Directors: Kamaleswar Mukherjee
Starring: Saswata Chatterjee Ananya Chatterjee Abir Chatterjee Rahul Bannerjee Joydeep Mukherjee
There’s poetic justice in the fact that Meghe Dhaka Tara, Kamaleswar Mukherjee’s masterful ‘biopic’ of Ritwik Ghatak, is produced by Shree Venkatesh Films, the biggest production house in the very same Bangla film industry that steadfastly ignored his films in his lifetime. Audiences largely rejected the man who insisted on confronting them with the miseries of real life that they had come to the cinema to escape. That is, like most such stories, until he got the approval of the West and was accepted for the genius he was.
Saswata Chatterjee, he of Bob Biswas fame, plays Nilkantha Bagchi, a disillusioned intellectual admitted in an asylum to overcome his proclivity for bangla, the country liquor favoured by generations of leftist intellectuals (“The intervening stage between communism and socialism is alcoholism,” proclaims one character). Bagchi is Mukherjee’s stand-in for Ghatak; an alter ego, in fact, created and played by Ghatak in Jukti Takko Ar Gappo, his last film. Much like his mythological namesake, who drank the poison from the churning of the ocean to prevent the destruction of the world — Ghatak, like Bagchi in the film, was criticised by fellow communists for smoking the opium of religion, among other unpardonable sins — there is a certain heroism to Bagchi’s alcoholism, a sense that he must drink in order to continue producing work that will hasten the revolution. But it is poison; we watch how it, along with everything else, has eaten away at him and left him a broken man, a refugee.
It is that image, of Bagchi as refugee, as pariah, that the film keeps returning to. Unlike Ray and his middle-class subjects, Ghatak dealt extensively with the scars of Partition and the miseries of those who were uprooted. Bagchi is told, after the audience walks out of one of his films, that he has not been able to rise above the shanties. He is told, on another occasion, that the fire that burns inside him scorches those around him. His students at the Film Institute reject him for having worked in Bollywood when he needed the paycheck. Even among the working classes, the heroes of his films and his worldview, he does not find acceptance; they tell him frankly that they don’t understand his work. Bagchi is, essentially, a revolutionary sans a revolution, the titular star obscured by clouds. Much of the film, told in glorious flashbacks with Bagchi walking his doctor through them like some Ghost of Christmas Past, deals with these fissures as they happen.
Chatterjee, who seems at first glance a mystefying choice to play Ghatak, gets so thoroughly under the skin of his character that by the end, especially when he adopts the distinctive stubble, it is hard to tell the difference. His versatility, which has made him Bangla cinema’s foremost character actor today, is essential to essaying such a complex role; he goes from earnest idealist to nihilist to obsessive theatre director, haranguing the fellow asylum inmates who will act in his final production.
But the most extraordinary thing about Meghe Dhaka Tara is its refusal to simplify itself for its audience, to provide easy questions and answers. It’s non-linear, stream-of-consciousness, intricate, dealing with ideas conventional Indian cinema wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Not because they’re too radical or anything, but because the very idea of an audience thinking for itself seems an alien concept to today’s filmmakers. The fact that the film, with its homage to Ghatak’s take-no-prisoners style, stands out, shows that other failed revolution of his: a thinking man’s cinema.
‘Once it is generated, empathy becomes a condition of social life’
Your book sounds a little like a damsel in distress calling out for a knight in shining armour to come save our country.
(Laughs) Now that you’ve put it that way, I can’t really disagree with you. I wish I could. Well, democracy is a damsel, and a damsel can also be in distress if left to her own wiles and guiles, which happens in routine life of democracies. Things become pettier and pettier, and as I say in the book, dystopia sets in. You might have read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where we have normal science and paradigmatic or revolutionary science. I think democracy also proceeds in a similar trajectory. We have ‘normal’ democracy — elections, petty politics, interests — and every now and then, a group of people are able to bring about transformations that enlarge the scope of citizenship.
Over the last half century or so, we have come to believe that democracy is more about representation than delivery. I don’t think the two are necessarily at odds with each other, but because of historical factors, the impetus to substantively realise citizenship is not as strong as it should be. In a country like India, there’s greater emphasis on individuals or NGOs doing extraordinary things, and the State is often let off the hook. But in the history of democracy, from the abolition of child labour to the National Health Service (in Britain), it’s always been the State that delivers. The ‘citizen elite’ is an elite of calling that has come up in history to make a difference. The interesting part is that whenever they make a difference, it is not because their interests are being served. Sometimes they go against their own interests also.
Dipankar Gupta
Rupa & Co
240 pp; 495
You have written that this revolution can only come from the elites of our society, and there are historical examples to show that such interventions have come from them. But what can us non-elites do in such a situation?
I think we are all elites, whether we like it or not. In India, the middle class is the elite. People like us don’t actually think of this. We think of removing corruption — which is not a bad idea — of high living, of treating our servants well. But we don’t take the idea of universal health and education as important features of social policy and debate. It’s not on our agenda. And if you raise the topic, they put up their hands and say, “Where’s the money?” I have argued that where these have been implemented, it has not happened because they had the money. Very often, they were poor countries and because they did it, they became rich. So you can’t say that we can’t do this because we don’t have the money, because in that case you’ll never have the money.
Because of this debate between socialism and capitalism, if the State does something, it is considered inefficient. That should not be the case. Even today, if you fall sick in France, you don’t go to a private hospital, but a government one. But if you have a patron-client relationship and a tiny sliver of a middle class, the State is not a very good vehicle for expression.
Empathy, in your mind, is the foremost principle of democracy, and you have written this book at a time when empathy is arguably at a historical low in this country. It’s all too gloomy, isn’t it?
Yeah, that’s true. But empathy is meant to be generated in a self-conscious way, which is the job of the citizen elite. But once it is generated, empathy becomes a condition of social life. It occurred to me for the first time when I was travelling in a train in the US. The ticket collector came, joked and chatted with us. It’s not like he sat and had tea with us, but he was an equal. I thought to myself that this is what it is. That I could be the ticket collector and he could be sitting there, and we would have a similar relationship. The empathy I saw on the train was not a conscious, self-generated one, but it had become a means of social intercourse. I think the citizen elite makes that break, so that all of us can have that empathy in our dealings.
But the idea of the welfare state has been discredited in India over the last two decades by the forces of capital. How would the citizen elite convince the masses to go back to the paradigm of State-based delivery systems?
The people of India aren’t really going to be convinced unless you do it for them. People don’t know what is good or bad if they haven’t experienced it. For instance, when the Delhi Metro wants to add new lines and expand, nobody objects as they did initially. This is because they know it is for their own good, because it has proved itself. Imagine if you could do this on a greater scale. I have seen it happen before my eyes in Basque Spain, how in a few short years, it went from being a basket case to one of the best parts of Europe.
And a primary reason for the success of the Basque region was the shift from an identity-based politics of victimhood to a model of improving citizenship.
In fact, they used their victimhood in a different way. They said, “We’re going to show you we are better than you.” The Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) played on Basque hurt for a long time, and the reason the Basque nationalists did so well after Franco’s death in 1980 was that they took that passion and channelled it differently. That is what took the winds out of ETA’s sails. I was saying to myself that if only the Shiv Sena and others thought that way, that if they told the Western world, “We are great Hindus, because we can do nanotechnology better, because we can harness wind energy better,” it would be so different.
Do you see potential citizen elites in today’s political class?
No, right now I just see elites. We have been conditioned to believe that people count, that we must play to our immediate interests. So the most you can expect is some clean elite to develop, but that is not the answer. One thing I want this book to address is not to blame people for democracy. All too often, we say we deserve the leaders we get, which is unfair. Most people don’t have a choice; you can only choose among those who are available. For example, you want to buy a car. You have a dream car in mind, which runs on hydrogen and can take 100 people. But that car is not in the market. Likewise, there are only certain politicians in the marketplace, and the entry price in politics is very high. It’s not just money; it’s also violence.
Are there measures that need to be taken to create the necessary conditions for a citizen elite to grow?
We need to stop being fobbed off by what people say. The media, for instance, is involved with Modi or not-Modi or Rahul or whatever, but they never ask them questions like “What is your policy for health?” They will say we need health for the poor, but we don’t want health or education targeted only to the poor, because we’ve seen that only leads to poor health and education. It has to be universal. But nobody asks these questions. Even those critical of Modi don’t ask him these questions. These are issues that must be raised by us. There has to be a certain amount of social churning.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Every Move She Makes. They’ll Be Watching Her
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There’s something rotten in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. And it seems the Kannada and Telugu news channels have identified the problem — girls gone wild, fuelled by alcohol. On 14 May, Karnataka’s leading regional news channel, TV9 Kannada, ran a programme, Olage Serideru Gundu (literally, ‘once alcohol is inside’), a fine assortment of video nasties from across the country, showing the great evils of girls drinking — the ruckus on the street, clothes askew, clashes with cops.
For some years now, the disapproving cultural policing of a class of girls — ones who can afford to go out to drink — has become a staple on regional news in both states. There is massive viewership, particularly of sleazy ‘true crime’ reports, and so editors and programming heads encourage reporters to follow women and young couples, to stake out pubs, nightclubs and make-out spots. A cursory search on YouTube reveals the many news reports with such eye-catching titles as ‘Drunk women causing hulchul’, ‘Drunk women causing hungama’, or ‘How to ban rave parties to save the youth’.
“We show boys too, but a girl being daring on screen instantly catches the viewers’ attention,” says Shreeti Chakraborty, senior producer with a leading Kannada channel. One clip was of an altercation between four female students of NALSAR University of Law and reporters from the Telugu news channel ABN Andhra Jyothy, outside Rain pub in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills on the night of 11 April. Shruthi, Megha, Prachi and Adwitiya angrily confronted a drunk man filming them on his phone. The confrontation attracted a mob and reporters from ABN. Apparently, the drunk man was a reporter who had telephoned his colleagues. The footage was picked up by other news channels. Several of them branded the girls immoral, drunk and half-naked and even questioned the pub’s licence.
Watching the ABN footage is instructive. The camera pans up and down the women’s bodies. It is exploitative; consent is not an option, probably not even worth a thought. The viewer is implicated by the camera’s roving eye, a fellow voyeur leering at barefoot girls in short dresses. The cameraman follows the girls to their taxi, thrusting his camera through the door, his taunts provoking the girls to shout insults. Their expressions of fury at being cornered were circulated on primetime news as the faces of unacceptable modernity, of aggressive young women out at night, women who must be checked.
One irate senior journalist with a leading Telugu news channel described the girls as “public nuisance”, and launched into a tirade about “minors” getting drunk, abusing reporters and partying late into the night. He blames this “anti-social behaviour” on both NALSAR and the students themselves: “They even shot a promotional video for the ‘daaru party’ on campus. Look at the things they say in that.”
Confronted by this (self ) righteous indignation, the students launched an online campaign on change.org to prove that they had been harassed by the media. They compiled evidence to show that they were neither minors, nor drinking after legal hours (11 pm), and the leaked video that the news channels broadcast was not a promo for the party. Raj Singh, the owner of Rain, has stated that the ages of everyone at the party were checked and the girls left around 11 pm, not past midnight as the reporters alleged.
“The police raided us at 11.45 pm after the incident was over,” says Singh. “At 12.45 am the reporters barged into my club, beat up my security guard and placed bottles on the bars to suggest that the pub was still open.” His decision to stand up for the girls has meant that his pub “has been raided almost nightly by every department imaginable looking for some illegal activity”.
In response, Andhra Pradesh’s Electronic Media Association of Journalists put up a counter petition on change.org, asking for the girls who “assaulted reporters” to be condemned. It garnered over 5,000 signatures. But during routine checks, change.org traced the bulk of these signatures to one IP address, proving that most were fake. After they removed those signatures, only 132 were left.
The girls’ determination to stand up for themselves sets them apart in a state where reporters looking to manufacture lurid stories appear to operate without any kind of sanction. “We had to fight back,” says Shruthi Chandrasekaran, one of the girls involved in that now infamous April incident. “What’s happening is just wrong and too many people seem resigned to it. We don’t even know what motivates the media’s malice towards us.”
Andhra Pradesh has some 16 regional news channels. Sevanti Ninan, editor of The Hoot, an online media watchdog, has written about how corporate ownership sets the terms and how the need to be profitable means a redrawing of the lines between public and private. In a market exploding with money and fierce competition, no channel can afford for viewers to switch off. Thus, there’s little distinction between what channels define as eyeball-grabbing reportage and salacious entertainment. News seems to essentially mean reality TV served with an indigestible side dish of hypocritical, moralistic commentary.
GS Rammohan, associate editor with ABN Andhra Jyothy, accepts that TV news has gone insane, driven by ratings and profit. According to the TRPs, what sells is sex and crime. “People enjoy watching other people’s private lives on TV,” he says. As long, apparently, as the “other people” are comely young women. The same senior journalist who denounced the NALSAR students stated matter-of-factly that channels look to show beautiful women onscreen as de facto policy. Local media in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, Rammohan says, are similar in this regard. Though Karnataka has six regional news channels as opposed to 16, its crime news coverage is famous for stings, both successful and attempted, on bars in Bengaluru, Mangalore and Manipal. Many of these stings are the work of reporters employed by Suvarna News 24×7 and TV9 Kannada, the two most popular regional news channels in Karnataka. Both blame the other for lowering the tone of the public conversation with leering, tabloid journalism.
Raoof Kadavanad, a crime reporter with a leading English daily in Hyderabad, watches the tactics of TV reporters with some bemusement. He describes how crime reporters seek out couples in public spaces and film them with hidden cameras. The footage is then screened to bolster the argument that the behaviour of young women in the city is deplorable. After the NALSAR incident, TV5 aired a segment about Hyderabad’s nightlife that deplored what was “happening to our sisters and daughters”
In July 2012, Tonic, another pub in Banjara Hills, was raided for having a party long after legal hours. The media filmed the raid, focussing largely on the women in that familiar, creepy style. Depressingly, this behaviour is typical. In January 2012, Suvarna broadcast a ‘sting’ on illegal bars in Bengaluru. The ‘illegality’ of said establishments was, of course, of less concern than filming the girls on their cameras. In 2011, a medical student was photographed at a party in Le Rock Cafe in Bengaluru. Her picture was published in a Kannada newspaper belonging to the Telugu channel Sakshi TV as an example of the malign influence of western culture on the present generation.
The combination of sanctimoniousness and aggression is visible. Girls are hunched over, hiding their faces, surrounded by baying men. The footage is edited insidiously, with strategic blurring implying nudity when a girl is wearing a dress deemed insufficiently modest. Shame is thrust on the girls. “It was terrifying,” remembers Shruthi, “to be chased by this man with a camera, who won’t even let you shut the car door.” Her fear has been felt before by innumerable women running away from cameras, desperately covering their faces with dupattas, scarves or their own hands.
Another popular tactic used by reporters is to wait around with traffic police conducting its weekly drunk-driving tests at various checkpoints around Hyderabad. Every Friday and Saturday night, a small group of reporters armed with lights and cameras film these checks, waiting for women who might be stopped. “Channels use that footage in different packages to say different things for months. People enjoy it,” says ABN Andhra Jyothy’s Rammohan.
In Bengaluru, Ajit Hanamakkanavar, the Crime Bureau Chief of Suvarna, acknowledges that “news has crossed over the line to moral policing and reality TV”. “In the TV business, the remote control is your biggest enemy. No one watches serious, investigative stories,” he adds. The channel has a “legal team at the ready” to deal with accusations of slander and defamation. The reporters are often tipped off about the bar raids by the police. “A commissioner will not be my source,” says Hanamakkanavar, “but a constable will be.” A senior police officer confirmed that the constabulary and reporters often share information.
Both Rammohan and Hanamakkanavar put the blame squarely on upper management. The top brass have cynically turned moral policing into a lucrative business. Many of the reporters, who often come with their own cultural baggage, actually believe they are making a valuable difference, providing a much-needed check to out-of-control youth. It is not enough for them to observe society; they feel the need to become enforcers of a particular, usually imaginary, cultural code. Sampath Kumar, a crime reporter for ABN, earnestly tries to explain how “these people” can be kept in check “through fear of the media and by being made to understand that their behaviour is wrong”. He claims the reporters have the public on their side and that tip-offs come just as often from their audience as from the police.
In Karnataka, there is also a penchant for blaming the outsider, or the ‘foreign hand’ — students and professionals, who flock to cities from other states and countries, and bring money, decadence and loose morals. The pressure to make the money to lead extravagant lifestyles also results in crime, say reporters. Rajesh Rao, the Mangalore crime reporter for TV9 Kannada, says that he’s “seen what goes on in these pubs, what drugs are exchanged. These petticoat parties where girls wear short clothes”. Suresh Kumar Shetty, the Mangalore crime reporter for Suvarna, worries about the effects the “lavish lifestyle” of rich students from outside the state have on locals.
Like Rao, Shetty admits that his channel has attempted to smuggle cameras into popular bars. He once asked two friends of his, who were not reporters, to enter a bar as a couple and film the goings-on. To validate the rightness of the cause, he refers to the tragic suicide of Sneha, an 18-year-old Mangalore girl, in February this year. A drug addict, she reportedly killed herself because she couldn’t afford the next fix. Her parents spoke about a girl who used to top her class at school until she started going to parties in hotels and pubs and was introduced to drugs.
This story fits conveniently into Rao and Shetty’s argument that local youths are tempted into vices they cannot afford and that the media must protect them. Naveen Soorinje, the Mangalore reporter for Kasthuri TV, disagrees. With vehemence. He made national headlines last year after the 23 July 2012 homestay incident in which activists from the Hindu Jagarana Vedike attacked boys and girls at a birthday party. Soorinje’s coverage shed light on what had happened, yet he was named as an accused in the case by the police. Released on bail in March this year, all charges against Soorinje were dropped by the Karnataka government on 14 June. Having consistently reported on cultural policing, he points out when right wing groups such as the Sri Ram Sene go on one of their periodic moral policing jaunts in Mangalore, the media, tipped off by these groups, is close behind. It’s a cosy relationship. The media gets political backing for its own occasional hand-waving about decadent modern culture and the right wing groups get the soapbox and spotlight they so desire. “When the right wing groups are not around,” says Soorinje, “TV channels film young people in pubs and ask ‘what is the Hindu sangathan doing now?’ When TV9 does something, Suvarna tries to catch up by doing something more sensational.”
This role of social responsibility is championed by TV9 Telugu’s executive editor Dinesh Akkula and Input Editor Arvind Yadav. According to them, the story of Telugu media is one of transformation — from a cutthroat business to responsible journalism that is the hallmark of the likes of TV9. “Maturity is coming in slowly,” says Akkula, “we stick to the guidelines recommended by the News Broadcasters Association (NBA). We don’t target specific people or groups, but we show what’s in the public interest.”
In TV9 Telugu’s infamous Planet Romeo sting (February 2011), a reporter posed as a gay man on the site Planet Romeo and befriended other members, eliciting intimate details while recording his conversations. The ‘report’ was broadcast with lots of hand-wringing about how Hyderabad was falling prey to the fashionable gay culture. The conversations were played on TV, revealing identities, personal sexual preferences and histories. Prominent gay rights lawyer Aditya Bandopadhyay filed a complaint and the NBA fined the channel 1 lakh, a piffling sum for a network of TV9’s size.
That appalling piece of reporting shows that it’s not just middle and upper-middle class girls in the firing line, but all manner of easy targets. The Telugu news channel NTV 24×7 once filmed transgenders at an LGBT awareness event held by the NGO Suraksha and then aired that footage in a completely different context, when a man was murdered at a popular cruising spot. TV9 Kannada did a major expose in 2009 on the “Devdasi tradition” among sex workers of Kudligi in Bellary district. The story’s fallout, as documented in a fact-finding report by Vimochana, a women’s organisation, and Nava Jeevana Mahila Okkuta, a Dalit Women’s Collective, was that these sex workers, previously accepted by a wider community, were now ostracised. They had lost their only source of livelihood, couldn’t send their children to school and were shunned by the neighbours. The TV9 journalist, Prakash Noolvi, went on to win the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in January 2012. “The reporter didn’t hide the faces of these women,” says Akkai Padmashali, the media coordinator of Sangama, an LGBT organisation. “They cheated these women by posing as clients. One had even been visiting them for sex.” She angrily recounts the many times reporters secretly film sex workers to extort money from them.
Activists and intellectuals point to how a large section of society gives legitimacy to the media and other self-appointed moral police. People will be outraged by a girl being beaten up, but will also say that she should not have been out drinking in the first place. Conservatives who might be of completely different backgrounds find common ground when setting limits on women’s behaviour. Shaming is a cultural reality. Madhavi Lata, a scriptwriter and former reporter for NTV, is honest about the fact that truth is often warped to fit viewers’ preconceptions. But even she asks why “these girls give people the chance to say something about them. They could go out for a drink in more decent clothes”.
Hyderabad-based activist Tejaswini Madabhushi recalls media reaction to the 5 January ‘Midnight March’ in the city, an attempt to take back the night from sexual predators and the moral police. “Vernacular news reporters,” says Madabhushi, “kept asking us why we wanted to go out in the night and provoke men like them.”
Pop culture too reflects this attitude. Audiences cheer when Telugu heroes verbally and physically abuse heroines. It’s part of a nationwide acceptance of misogyny. Sandhya, a leading gender rights activist in Hyderabad, says people “want to see women as sex objects. Studios call us for panel discussions and pit us against someone from the right wing. We tell them to leave the girls alone and start telling the boys how to behave.” R Akhileshwari, a senior print journalist, points out that it’s “always the woman’s body” that is the locus of censure or dispute. “Why do these channels not look at the liquor shops on the road, where men buy drinks, enjoying a session right there by the roadside?”
Perhaps legal challenges will force TV channels to modify their intrusive behaviour. “It is a violation of privacy,” says Bengaluru-based lawyer Akmal Rizvi. “It can be interpreted as stalking, which comes under Section 354D of the IPC.” One of Hyderabad’s eminent lawyers says, on the condition of anonymity, that some reporters “blackmail people for money by threatening to show their faces on TV”. The NALSAR students cited the reporters’ violations of the NBA’s regulations concerning stings and media ethics. The reporters argue that roads are public areas.
“Moral policing on TV goes back to the ’90s when crime shows started,” says Deepu, a Bengaluru- based documentary filmmaker with Pedestrian Pictures. He reiterates the point that journalists are part of the social fabric that consumes these shows. But the very morality these channels pretend to is hypocritical. “Why would you want to see that picture of the skimpily dressed girl if you are so moral?” asks Nisha Susan, freelance journalist and writer, who began the ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign in 2009 in response to Sri Ram Sene goons beating up women in a Mangalore pub. Thousands of people around the country responded to her call to send the thugs the aforementioned items of women’s underwear. She adds that each generation must push the boundaries for acceptable female behaviour and be prepared for the inevitable friction.
As of now, vernacular media is working hard to play to its audience’s prejudices. An audience that tunes in repeatedly to be scandalised. Perhaps one day, these channels will be overtaken by their viewers as they’re forced to adapt to changing times. One day, the audience will note the rage on a young girl’s face as she is backed into a corner by a reporter wielding a camera. And then they’ll no longer listen to the reporter’s claims that it is the young girl whose behaviour is immoral.
aradhna@tehelka.com
Raanjhanaa refuses to tell a feel-good bubble-gum romance
It is a common criticism of Bollywood today that it does not afford agency to its female characters. The very fact that the few woman-centric films it does churn out are celebrated primarily for being woman-centric is clinching evidence. Aanand Rai’s Raanjhanaa does not fit into that genre, but directly challenges the notion of the male narrative and the place of the woman in it.
When young, Hindu Kundan (the adult played by Dhanush) first sees young, Muslim Zoya (Kapoor), with all the attendant background music and fireworks of love at first sight, you expect the familiar melodrama of stalking masked as courtship, acknowledgement of love, societal differences, the couple fighting back, true love conquering all. What you don’t count on is the woman having her own ideas on how the story should go. When she returns after being separated from Kundan by her parents and sent away for eight years, she doesn’t even recognise him, and more importantly, once she does, she doesn’t believe that she has any obligation to love him no matter how many arranged marriages he gets her out of. Not even if what she sees as a dalliance from school is the cornerstone of his life.
But it is what Kundan’s life is based on, and that is the thrust of the film. Dhanush’s Bollywood debut gives him ample space to demonstrate why he is a star south of the Vindhyas, and his complete immersion in the role is necessary for the film to make the points it does.
For Raanjhanaa to work, we must look at Zoya through Kundan’s eyes, while also looking at Kundan as he looks at her. Unlike the legions of expressionless leading men in the industry, Dhanush knows the exact moment to go from earnest to mildly obsessive, to petulant, to broken. We must watch his love corrode both his and Zoya’s lives — his degradation and her guilt, her sorrow and his guilt. A relationship, after all, is an aggregate of the two people involved and how they affect each other, not a formulaic sequence of emotions the two must necessarily feel.
Sonam Kapoor, on the other hand, isn’t entirely convincing, even if this is the best performance in her brief career so far. Again, what sets Zoya apart from a Bittoo (Delhi-6) or an Aisha, two roles where Kapoor was given some semblance of agency, is that while those characters acted out of overtly defined personalities, we are unsure of what Zoya will do. Caricatures are predictable; a flesh-and-blood woman, especially when seen from the perspective of the young man in love with her, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The film drags in the second half, and a lot of that has to do with shifting the setting from Benares to JNU. Scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma is in his element when talking about the city, especially through the efforts of Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, who plays Murari, Kundan’s best friend. Sharma, and by extension Rai, explores the insides of the city, whose outsides were beautifully captured by Satyajit Ray. In the latter sequences, however, Sharma’s ideas on politics and life at JNU are those of the outsider, some intelligent observations — one scene in particular, where students debate the ethics of dealing with a thief (Kundan), has riled up the campus, but is funny, if simplistic, satire — and many more reductionist ones, causing a jarring transition from the rich tapestry of Benares to a paint-by-numbers Delhi. This spoils somewhat an ending that is a clever interpretation of the conclusion of Heer Ranjha, the folk tale this is a loose adaptation of.
Fans of Bollywood romances might be disappointed that Raanjhanaa refuses to tell them the feel-good bubble-gum romance they are used to. Fans of cinema will be delighted that it does.
[Film Review] Man of Steel
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Henry Cavill
Amy Adams
Michael Shannon
Superman,” wrote Gary Engle in his iconic essay, What Makes Superman So Darned American?, “is like nothing so much as an American boy’s fantasy of a messiah. He is the male, heroic match for the Statue of Liberty, come like an immigrant from heaven to deliver humankind by sacrificing himself in the interest of others. He protects the weak and defends truth and justice and all the moral values inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” For nearly 70 years after being created as a villain by high-school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933, Superman was cast as the embodiment of Good, and by extension, America. In the post-9/11 era, as being American became more and more distinct from being Good, the comics focussed more and more on the Man of Steel’s relationship with the new America — in 2011, he even renounced his US citizenship.
Man of Steel, therefore, was never going to be the Superman we all grew up with. Audiences have been disappointed by the general lack of bank robberies being foiled or plunging trains being caught and returned to the tracks. What we got, instead, was bearded Henry Cavill drifting through Americana and an existential crisis, though, at times, the existential crisis is not whether his true allegiance lies with the planet of his birth or his adopted home, but whether he is Superman or Wolverine. In any case, the name ‘Superman’ is almost excised from the movie, as is the giant ‘S’, now a Krypton symbol for hope.
Which is fine, actually. The nature of comic books, particularly the fact that there are only a finite number of superheroes to build mythologies around, necessitates the concept of the reboot. Superman has, over the years, been reinvented or rejigged umpteen times depending upon the whims of the authors involved. dc Comics explained away the inconsistencies by saying the different Supermen were in different universes. In this particular universe, Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder look at Clark Kent through the lens of the immigrant experience, which Engle says Superman raises to the level of religious myth. Much like a character in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel, Kent sees his attempts at assimilating being met with alienation simply because he is different.
The problem lies, however, with how Nolan and Snyder represent these feelings of alienation. The bearded Clark Kent undergoing a journey of self-realisation is very reminiscent of the bearded Bruce Wayne undergoing a journey of self-realisation in Batman Begins. Tacking on the same story arc for Superman seems forced, and Nolan’s increasing propensity to use a shovel to drive home his point doesn’t help matters.
That shovel comes in the form of General Zod, an occasional comic-book villain who was removed after dc’s attempts at clearing up inconsistencies in 1985 led to a rule that no other Kryptonian would appear in future books (so that Superman’s status as the last of his race would be unchallenged). Though Michael Shannon is always excellent as the self-righteous villain, the ethical dilemma he poses to Kent is the basic Hollywood theme of duty versus humanity: on Earth, if not on utilitarian Krypton, the latter will always win. Instead of focussing on the dilemma, however, we get the high-adrenaline pyrotechnics Snyder revels in, which leaves the additional complexity half-baked and mildly juvenile.
There’s still hope, though. Man of Steel is an imperfect origin story, but if past experience is anything to go by, it’s the second film where Nolan is at his best.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Modi hand in Ishrat's killing: Mother
Photos: Deepak Salvi
The mother of Ishrat Jahan, a 19-year-old Muslim woman that police killed in Gujarat nine years ago claiming she was a terrorist, believes that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi knew of the plan to kill her daughter and was possibly complicit in it.
“Modi is one hundred percent involved in the killing of my daughter and his role in it should be investigated,” Shamima Bi, Ishrat Jahan’s mother, told TEHELKA on Monday, June 17. “How could he not have known when the police claim Ishrat was a terrorist and was on her way to kill Modi when they shot and killed her?”
Shamima also said that the police officers involved in her killing — outside the city of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004 — should be given the death sentence if found guilty. “They planned her killing in cold blood and then killed her knowing fully well that she was innocent,” Shamima said in a telephonic interview. “They should hang for it.”
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is set to prosecute various officers of Gujarat Police who had planned and killed Jahan and three men in an early morning “encounter”. It has declared as absconder a former Ahmedabad crime branch chief named in the case. A former state police chief too is named in the case.
The Gujarat High Court tasked the CBI with the prosecution after a special investigative team (SIT) the court had appointed said in November 2011 that the police had actually kidnapped the victims and shot them, rejecting its claim of killing them in a shootout.
The court had set up the SIT after a magistrate in Ahmedabad had found contradictions in the police story. Based on autopsy reports, the magistrate wrote in 2009 that the victims appeared to have been shot in captivity and not in an exchange of gunfire.
The police had defended the killing saying the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India’s principal snooping agency, had provided the intelligence that Jahan and the three men, two of whom were allegedly Pakistanis, were winding their way to assassinate Modi.
The CBI now has named a police officer with the IB who it says provided a false input about the four persons that were subsequently killed. CBI sources suggest the said officer, Rajindra Kumar, would be arrested. The CBI claims to have evidence that Kumar was on the phone with Modi’s office throughout the day of the killings. Last week the CBI told the high court it would file the charges against the accused by mid-July.
Despite an intense fight back by the IB to stall Kumar’s arrest, Shamima Bi says she believes she is now close to getting justice for her daughter’s killing. “The police and the intelligence agency are trying their hardest to botch the case because their neck is firmly caught in it,” she said. “But I am confident that it is moving in our favour.”
Shamima Bi said she had all but lost hope for securing justice until the Ahmedabad magistrate, SP Tamang, wrote his report in 2009. “The Tamang report revived our hope. I knew then that my innocent daughter’s death would be avenged soon.”
Modi’s government maintains that Jahan and the three others were terrorists and were killed in a genuine encounter. His complicity in the killings has been regularly denied. Tehelka has no means to independently verify Shamima Bi’s allegation against Modi as valid or not. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party this month chose him to lead it in the country’s next General Election that are due in May next year.
Shamima Bi is unfazed that Modi might become prime minister. “The courts have a duty and a right to convict the guilty no matter how high they be.”
Mr Modi Goes To Elections
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has named Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, as the chairman of its campaign committee. Modi will now lead India’s principal opposition party in the country’s 16th General Election. A backroom boy until his surprise elevation as Gujarat CM in October 2001, few would have thought Modi would ever grow so big as to be projected as a candidate for India’s top job.
No doubt, it is a rare privilege, one that has gone to only two others in the party’s 33-year history — Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who rose to be prime minister, and Lal Krishna Advani, who became his deputy prime minister and was the party’s prime ministerial candidate at the 2009 election. Once Modi’s benefactor and now an adversary, Advani quit all party posts after Modi was named its torchbearer. He took back the resignation under pressure from the party and its ideological parent, the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), but the animosity lingers.
Though the BJP has had a string of presidents over the years, Vajpayee and Advani alone were considered PM material. Now that he hopes to become PM, Modi has his task cut out. With only 11 months to go for the next General Election, he has little time to craft a winning team and strategy, or to alter an image of being socially divisive, created by the charge that he allowed, or even connived with, right-wing Hindu zealots to massacre some 2,000 Muslims in his state in 2002.
Would Modi succeed where Advani failed? Just how would Modi deliver a victory that has eluded the party in two successive parliamentary elections? Does Modi have greater traction with the voters than Advani had in 2009? Would existing and potential allies accept Modi as PM just as they accepted Vajpayee in 1998? Both Modi’s supporters and critics recognise him as rabidly anti-Muslim, a perception that has forced at least one coalition ally of the BJP — the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar — to threaten a pull-out if Modi is named the PM candidate. Indeed, Modi is one of the few politicians seen as toxic for India’s pluralistic politics. Would his perceived anti-Muslim persona whip up a frenzy of support among India’s 80 percent Hindu population or would it drive the BJP into the ground?
Modi’s other image is that of a launcher of prosperity predicated on the high economic growth that he asserts Gujarat has netted on his watch. Would Modi’s claim of quality governance in Gujarat carry a decisive edge with India’s 800 million voters? A similar claim by Vajpayee’s government — called ‘India Shining’ — had flopped with the voters in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Finally, would Modi’s stunning three backto- back wins in Gujarat rub off on his maiden bid to win a parliamentary majority?
- BJP’s tally in the 2009 Lok Sabha election
BJP IN STATE ASSEMBLIES
The BJP is undeniably worse off today than it was in 2009. If anything, Modi’s path is far more tortuous than was Advani’s then. Statistically, Advani was dealt a better hand than Modi has been given. Five years ago, the BJP was in power in seven states, including Karnataka, its first full government in south India. Today, the BJP rules only four, two of which are the politically irrelevant Goa and Modi’s own Gujarat. In Karnataka, the BJP’s humiliating loss in the Assembly election last month and in municipalities weeks earlier has lost the party its only toehold in the south.
In Bihar, the BJP-JD(U) alliance appeared cast in stone after it spectacularly won the 2005 Assembly election. It went on to win an unprecedented 32 of Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats in 2009, with the BJP equalling its highest ever tally of 12 that it had got in 1999. The gains were equally prodigious in the 2010 Assembly election, when the partners substantially improved their tallies to retain power. But today, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is inches away from splitting as he fears that embracing Modi could alienate many of Bihar’s 17 percent Muslims who earlier voted for his party.
In Jharkhand, opportunistic politics toppled a BJP government in January, bringing the state under President’s Rule. The party lost Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in Assembly elections last year.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and electorally most influential state, the BJP scraped through in only 47 of the state’s 403 seats in last year’s Assembly election, coming a distant third to the Samajwadi Party (SP), which won power, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In fact, the BJP’s performance in 2012 was not only poorer than its 51 seats in 2007, but also far worse than its 88 seats in 2002 when its government there headed by Rajnath Singh, now BJP president, was voted out. This shows that the BJP has failed to capitalise on the failures of the state governments of the SP and the BSP who have alternated in ruling Uttar Pradesh since 2002. Worryingly, while the sp and the Congress, the BJP’s national rival, which came fourth in the 2012 election, increased their vote shares compared with 2007, the BJP’s vote share declined from 17 percent to 15 percent.
Indeed, the BJP has been in an electoral free fall in Uttar Pradesh for more than a decade. Both the numbers of seats and the vote share have declined through four Assembly elections 1996 onwards, when it had polled 32.5 percent votes and won 174 of the 425 seats. (Uttar Pradesh now has 403 seats as the rest belonged to the part that became Uttarakhand, which was carved out of the state in November 2000.) The BJP’s fortunes have sunk so deep that last year it won only one of the five Assembly seats that fall in the state capital Lucknow’s Lok Sabha constituency, which Vajpayee held until 2009.
In Maharashtra, where the BJP, with its local ally Shiv Sena, has lost three Assembly elections on the trot since 1999, the BJP’s fortunes have steadily dipped in the number of seats and in the vote share. It is in a worse position today in India’s second most populated state than it was in 2009. In Odisha, the BJP has virtually drowned since the state’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (bjd) leader, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, dumped it as a coalition partner in 2009. The BJP’s only saving grace came last year when its ruling alliance in Punjab, with the Sikh party of Akali Dal, won the Assembly election to retain power. The BJP expects to hit the jackpot only in Rajasthan where it hopes to beat the incumbent Congress in the Assembly election in November.
In both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the BJP has won two successive terms since 2003, elections are due six months from now (along with in Rajasthan and Delhi, both currently ruled by the Congress). Although the BJP governments there project themselves as still popular, the Congress is pinning its hopes on anti-incumbency to claw its way back. Should the BJP lose both or either state, Modi’s capital with the voters, as well as in the party, could diminish severely.
BJP IN PARLIAMENT
The BJP’s first national government lasted only 13 days in 1996 as it could not get enough allies for a simple majority of 272 in the Lok Sabha. Its second coalition government formed in 1998 lasted a month over a year, and its third, formed in 1999, nearly completed a full term before Vajpayee called elections. In 1998 and ’99, the BJP had won 182 and 183 seats, respectively, and gained simple majorities with support from allies.
It can be assumed that the BJP would be in the hunt once again if it gets around 185 seats in the next election. To achieve that target, Modi appears to be at a greater handicap than Advani was in 2009.
In 2009, Advani led the BJP into the election defending 144 seats it had won in 2004 and therefore needing to improve the party’s tally by only 40-odd seats. This time around, the BJP holds only 116 seats in the outgoing Parliament. Modi would need to wrest about 70 seats from other parties. Given the declining electoral fortunes of the BJP since 2009 across India, both in Assembly and parliamentary elections, Modi faces an uphill task. Especially as the BJP might be able to contest only about 365 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats as it did the last time in 2009, and leave the rest for its allies.
The silliness of the plot is what stands out the most about Now You See Me
Director: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher
WHAT IS magic? Deception for entertainment, says J Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg), leader of The Four Horsemen, the quartet of magicians who are the protagonists of Louis Leterrier’s latest film, Now You See Me. It is suspension of disbelief at its purest; while cinema, like all narrative fiction, purports to be truth told through a lie, magic focusses on the lie. The audience knows that it’s not really real, but is willing to go along for the ride and watch their concept of reality being challenged headlong.
The same can be said about the heist film as it has evolved over the past decade or so. When you watch Ocean’s Eleven, or Twelve, or Thirteen, you know the elaborate scheme is too elaborate to succeed in the real world, but you go along anyway because you know that it isn’t about how things are done, but that they are. Such films are all about the plot convoluting itself just when you think you know what is going on. It is, as Roger Ebert wrote about Steven Soderbergh after Ocean’s Eleven, “serious pianists sometimes (pounding) out a little honky-tonk, just for fun”.
It is, therefore, surprising that what stands out most about Now You See Me, a heist film about magic, is the silliness of it. The film insists throughout that it will not hesitate from pulling the rug from under the plot whenever necessary or convenient. Atlas says as much, telling fbi agent Dylan Rhodes (Ruffalo) that just when he thinks he’s got him, Atlas will appear behind him. By putting the audience on guard, the film has only itself to blame when they are unconvinced. The twists are increasingly ridiculous, the explanations increasingly tenuous. The final reveal is marvellous, but leaves too many threads dangling. Maybe if Leterrier had taken a leaf out of his magicians’ book and employed some misdirection with actual character development or ethical dilemmas, our attention wouldn’t be on the actual trick.
But perhaps there is some misdirection involved, since, more than a heist film with all its attendant plot headaches, Leterrier has actually made the kind of film he is most comfortable with. Much like his hugely successful Transporter films, the plot in Now You See Me is merely an apparatus on which to situate his skill for shooting slick action sequences. The three magic tricks serve as three set-pieces, with the rest of the movie essentially a long chase sequence (with the occasional incident of the chaser becoming the chased) to get to those points. It is in these moments of mindless action that the film is the most assured, with its two pedigreed cinematographers, Mitchell Amundsen and Larry Fong (who happens to be an accomplished magician), holding fort. In a way, the film is reminiscent of Wanted — Amundsen’s magnum opus — for the extent to which the story is subordinate to style.
That being said, the casting, if a little safe, has its merits. You get to watch Michael Caine threatening Morgan Freeman. You get to see Eisenberg being the smug, arrogant genius, bewildering straight man Ruffalo (“First rule of magic: always be the smartest guy in the room”). You get Freeman (always worth two mentions) doing exposition, and then you see him fleshing out his character to incorporate shades of grey that he rarely gets in such films.
There’s probably a sequel in the works — too many loose ends, and the lack of a coherent ending leaves much room — but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Like its ephemeral title suggests, Now You See Me is a fine way to spend an afternoon without worrying about what is to come. Much like children at a magic show.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘It is such a silly thing, this fitting in’
EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
“If we are abandoning Sri Lanka, it’s because Sri Lanka abandoned us first,” Shivan, your protagonist in The Hungry Ghosts, declares dramatically. But you have reconnected more and more with your home country. Did you face the same alienation Shivan did when he returned?
I have been going back to Sri Lanka since 1992 and, in 1997, my partner and I spent a year there. So I haven’t reconnected recently. I’ve kept up with it. However, I did feel the same alienation Shivan felt and I felt it for the longest time. But gradually Sri Lanka, or more to the point, the Colombo circles I move in, has changed. So, it’s really easy for me to be gay in Sri Lanka. Also, sometime back, I gave up on the idea of ever trying to fit in anywhere. It’s such a silly thing, this “fitting” in, and when one gives up that hope, it is so freeing. My Sri Lankan friends also don’t really fit in, in various ways. Now Sri Lanka is almost too familiar and sometimes when I land in Colombo, I find myself nostalgic for that sense of alienation and the excitement it bred, which was fertile ground for a writer. Like Shivan, I would like to look around my landscape as I drive into Colombo and feel that sense of strangeness. But it is such a familiar drive now and often in the car, I am making a mental shopping list in my head of all the things I must get before I get to my apartment.
Do you see Sri Lanka differently now as a member of the Lankan literary establishment, rather than an “émigré writer sniffing around for a story”?
Yes. I see its complexity much more. Working in a place really roots you there. Because I left at 19, despite being much older on various trips back, I was still 19 in some way. But now I really feel, just by having worked there, that I am a really mature adult in that landscape. I have made some of my closest friends during my working life there. Nothing like running a literary festival to bring people together.
Shyam Selvadurai
Penguin India
384 pp; 599
So what is your assessment of post-bellum Sri Lanka? Are you optimistic, now that the LTTE has been defeated?
I am delighted and relieved they were defeated. They were a blight to their country and especially to their own people. However, they have left a power vacuum and also left the Tamil people without a strong voice to represent them. I guess this wouldn’t have mattered so much if the current government made real efforts at bridge-building and reconciliation, but this isn’t happening at all. Then there is the killing of journalists, the silencing of dissent… It feels rather dismal as gradually the great hope the end of the war brought is being drained away.
There has also been a hardening on the part of the Buddhist clergy. Last week’s self-immolation by a monk to protest cattle slaughter and proselytising by minorities is an example. You’ve said you don’t consider yourself a Buddhist as Buddhism “carries all the problems that religion has for (you)” in a Sri Lankan context.
I meant religion in general, not just Buddhism. Well, what can I say? To start with, I’m not a “joiner”, to use a North American term. I don’t like congregating and praying together and particularly don’t like the basement social after with cookies and coffee. Then there is the homophobia, the sexisms, the misogyny, the hatred, the fundamentalism, the ridiculous things one is expected to adhere to because one is of the “faith”, the priests you are expected to venerate and respect even though they are undeserving of it… Need I go on?
Shivan’s grandmother uses Buddhist fables as a justification for her slumlordly actions. Is that a perversion of Buddhism, or an exploitation of the non-prescriptive, nonjudgemental nature of the religion?
Yes, it is a perversion, but one that is very prevalent in Sri Lanka. The rather heartless way she uses karma to justify other people’s suffering and her own good fortune is all too familiar if you are Sri Lankan. It’s also funny and I hope the reader finds it grimly amusing.
What prompted you to rely on the Jataka tales in your novel as an allegorical device? Was it simply that the plot demanded it, or something else?
They are not just Jataka stories but also stories that are set in the Buddha’s lifetime. I fell in love with them when I first read them as they are so simple and yet so complex. Also, as a writer, I was very interested in how a different philosophy created different narrative structures from the Western ones, and I was keen to try and find a way to use those structures in my novels. The structure of The Hungry Ghosts is based on the Naked Perethi story. Part 4 mimics the denouement of the Demoness Kali story, wearing down the protagonist to a moment of wisdom and freedom.
What differences do you see between Arjie from Funny Boy and Shivan here, as the two wrestle with their sexuality in conservative Sri Lanka?
Arjie’s story ends at his moment of realising he is gay. Shivan’s continues on into the trials and pleasures of being gay for someone like him, i.e. non-white, Sri Lankan. Shivan, because of his inner hunger, is blind to the reality around him and this is reflected in how he negotiates his sexuality in Sri Lanka. Arjie is much more clear sighted, even though much younger than Shivan. But in the end, I think Shivan is a more interesting character, as he plumbs the depths of his soul to emerge a new person. He really does descend into the darkness, as we must all do, in order to find wisdom.
ajachi@tehelka.com
In the global arena, being seen as weak is worse than being weak
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union over two decades ago, India has increasingly acquiesced to Washington’s paternalism in a bid to be the superpower’s bulwark in South Asia. Critics have long protested that India was turning servile to the Americans on issues of security, geopolitics, commerce and agriculture, among others. New Delhi touched a new low in that view this week when it claimed that the American surveillance of Indian embassy’s Internet and phone usage in that country did not amount to snooping. That claim by External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid came a day after a news agency reported India’s rejection of a request for asylum from Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower who stunningly revealed last month that American intelligence agencies have been carrying out widespread global surveillance of governments and intergovernmental organisations.
To the critics, India’s lighthearted view of the American transgression appears even more misplaced when compared with reactions in America’s stauncher allies, the European Union, Germany and France, who, too, the Americans snooped upon and whose indignant uproar has forced a reluctant US President Barack Obama to promise a probe to quantify the damage from the surveillance. Not to speak of the defiance of China, which refused to be browbeaten by America when it demanded that Beijing pressure Hong Kong, where Snowden first surfaced after his leak, to hand him over; or of Russia, where the leaker is holed out while Moscow faces off America’s bullying.
In a rare transatlantic kerfuffle, the traditional US allies in Europe, in fact, threatened to withhold an imminent trade pact if Washington did not roll back its surveillance of friendly countries. In contrast, India’s meek acceptance of the US surveillance of its embassy reflects a desire to be more loyal than the king and not to upset the American establishment, come what may. This erodes India’s credibility as a sovereign equal in the comity of nations and makes it appear as a client State. It also betrays New Delhi’s failure to understand that, in the international arena, being perceived as weak is worse than being weak. Doubtless, the effects of this cave-in will surface soon.
For one, few sources and contacts, official and informal, would now talk freely with Indian officials across the world. For if the embassy in Washington DC is not secure enough, then missions across the planet are less likely to be so. (Remember the howls from the US when WikiLeaks disclosed secret diplomatic cables sent to Washington by American embassies from across the world? American officials had slammed the disclosure saying it had compromised the safety and security of its officials and informers.)
Such caution in their interactions with India would be most damaging from the governments of big countries with whom India has complex and delicate relationships, such as China, or strategic and military ones, such as Russia. Such interactions beg to be conducted in utmost privacy to facilitate results from long-drawn-out negotiations. But with India turning a blind eye to the snooping, neither Moscow nor Beijing, which are both ever suspicious of Washington’s attitudes towards them, would easily open up to the Indian officials. Even the West Europeans, who are regular dining partners with the Americans, would be careful in their day-to-day interactions with Indian officials.
Secondly, and more dangerously, the urge to brush the snooping under the carpet means that the Indian government will never fully know how much of its privileged information is already compromised. To be sure, Obama rushed in to say that his snoops did not hack the content of all the mails exchanged or the telephone calls made but only their logs. But when the US officials defended the surveillance by claiming it helped thwart terrorist attacks globally, they also tacitly acknowledged that they can and do access some of that material. By failing to press the Americans to disclose the material they have from the Indian embassy, New Delhi is allowing the US a free pass to continue that surveillance and hack its mails and phone calls, if not more.
The Indian response is hardly surprising. It is of a piece with New Delhi’s fawning behaviour towards Washington, an embarrassing example of which came five years ago when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said to the then US president: “Mr Bush, the people of India deeply love you.” It is a pity that when smaller nations such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and even Pakistan and Afghanistan, which are dependent on American munificence, duel with the US aggressively, India cannot but continue to see Washington as its lodestar despite the latter’s waning global influence.
ajit@tehelka.com