed to infighting, losing successive elections at various levels. Kasparov has receded from the fight, in deference to the younger generation, training his guns instead on Ilyumzhinov, a staunch Kremlin ally. But he refuses to accept that Putin enjoys the country’s support, insisting that only free and fair elections will prove that. “In chess,” he memorably said during his session, “there are fixed rules and predictable outcomes. In Russian politics, it is precisely the opposite.”

The Good Times And The Bad

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
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Vijay Mallya. Photo: Arun Sehrawat
Vijay Mallya. Photo: Arun Sehrawat

In the morning of the final day of THiNK 2013, the audience gave a standing ovation to Medha Patkar’s attack on corporate greed and the ravaging effects of irresponsible business on the country’s poor. In the evening, the same audience gave a standing ovation to Vijay Mallya’s attack on the government’s refusal to dig Kingfisher Airlines out of a deep financial hole.
Mallya’s session, a conversation with TEHELKA’s Editor Tarun Tejpal, could be divided into three parts. In the first, he rattled off his achievements, not insignificant by any manner. He took over as chair of United Breweries at the age of 26 after the death of his father. He raised sales from 2.9 million cases of alcohol a year to 130 million, making United Spirits the biggest alcohol producer in the world. He resuscitated the Kingfisher brand, which had been shelved by the previous management, and got Kingfisher beer a 50 percent domestic market share. He got around the ban on alcohol advertising by authoring surrogate advertising. Asked about his larger-than-life image of the king of good times, he talked about how he was merely acting his age. As a business tycoon in his mid-twenties, it was only natural, he said, that unlike the Goenkas, Birlas and Ambanis of the world, who were twice his age, he would spend his money on Ferraris, expensive watches and clothes.
In the second part, he talked about his time in Parliament, inveighing against the hypocrisy of his fellow MPs. He criticised the rampant corruption of the country and the death of debate in the apex legislative body of the land. (It was presumably his disdain for this, that meant his Parliamentary attendance in this term is less than half the national average, and that he has participated in precisely zero debates.)
The third part was dedicated to the spectacular fall of Kingfisher Airlines. Mallya attributed the demise to the dramatic rise in oil prices in 2008 from around $70 a barrel to over $140, “a rise of over 100 percent in our primary cost factor”. He had made Kingfisher the largest airline in India, with 490 flights a day, and was therefore heavily exposed to the price hike (Jet, his primary private competitor, could hedge oil prices, he said, because 20 percent of their flights were international). 26/11 didn’t help, as it reduced passenger numbers. The government, he said, refused to help because of his ‘liquor baron’ status. Neither did it allow him to restructure his debt and bounce back. He attacked the government, to great applause, for not supporting industry, for not having the safety net of Chapter Eleven to allow companies to tide over difficult times. He once told a group of Indian-Americans, he said, that they should return to India for the same reason their ancestors had gone to the US. “I regret those words today,” he said to the aforementioned standing ovation.
What Mallya neglected to mention was that Kingfisher Airlines’ debt was in 2010, when a consortium of 14 banks converted Rs 1,355 crore into equity at a 62 percent mark-up over the market price. He also neglected to mention that the airline never showed a profit, even before the oil crisis, and was perhaps the most high-profile toxic asset in the banks’ portfolios. The bankers also stretched the period of repayment of loans to nine years with a two-year moratorium, cut the interest rates, and sanctioned a fresh loan. In December last year, he asked the banks, which already had an exposure of over Rs 7,000 crore, for more, with nothing much to offer. Shockingly, they refused.
It is all very well for Mallya to use his ‘liquor baron’ image as an excuse for why the State refused to help him, refused to show him sympathy. To an extent, it is even true. But Kingfisher Airlines’ demise cannot be attributed to state inaction alone.

An Afghan date to remember

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
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IMG_2776
Call it coincidence, but the first thing I found on television after returning from Day Two of THiNK 2013 was Mike Nichol’s wonderful film Charlie Wilson’s War. A biopic about the United States Congressman who led a campaign to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan in order for them to fight the Soviet invasion, it ends with a quote that perfectly sums up the US’ efforts: “These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… and then we fucked up the endgame.”
Wilson’s war did go a long way in ending the Cold War and engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union, but like almost every other case of the US giving guns to a group of people in the hope that they would defeat another group of people, it had adverse side-effects that would destabilise the region for years to come. Once the Soviets packed up and left, the Afghans found themselves in a nation where half the population was under 14. The Americans had spent billions on providing them weapons, but did not invest in schools, hospitals, sanitation, water, none of the institutions needed to rebuild a nation. Predictably, these armed groups began to fight each other, until a group of Islamic students — talibs — came into power. The CIA believed, said former director of the Agency’s counterterrorism centre, Robert Grenier, that the Taliban were “good Muslims” who would finally stabilise the volatile region and build a modern, if theocratic, Afghan state. The rest, of course, is history.
Grenier was speaking at what was the most memorable session of the day, if not the festival itself: ‘An Afghan Date’, a conversation between him and a founding member of the Taliban and former Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, moderated by TEHELKA managing editor Shoma Chaudhury. It was pitched as some sort of rapprochement; you expected the two to acknowledge their differences and come to some sort of common ground. After all, it is talking, we have been told on multiple occasions at THiNK, that is the solution.
What we got instead were two interviews between the two speakers and Shoma herself. It began with an analysis of the causes of the US war in 2001. Zaeef, who as ambassador to Pakistan, was central to the efforts to avert war. He mentioned the various options that the Taliban offered the US in the aftermath of 9/11, a continuum of choices ranging from trying Osama within Afghanistan to having him tried in some other Islamic country. The Americans, he said, would accept nothing less than them handing him over to them. This, he said, was unacceptable; one, because Osama was in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power and the notion that the Taliban had created him was a lie, and two, because he was a guest in their country and Pashto hospitality forbids sending a guest to what was, in effect, near certain death. Grenier, on the other hand, defended American transigence, saying that the menu of choices they could offer the Taliban became “very limited after 9/11 for obvious reasons”. The Taliban, he said, were untrustworthy, so any question of compromise was ruled out.
Expectedly, this didn’t go down well with the audience, and thus began perhaps the most confrontational interview THiNK has seen in three editions. Repeatedly, Shoma attacked Grenier for the CIA’s intransigence, for its arrogance in painting the Taliban simply as religious extremists not worthy of dialogue. Grenier didn’t help his case with obstructionist waffle, refusing to directly answer any of the questions, opting instead for vague statements about truth, justice and the American way. It became clear that the US, like most of the ‘civilised’ world, refused to look at the Taliban as rational actors, preferring instead to paint them as fundamentalist fanatics.
It was truly bizarre; the Taliban representative suddenly seemed the more reasonable panelist, drawing applause and cheers with his talk of compromise and change. Of course, there is much fodder for criticism of the Taliban, who for almost seven years, formed one of the most regressive regimes in the world. Women’s rights, for instance, were trampled upon in a manner that was almost unprecedented in the post-medieval world. In the audience’s mind, however, Grenier’s obfuscations and Zaeef’s measured tone meant that the latter left the session seeming almost progressive.
That impression, however, was dispelled somewhat in a second session with Mullah Zaeef on the final day. The session had been called partly because the first, primarily about the geopolitics of the Afghan war, had seemed to some to be too soft on him, and Shoma was able to press Zaeef on the Taliban regime’s record. Zaeef’s answers demonstrated the benefits of talking; that first session, it seemed, had taught him how to obfuscate with élan. Every time he was asked about the regime’s oppression of women, he stuck to his talking points. When the Taliban came to power, he said again and again, it had three priorities: disarming the population, build a united Afghanistan, put in place a national government. Empowering women, it seemed, was simply forgotten. Shoma pressed, essentially asking the same question in different words. Zaeef responded with a vague statement about how they had “budget problems”, before reiterating the three priorities. Further pressing, further waffle. 1994 was a different time, he said. If the Taliban ever came back to power, things would be different. But the situation would be similarly volatile. No, you see, in 1994, we had three priorities… Amidst the noise, though, it was easy to miss the most important thing he said. In 1994, the Taliban, he admitted, was too insular, too unexposed to universal principles of human rights. Mistakes were made, which wouldn’t be repeated in the future. Women form half of the electorate, he said, and for the Taliban to come back to power, they would have to protect women’s rights and liberties. Of course, it’s not too certain how much influence Zaeef has left among the Taliban, but the contrition he showed does hold great hope for the future.

Two titans of cinema, under one roof

By
Ajachi Chakrabarti
-
Photo: Ishan Tankha
Photo: Ishan Tankha

You know you’re in the presence of a legend when the audience, which has been eating out of your hands so far, begins heckling you when your questions run longer than they should. It is a sign that the audience will not be satisfied until they see and hear as much as humanly possible from the man they came to see. That the audience firmly believed that every moment Amitabh Bachchan spent silent on stage was a moment of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they would never get back. If TEHELKA Editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal, who hosted the session, had ended it at the scheduled time, there might have been a mini-riot. Wisely, when the bell rang, he immediately assured the crowd that the talk would go on.

It was, as Tejpal said, the most starstruck session in THiNK’s history, as Bachchan and Robert De Niro, two titans of cinema whose names are known to millions, were both present under one roof. De Niro, who will formally take the stage on Sunday afternoon, was watching in the audience; and when the session finally ended, he came onto the stage for a photo-op for the ages.

Bachchan, who said that the presence of a live audience “always brings fear” of not being acceptable, of making mistakes, was reserved, but engaging. He spoke of his childhood in one of India’s most elite families, growing up in an atmosphere of literature and poetry (his mother let him follow his acting dreams since “one poet in the family [was] enough”), to parents who came from two entirely different backgrounds. Of his early struggles in the industry after being rejected as a newsreader by All India Radio. Of the heights he reached once he broke through as a leading man in Zanjeer and Abhimaan. Of the fall from his perch and bankruptcy, of his reinvention on the small screen through Kaun Banega Crorepati.

It is a cliché, but what shone through the session was Bachchan’s utter humility and the legendary work ethic (he made sure, he said, that he would never miss a call time). Asked repeatedly to describe what goes into his decision to choose which films to do, he replied, “I’m bad at picking scripts; I just took work whenever I could. I just wanted what I was doing to be acceptable.” The younger crowd, he acknowledged, was more organised, more choosy when it came to their films. He talked about the blind faith he placed in his directors, how the only disagreements he’d have with them would be registered when the script was being narrated; once shooting would start, they would be boss.

At one point, Tejpal asked him whether the rumours of Indira Gandhi getting him his first break by writing a letter of recommendation were true. “I never saw the letter or anyone who got this letter. But,” he said, asking De Niro whether he agreed, “even a letter from God can’t get you a role in a film.”

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