Shooting still and moving pictures for the first time, Veer Munshi’s tripartite work Shrapnel sends a seeking shout into the emptied vales of Kashmir, says Aradhna Wal Keeper of memories Veer Munshi, Photo: Tarun Sehrawat IN THE sunlit hallway of the gallery, surrounded by pictures of grand houses in ruins, stands Veer Munshi. He gestures towards the frames, saying, “You understand this is still a work in the making.”
The artist, a Kashmiri Pandit in exile, left Srinagar in 1990, and has been based in Delhi since. “I went back after 17 years to shoot this series, as a personal catharsis. It can get depressing. I was an insider but am now an outsider. I want to go home; instead I have to live in hotels like a tourist,” he says. “But I will never be a tourist.”
Munshi’s career has been a constant negotiation with a displaced identity, and the fractured feelings it begets. In 1990, the then 32-year-old artist left for Delhi, thinking he would soon be back home. In a few days his family followed, and soon after, the entire Kashmiri Pandit community. There was no goodbye. “We were disconnected from Delhi. We didn’t choose to live here. Our mannerisms, our thinking, our lifestyles were all rooted in Kashmir.” Blindsided by the forced exodus, his inward eye turned home. Kashmir became both a backdrop and an actor in his work. Shrapnel, his most recent exhibition, is an attempt to archive his vanishing homestead and the multiplicity of his emotional response to it. The nomenclature is apt, as the show’s three compartmentalised works are contained explosions — forceful, direct with both velocity and vector. They are a collision, almost, of shards of the 57-year-old’s childhood memories of Srinagar and present day reality.
Srinagar-born and Delhi-based Veer Munshi is an artist in exile. His painting Terrorist on a Floating Land (1991) marks the beginning of his engagement with the losses faced by Kashmiris. Munshi got his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Baroda. His latest show Shrapnel, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, has already exhibited in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai and is slated to go on show in Srinagar and Bengaluru.
The three sections of the show are a video installation, Hands like Leaves of Flame, a series of photographs, Pandit Houses, and a graffiti installation The Chamber. The violence of displacement and the longing for home are palpable through the surface calm of the man and the art. Fight for survival Ruins in Srinagar from Munshi’s photography series Pandit Houses, Photo Courtesy: Latitude 28
In the video one follows Munshi trekking through rubble and knee deep snow in Srinagar, from spring to winter, as a huge manor burns simultaneously on the adjacent screen. The camerawork is shaky and basic, yet there is a sense of impending frenzy as Munshi hunts for the home that was. However, in the darkened room, it is the burning building, a rich cultural heritage swallowed up in flames, which draws the eye. The pathos is palpable, and it’s unsurprising to find that Munshi’s own house was burned down and the land it sat upon summarily sold. He doesn’t know the details, though the probable cause of arson was a crossfire between militants and security forces. The video doesn’t need the story, because the story isn’t specific to Munshi.
The photographs are a framed narrative sequel. Abandoned Kashmiri Pandit houses populate Srinagar; stark skeletal reminders of the life that once thrived. This is Munshi’s first time as a photographer. Yet the pictures have a decided impact. The beauty lies in the simplicity — the unembellished shots and clean geometric lines that allow the house to tell its own story. “I could have painted them,” he says. “But then they would bear my stamp. These houses have so many things to say. Photography, more than painting, allows them to do so.”
It took him three years to learn the process and technicalities. “As it is with painting, I kept doing it over and over again, till that magic came and a picture became a work of art.” He animates the stills with stories of yore, describing how two different houses would be built connected by bridges that would be thrown open during festivals and celebrations, be they Muslim or Hindu. “This one is my aunt’s house. It had a huge upper storey where we would play cricket during the frozen winters. My sister’s wedding reception was held there. It had a beautiful khatumbandh, a ceiling made from weaving together wood. The other, Professor TN Madan’s, whose family I knew. You see this one right here? I can picture the family sitting out in the jharokha, looking down at the people on the roads, having their morning tea, an important ritual in most households.”
The series came together like a puzzle. Munshi would look for fellow exiles, track them down, hear their story and then capture the house. The people behind the pictures were as important as the image on the wall. “An old friend, Muzzafar, who passed away sometime ago, helped me find these houses. My own memory had faded.”
These photographs are the show’s thematic lynchpin. The houses were at the core of the Srinagar that was; their very bones built for the land, the snow and the rocky terrain. Even today they stand out amongst the superimposed cluster of buildings that are replacing them. Munshi’s anxiety goes beyond preserving his personal memories, to archiving an architectural history of Kashmir, not as a sentimental salvage but as a living document. He calls it activism through art; to get the houses declared heritage sites.
Says Munshi, “Any society needs a composite culture. The people in Kashmir today are bereft. The Pandit no longer knows the Muslim and the Muslim no longer knows the Pandit.” Conservation is a pressing concern. “Often, a people’s local identity is tied to a place’s architecture,” confirms Divay Gupta, Principal Director of INTACH’s Architectural Heritage Division. “These sites have no legal sanctity, leaving them vulnerable. We call them unprotected heritages.” One photograph shows the Lal Ded Memorial School before a private builder razed it for a glass and steel shopping complex. A quiet, slow heart-ache assumes a pounding urgency with the knowledge of how fast the decay is.
It doesn’t take a telescopic lens to detect Munshi’s struggle to accept the way the world is. He started out with anger and morbidity on canvas. Over the years, that has dissipated. Instead his energy has turned to hunting for reason. Why the violence, and how does one deal with displacement? “I am not a political spokesperson for Kashmiri Pandits. Being part of one minority I understand the concerns of the minorities everywhere; be it a Kashmiri Pandit here, or a Muslim in Gujarat or a Sikh elsewhere. It is easy to hate, to be reactionary because of the violence. But I have to rise above the bitterness and look for solutions.”
With the help of an old friend Munshi tracked down exiled Kashmiris, heard their stories and then captured their houses
The violence is addressed directly in the final chapter, The Chamber. The concept has the fascinating simplicity of a bullet or a bomb. Put a person inside a room where only the four walls covered in graffiti-esque art are visible. The viewer is trapped inside, with no way to escape the sharp metal objects and screaming figures. A literal explosion with flying shrapnel and an allegory for the disruptive, destructive qualities of bits, bytes and bullets of unending information. It is that split second of disbelief, denial, indecision induced by terror, unprocessed and starkly familiar.
However, the determined calm that Munshi has employed in the rest of the show proves an obstacle. Here, where he should have really let go and created as much tumult as possible, he seems a tad reserved. Was that a gunshot or a backfire? The bang is not as loud as it could be, and the explosions seem contained.
The form is experimental, but perhaps not the tilt-shift that changes a view of the world. Munshi has stuck to his politics. Says art critic Ina Puri, “The change is really in the form of diminished hope from his earlier shows. There is no happier tomorrow, but an effort to accept the brutal present. Kashmir is heartbreakingly beautiful, but a peopleless land. There are no children on the street.” There is no one in Munshi’s pictures either. Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka. aradhna@tehelka.com
Thermal and a Quarter’s ambitious fifth album, 3 Wheels 9 Lives, spans political messaging and groovy listening, says Aradhna Wal Road trip (L to R) Rajeev Rajagopal, Prakash KN and Bruce Lee Mani IN 1996, three Mallus and a quarter Mallu formed a college band. Fan lore says that they called it Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ), playing on their ethnicities. Fifteen years and multiple line-up changes later, TAAQ has emerged as one of the country’s favourite alternative rock acts. Bruce Lee Mani (vocals and guitar, the quarter Mallu), Rajeev Rajagopal (drums, one of the original Mallus) and their new bassist Prakash KN have been touring India to launch their fifth album, 3 Wheels 9 Lives, at packed venues in Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi and Mumbai.
TAAQ is not the only Indian band to have been playing for many years. But, unlike stagnating groups, it has remained unique, innovative, lyrically clever and true to its blend of jazz, funk and rock. 3 Wheels is a three-CD, 28-song behemoth. Despite the ambitious scale and diverse material, the strong vocals, complex guitar riffs and bluesy melodies make the sound happily familiar, satisfying long-time listeners and reeling in newcomers. TAAQ is more than just rock. Bruce’s jazz sensibilities play a huge part in the songwriting process, as heard on the album track Birthday and an old, highly inventive cover of Hey Jude. A large part of their appeal lies in their incredible live shows. The Delhi leg of their tour featured a two-hour gig with a tight set, amped-up energy, big sound and not one faltering note.
A demonic autorickshaw adorns the album art, making the ubiquitous public transport vehicle the leitmotif. The lyrical alchemy transforms it into a metaphor for life in the Indian city. Listeners go on wild rides with F1 drivers reincarnated as autowallahs who rip off customers (the ridiculously catchy Meter Mele One-and-a-Half), meet lonely urbanites looking for love (Billboard Bride) and artists fighting censorship (Won’t Stop). TAAQ calls itself Bangalore rock but every urban dweller will identify with the conjured cityscape. Misadventures in autos unite daily commuters across the country. “Our songwriting process is a response to what’s happening around us,” explains Rajeev. “The music documents our lives in India and things that affect us,” adds Bruce.
Their social awareness is patently obvious. Their Twitter feed has conversations on India’s political turmoil (“It’s the first time the words “PM” and “strong rebuttal” have been used in the same sentence in a long, long time!”) and the recent exodus of Northeasterners (“Folks afraid to live in parts of their own country, fleeing to their homelands. Difficult day for Bangalore!”). In a music scene littered with imitative style empty of any ethos, TAAQ is acutely tuned to its surroundings. A 1999 track, Humpty Dumpty, talked about Jayalalithaa pulling out from the Union government, a move echoed by Mamata Banerjee today. “I heard someone say that Mamata changed her Facebook relationship status from ‘it’s complicated’ to ‘single’,” jokes Rajeev, who is the most vociferous about their involvement with ground realities. “We wrote Won’t Stop when an artist was jailed in Mumbai for his work. We’re not chanting slogans but we have to protect artistic freedom in the face of moral policing,” says Bruce. They wrote Shut Up and Vote (2009) at the NGO Janaagraha’s behest, to make voting as cool as rock ’n’ roll. Kickbackistan’s lyrics, “the stink of your lust, it lingers”, pointedly talk about the dirty politics unearthed in the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Their spontaneous reactions resonate with public sentiment. One Small Love spoke out against the Mangalore pub attacks, along with a very angry nation.
All is not deathly serious. The focus stays on the melodies and production. TAAQ gave the Indian rock scene its bona fide anthem Jupiter Café. The years have only added to their indefatigable enthusiasm about music in India. Back from their summer US tour, they compare the two experiences: “Everything there is well-organised and musicians can make a living off music. But, in India, there are limitless possibilities for things yet to happen. Music is a fickle and unforgiving industry but venues are growing and bands are experimenting with rock, funk and blues. The ecosystem is evolving.”
Such a band could probably not exist elsewhere. There are no outside references to anchor their music. They thrive on the chaos and the “wonderful treacly pace of the Indian juggernaut”. TAAQ knows its sound, and how to keep it rolling. Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
He’s seventeen and a half. A series of parallel welts run up his arms, rising in ridges from his dark skin — mementos of knife fights and blade slashes. He returned the previous night from a juvenile detention centre. It was the fourth time he’d been arrested in the past two-and-a-half years. The charge this time was attempted murder. He had brawled with a group of boys who had “come to settle some old scores”.
He says he’s happy to be back here in the narrow alleys of Trilokpuri in East Delhi. He enjoys eating eggs, so his mother made him some for dinner. Still, he glances nervously around him at the women and children peering from the balconies and terraces overhead.
In this crowd, he’s alone. Disdained by society, but, more importantly, ill-served by a juvenile justice system that is insensitive to any need beyond the most basic. This is a system that barely puts up any pretence of following through with its rehabilitative purpose. In its indifference, it has failed and continues to fail the city’s children.
Back in December last year, the Delhi gangrape brought juvenile crime under intense scrutiny. With it came a clamour for harsher punishments and demands that 16- year-olds be tried as adults. Opinions seesawed between the bloodthirsty and the kneejerk, between blaming the kids and blaming the system.
On the one hand, anecdotal evidence indicated that juvenile crime in Delhi had been increasing. Children seemed to be coming of age faster, moving into crime by their mid-teens. Were harsher punishments the solution? On the other, critics of the system were quick to put the blame on the brutality juveniles have to face in shelter homes in Delhi, both government-run and private.
These homes, they said, were overcrowded and understaffed. Drug abuse was rampant, as was sodomy and rape. This was an exaggeration. No one denies that in Delhi there have been brutal incidents in juvenile homes, but these have been few and far between. Contrary to what was being reported, the system was not evil. Children were bullied, usually by older boys, but were not tortured by officials. The food might not have been the best, but there was enough of it. In fact, conditions didn’t compare badly with living at the railway station or in a small shack in a Delhi slum.
But evil is easily recognised and the solution is clear — put an end to it. Official apathy, the kind that suffocates even the best intentions, is far more damaging. In Trilokpuri, the reaction to the gangrape intensified the stigma this (unrelated) juvenile offender faced. In this poor neighbourhood, where houses are unpainted brick rooms stacked precariously on top of each other and streams of sewage zigzag along the streets, life can be rough and unforgiving. Word had already crept out that he was back.
Nearby, a group of boys loiters in one of the lanes, keeping a keen eye on passersby. One of them brandishes a long wooden stick. “He came back last night, didn’t he,” he says. “That murderer.”
Thousands of juveniles, especially in the poorer parts of the city, come into conflict with the law. Some are rehabilitated, mostly by the shock of getting entangled with the police. It’s a matter of luck rather than judgment. For most, like the boy from Trilokpuri (who cannot be named because he is still a juvenile), it’s a slippery downward slope to further criminal activity. Until the gangrape, this moribund system was mostly ignored. Then, overnight, things changed. Those demanding that the age of juvenility be brought down had forgotten that it had been increased from 16 to 18 a little over a decade ago. They also seemed to have overlooked the fact that juveniles under 16 were also committing violent crimes.
Changing the age was just fiddling with numbers. It wasn’t what was going to fix a system that was trying to address a disconcerting dilemma — rehabilitating juveniles without punishing them; being gentle on those caught while still being a deterrent to those outside.
There were other confounding issues. In the popular perception, street children are most commonly associated with juvenile crime. Their lives are brutal and abused. Crime is assumed to be the natural corollary. But according to the statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2010-11, of 33,387 juveniles arrested countrywide, 81.3 percent lived with their parents. Homeless children, perhaps because of their extreme vulnerability, stay clear of any confrontation with the law, accounting for just 5.7 percent.
Of the juveniles arrested, 31,909 were boys, and 64 percent were between 16 and 18 years of age. The bulk of the crimes were theft and causing injury. Evidence indicates that these national patterns are reflected in Delhi.
A child’s first encounter with the system in Delhi is with the police. Every police station in the city is supposed to have two juvenile welfare officers, who handle juvenile crime and who, together with social workers and the district’s top police official, form the district’s Special Juvenile Police Unit (SJPU).
The apprehended juvenile is handed over to one of three Juvenile Justice Boards, the equivalent of courts, which decide how they need to be rehabilitated. During their trials, which typically last not more than six months, children accused of graver crimes are kept in one of the four ‘observation homes’. The sprawling, eerily empty compound of the Sewa Kutir complex in North Delhi, once a home for beggars, now houses a juvenile court, an observation home and a new detox centre for children.
The observation home and centre are sequestered behind high walls and fences, but the court, which sits in a room at the corner of the complex, is open to everyone.
In practice, most of these children are released on ‘bail’ by the time their trials conclude. The few that the justice board thinks require institutionalisation are sent to the single ‘special home’ in North Delhi. This home also contains a wing, known as the ‘place of safety’, for juveniles who were erroneously sent to adult prisons, but cannot now be kept with other juveniles for fear that their brutalising (prison) experiences might rub off on the others.
It’s a regular day at the Sewa Kutir court. Outside sit gaggles of anxious kids and parents. Policemen, who are required to be in plainclothes, wait to present evidence or escort children into the courtroom. Private lawyers, who have set up shop in the courtyard, wait behind desks for the next customer. Three young boys, all about 17 years old, squat nervously in front of the room that houses the Delhi State Legal Services Authority, which provides free legal aid to children who cannot afford a private lawyer. They’re facing an ‘attempt to murder’ charge over a brawl that started with a minor motorcycle accident in their colony.
Ajay Devgn in Sajid Khan’s reimagining of Himmatwala is not much different from Ajay Devgn in Son of Sardaar, or, for that matter, much different from Ajay Devgn in Singham. He’s got the same invincibility, the annoying catchphrases, the same puerile attempts at humour. That is not to say that Ajay Devgn is a one-dimensional actor (you occasionally meet the second dimension at parties; the third and higher dimensions are reportedly recluses in a cabin somewhere in the woods), it’s just that he fits the mould Bollywood has created for the traditional male hero. A mould that the bakers perfected in that most loathsome of decades: the 1980s.
Again, that is not to say that the mould created to cash in on the star appeal of Amitabh Bachchan and Jeetendra back then is the same as the one created to cash in on the star appeal of Salman Khan and Devgn now. It has evolved — it had to, to come back from the lows of the ’90s — to include the multiplex crowd, who essentially bailed out the industry by paying inflated ticket sums and munching on overpriced popcorn. But the obsession with the übermensch as lead has continued, and as the industry has become a corporate one, the übermensch has become corporatised as well.
So when a child of the Establishment makes a film that celebrates the nadir of creativity in the industry, it does induce anger. Jeetendra and Sridevi’s Himmatwala was the top-grossing film of 1983, one of three — Mawaali and Justice Chowdhury being the others — starring the pair that made it to the list of 10 highest grossing films that year. This was also the year of Mandi, of Ardh Satya, of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. None of these films made it to the top 10, as Bollywood was reminded that quality has little to do with box office success. This realisation would eventually mean the death of Parallel Cinema by the ’90s, when low attendances overall meant that producers looked more for guaranteed hits than experiments in actually improving the quality of the cesspool of celluloid in which audiences could wade. Unlike his sister’s Om Shanti Om, Sajid Khan’s Himmatwala is more tribute than parody, a celebration of all that’s wrong with Bollywood. It’s like a One Republic cover band thirty years from now. It’s exactly the kind of thing Justice Katju would hate if he were ever forced to watch it.
The film, in a word, is annoying. The 150 minutes runtime feels more like 300; the tiresome clichés that are self-indulgently left in are too many to enumerate, yet not enough to make you laugh at the silliness of it all. The tiger fight is cool — a nod to Bachchan in Mr Natwarlal — but the action is fairly subpar (you know a film isn’t going to be the greatest when they give away the climactic scene in the trailer). The many attempts at comedy largely centre around Paresh Rawal making a case for himself to be bound and gagged, a case he has never so vociferously made before, and “Ooh look, it’s 1983, but we know what happens thirty years from now” humour. There’s even a sanctimonious declaration that one day, the rape of a woman will raise Himmatwalas who will defend their women’s honour, because, you know, honour and life can only be lost once. Logic dies a million painful deaths, as it did throughout the ’80s.
But I suppose Sajid had fun making the film, and that’s what matters. Audiences, mercifully, have shown that they have evolved somewhat, voting with their feet for common sense and better cinema. The ’80s were bad enough the first time. Leave them be.
Elopement dramas are as old as ghost stories in Bollywood. And historically, neither has been done particularly well, with lather-rinse-repeat storylines and hammy acting being the norm. So when a weekend’s offerings include a ghost story by an unconventional director and an elopement drama by one who has in recent times been decidedly conventional, one sighs at the predictability of Bollywood and picks the former. It helps that the former stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui, while the latter has Jackky Bhagnani in a film produced by his father Vashu Bhagnani.
Suparn Verma’s Aatma, however, turned out to be a slightly better produced version of the same ghost story Ram Gopal Varma has been peddling all these years. It has all the clichés one expects: the affluent, English-speaking rationalists having to rethink their beliefs when confronted with a ghost, eventually resorting to charms and yajnas to fight them off; the scary nightmares; the annoying psychiatrists who look the same in every film. Siddiqui’s excellent performance, as the abusive husband who dies and comes back to possess his daughter and torment his wife is the only saving grace of the eminently forgettable film. There are a couple of genuinely scary scenes — which is two more than all the RGV films put together — which derive their sense of danger primarily from Siddiqui’s menacing gaze, though Verma cannot be faulted for getting his basics right in setting up these scenes. The storytelling, however, is lazy, and the resolution so hackneyed that one is rooting entirely for the ghost by this point. At least he’s more creative when it comes to killing people.
Not having the heart to compose yet another review bemoaning Bollywood’s poverty of ideas (and having exhausted all my horror movie jokes in previous ventures); I decided to trudge back to the cinema and watch Priyadarshan’s Rangrezz. And I was pleasantly surprised. Priyadarshan saves himself the trouble of having to come up with a new idea by remaking the Tamil film Naaododigal, which has already been remade in Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Bangla; but for someone who hasn’t seen any of those versions, it’s a refreshing change from the melodramatic affairs elopement films tend to be.
Rangrezz chooses not to focus on the couple in love, but on the support system that enables the couple to run off; in this case, three friends, only one of whom knows either lover. Nevertheless, they decide on hearing the sad tale to go rescue the girl from her parents. The pacing matches impulsiveness of the decision, wasting little time establishing the protagonists and the dynamics between them before plunging them into the act. Santosh Sivan’s cinematography makes the actual abduction as good a sequence as any Bollywood has produced in recent times, and you cringe after every blow and actually sigh in relief once the couple is safely on a bus out of town. After the happily ever after, however, come the consequences for our heroes: physiological, psychological and otherwise. Whether these consequences were worth it is the question the film asks, and a strong ending makes the film much more watchable than it has any right to be.
That being said, the film has its fair share of issues, chief among them being Bhagnani’s performance. His previous films have shown him to be as wooden as the plank you want to hit him on the head with because of his annoying grin, and here, however much it is disguised by having him play a strong, silent type, his lack of range is painfully evident (Vijay Verma, on the other hand, stands out for his portrayal of Pakkya, one of Bhagnani’s sidekicks). On the whole, the performances lean towards the hammy, and Priyadarshan sacrifices subtlety at the altar of style. But, superficially or otherwise, Rangrezz is a gritty drama that does more or less what it sets out to do. “Never seen a nigger on a horse before,” grunts Django (Foxx) to Doc Schulz (Waltz) as they ride through a Texastown with its denizens gaping at the spectacle. Historically, that would be inaccurate; a documentary on BBC Radio 4 this Friday showed that as many as 25 percent of cowboys were black, that John Wayne’s The Lone Ranger was actually based on the life of Bass Reeves, a black lawman. Of course, historical accuracy isn’t too high on Quentin Tarantino’s agenda — many other BBC documentaries suggest, for instance, that Adolf Hitler wasn’t actually killed in a German theatre by a bunch of American Jews — and the fact that a black cowboy is the central character of a Western is a novelty in a Hollywood that has historically denied the African-American community its role in history.
Then again, Tarantino falls into the stereotype that an oppressed character requires a liberated white man to show him all he can be, and Christoph Waltz is as much the hero of Django Unchained as is Jamie Foxx. A dentist turned bounty hunter, Doc Schultz rescues Django from slave traders in a thrilling opening sequence and takes him under his wing in the bounty-hunting trade, which Django embraces as an excuse to kill white folk and get paid for it. After the inevitable montage, equally inevitably comes the central quest of the film: Django’s wife, called, in true Tarantino spirit, Broomhilda Von Shaft is a slave at another plantation owned by the sadistic Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), and must be freed. And must be freed legally, with a bill of sale and everything, which means Tarantino must rein in his penchant for gratuitous violence and construct an elaborate subterfuge in order for the heroes to buy her freedom without arousing suspicion. The gratuitous violence comes anyway, but by building up considerable tension until that point — and, more importantly, by taking the time to establish flesh-and-blood personalities for the practitioners of said violence — he ensures that it seems more like the climax than the entire movie, a problem with a number of his previous films.
But it’s important to recognise and accept Tarantino more as an expert of exploitation films than the modern master many consider him, taking the genre to heights nobody considered possible. Django Unchained doesn’t change people’s perception of slavery just like Inglorious Basterds didn’t change people’s perception of the Holocaust. Neither does it display great sociological insight into the causes and effects of slavery. Even Samuel L Jackson’s character of Stephen, an Uncle Tom with a mean streak isn’t entirely groundbreaking in its originality. What Tarantino does well, however, is entertain — and this is where Bollywood should take note — using his intellect to craft a scenario where the excessive violence seems merely excessive, not completely over the top. He achieves this mostly through cleverly-written dialogue and strong characters. Schultz’ formal Teutonic English in the opening scene works like a spring winding yourself, as you wait for the talking to stop and the shooting to begin.
Ultimately, the reason behind Tarantino’s enduring popularity is that he’s a fan of cinema. The clever nod to Django, with Foxx telling Franco Nero, the star of that other violent Western, that the D is silent, with Nero replying “I know” is my favourite part of the film and a telling example. It is moments like these that remind us of Tarantino’s origins of working in a video store, watching every film he could lay his hands on. He is everyman; a dark, demented one to be sure, but the feeling that he is one of us is a comforting one to have as the red mist sprays around.
Springtime Roohi Kapoor Photo: Vijay Pandey
There is a painting being hung up at the Lalit Kala Akademi. From afar, it looks like a rose. As one gets nearer, it flowers into nude figures of women in joyous abandon. In Bloom is one of the strongest works in artist Roohi Kapoor’s upcoming solo show Bloom; opening at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, on 28 March. It took her three years to get there and her excitement is palpable. “It was worth the wait. It is one of the best places to display your work,” she says. Bloom takes off from her previous exhibition, Mindscapes (November 2011). Kapoor, 26, has branched to experiment with techniques, but her penchant for bold, vivid colours remains. Over the past year and a half, she has been filling her canvases with the female form, elements of nature and a dreamy blend of reality and fantasy. Though not trained formally in art, her work is informed by her degree in sociology at the University of Nottingham, where she wrote a thesis on women in cinema. “That’s how I got interested in the representation of the female form. Even when I was writing, I would be painting these figures on the side.” Thematically, her use of women segues into the contemporary art practice of celebration of the female form in nature. It’s her tangible skill with technique that makes her stand apart. In Bloom employs illusion along with anatomy drawing, as does Free Rooted, where women meld into each other to form a tree.
“I’m focusing on drawing anatomy and the illusion technique for now. But I have used other styles, such as the dripping style, automated drawing and a style where you create figures using blocks of colours without initially drawing the outline,” Kapoor says of her work. These, she learnt through her unconventional education in art. After university, she has regularly attended various short courses such as those at the Triveni Kala Sangam, a restoration course at the National Museum in New Delhi, and one on portrait painting in Florence. She got her big break in 2008, at a group exhibition in London, Canvas India, curated by E-Paintings, her mother’s company. Like her art, Kapoor’s mind works free from boundaries and restraints, gathering lessons from all over the world, experimenting with her peers and letting all that she learns percolate into each other to form something new. “It’s hard to create your signature style in the art world, but that is what Roohi is doing,” says her mentor, Delhi-based art consultant Shail Singh. “She paints freely, and paints what she loves. Her recent experiments with shapes and forms, and her graduation to bigger canvases have added a new scale and dimension to her art.” That’s probably what has attracted some of her regular collectors, such as Delhi-based businessman Devan Jain who has bought some of her bigger canvases (nearly 5×3 ft) for around 30,000, from previous shows. Flights of Fantasy
Such scale can be seen in her more figurative pieces, such as Tangerine Dream, created using the dripping style. Kapoor splashed paint onto the canvas in colours that appealed to her, moved it around to spread it, only stopping after it took a shape that looked complete to her. After it dried, she painted on top of it, giving the background an eye-catching tieand- dye effect. Since large canvases take months to complete, she worked on multiple paintings at a time, so as to not lose any of the ideas her head was teeming with.
It is hard to find a central connecting narrative in her show. However, experimentation is how she is “developing her visual language” as architect- turned-graphic designer Ron Brinkers puts it. He calls her works “pictorial magic realism”. Brinkers curated Mindscapes and helped her self-curate Bloom. Curation is a skill that Kapoor confesses she is veering towards, and will try out on a more challenging scale when curating a group show in October. Her direction may seem haphazard, but for Kapoor, the urge to try out something new is what informs her art. aradhna@tehelka.com
THE ADIVAANI time machine needs your help,” goes the subject line of the email Ruby Hembrom sends out to the world. Time machine. That’s how Hembrom looks at her nascent attempt at creating a publishing house for India’s indigenous population: a time machine that documents Adivasi history and culture, fundamentally an oral tradition, before they are forgotten in the wake of modernity. Running the machine, of course, isn’t free, and Adivaani’s teething troubles are giving Hembrom — who describes herself as “just a regular working-class Adivasi girl, trying to make ends meet, with a treasure of an idea” — sleepless nights, and have prompted an attempt at crowdsourcing funds through the Internet in order to survive.
Enrolled in a publishing course last year, Hembrom was surprised that there was no platform for Adivasi literature on the lines of Urvashi Butalia’s Kali for Women or S Anand’s Navayana, which has won accolades for publishing Dalit authors, and decided to start one. The course helped; one of her fellow students was Mexican journalist Luis Gómez, who had over 20 years of experience working with indigenous people in Latin America, and had pioneered an attempt at helping the Aymaras of Bolivia tell the stories of their victory in the famous water war of 2000. “Putting down the stories of indigenous people in books allows the stories to go on, and allow future generations to look back, not to recreate the past, but to come together around their shared heritage,” he says.
With Gómez and Tudu’s support, Hembrom began Adivaani by translating her father’s history of the Santals into Santali. Santal: Sirjon Binti Ar Bhed-Bhangao garnered a lot of praise, not only for its content, but also the reasonable price and the quality of the publication, unprecedented for Santali books. Producing the book also opened her eyes to the stereotypes within the publishing industry.
“Our cover was black,” she recalls. “I went to the press, and this lady, who’s worked there for a long time, looks at the book and says, ‘Oh, Santali! Black is too sophisticated a colour for these backward Santals.’” This racism, says Gladson Dungdung, author of Whose Country is it Anyway?, Adivaani’s third release, is also seen in how mainstream publishers reject books by Adivasis. “I know writers who have more than 200 poems in their diaries, but don’t get published because publishers don’t think there is a market for them,” he says. Dungdung feels that Adivasis have been treated more as objects than subjects for literature, and cites the role of books in the Dalit movement, saying that the thriving publishing industry for Dalits means that they can speak and write for themselves, while Adivasis still need others to take up their cause.
Dungdung’s book was released at the recent New Delhi World Book Fair, where Adivasi literature was a major theme. Also released there was Hembrom’s We Come From The Geese, the first of a series of three books on Santali creation stories, which she conceived as a cluster project during her publishing course. “An indigenous scholar from Shillong kissed the book, and asked us to tell their stories as well,” she says. Another professor volunteered to write the creation stories of the Mundas. Hembrom says she wants to expand Adivaani’s scope to a pan-India one, that the focus on Santals is only a natural starting point, since both she and Tudu belong to the tribe. She intends the books to be aids for Adivasi children to learn English as well as read the stories of their own people. A lot of schools in Jharkhand have picked it up for their libraries, she says, while a number of colleges have asked for copies of her father’s book to include in their syllabus.
Bookstores, however, haven’t been as enthusiastic. Returning to Kolkata from Adivaani’s triumphant releases in Delhi, Hembrom found a number of people had written to them asking for their books. But setting up a distribution system has been the most disheartening experience, she says, as every distributor and bookstore she contacted turned her down, saying they were not interested in “such kinds of books”. Currently, only three bookstores — one in Kolkata, two in Ranchi — carry Adivaani’s books, which has made funding future projects very doubtful. But Hembrom refuses to give up. “We are in a hurry,” she says. “The urgency of recording every Adivasi narrative cannot be stressed enough. We cannot risk losing indigenous languages, folklore, literature, traditions and identities. We refuse to be a forgotten people.” ajachi@tehelka.com
Photo: Shailendra Pandey ONE OF the most talked-about incidents at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year was the dismissal by British MP Kwasi Kwarteng of Anjan Sundaram’s decision to leave behind a cushy life in academia at 22 and travel to Congo to report on the civil war as just another case of a rich kid displaying only a voyeuristic interest in Africa. While the consensus among the chattering classes was that Kwarteng had been needlessly belligerent, it is possible to see his point of view: Sundaram had said that he went to Congo because, as he writes in Stringer, “I had lived in man’s genius for so long. I wanted to know our destructive capacities.”
While this was probably not the best thing to say in a public forum about Africa — or anywhere, for that matter — what struck one at the time was Sundaram’s honesty and self awareness in accepting that a naïve sense of adventure, rather than idealism, took him to Congo. This honesty is Stringer’s triumph; while the rest of the world falls over itself to dub him the next Naipaul or Kapuściński, the most compelling narrative in Sundaram’s book is that of his personal journey.
Immediately after his rather pompous assertion of the reasons for going to Congo comes the sobering admission that those thoughts became secondary, as soon as he arrived, to more practical questions. “I had come to Congo alone,” he writes. “I needed money, a job. There was an urgency about this.” Stringer: A reporter’s Journey in theCongo Anjan Sundaram Penguin 240 pp; Rs 399 Stringer begins with a chase through the streets of Kinshasa, as Sundaram pursues a youth who has stolen his mobile phone. Not because the phone costs money, but because it contains all his contacts, his “personal map” of the city. Later, he is robbed at gunpoint in a taxi by his fellow passengers and driver. A large portion of the book is devoted to his travails, not least because he chose to live in a poor neighbourhood, sharing a house with a family that can afford only one meal a day. He did this not because he wanted to slum it, but because it was all he could afford without a steady income. A veteran journalist calls it gonzo, but Sundaram asides that he’d “much prefer a nice bed and air-conditioning”. Sundaram’s reaction to his economic troubles often borders on the churlish, especially in the face of the crippling poverty around him (though the fact that he presents it as such is another example of the candour with which he writes). But his experiences in the cité, one of Kinshasa’s many networks of tenements, set him apart from other journalists who write about poverty, hunger and disease from the comforts of hotel rooms in more peaceful parts of the continent.
While there is no faulting his account of Congo’s history under Lumumba and Mobutu, his accounts of the lives of the city’s poor — the reason for the Naipaul comparisons — benefit greatly from his unique perspective. The portrait of Jose, his host, is, for instance, revealing of the effects of Belgian colonialism: he is an évolué, a colonial designation for families who rejected their primitive structures and accepted civilisation, while his wife is not, a source of fundamental differences in worldviews that often results in friction. AS A work of journalism about Congo, and more generally Africa, Stringer could possibly be better written. Sundaram’s description of his travels outside Kinshasa lack the vividness and insight of his stories of the capital, and his analysis of the overall situation is not the most groundbreaking (mostly broad statements about the resource curse, corruption and the culture of violence). But as an account of his struggles to establish himself as a journalist, his frustrations at his stories not seeming to matter in the grand scheme of things or at senior journalists swooping in and muscling him out when the spotlight falls on the country during the historic elections, his fear on being besieged by the post-election violence, the book is a significant piece of literature, and a sign of great things to come. ajachi@tehelka.com
One of a kind Yamuna Krishnan is among the few people in India working on DNA nanostructures, Photo: Aniruddha Chawdhury/Mint
Yamuna Krishnan is fond of using everyday analogies and the odd aphorism. That, for a scientist whose playthings are microscopic, helical strands of DNA, is unusual.
Imagine a strand of DNA — she tells the audience at a talk she is giving — to be a long, old-fashioned wooden pointer. At this length, the rod is rigid. But if the pointer were to grow to 20 m in length, it would quite likely bend. DNA bricks A worm is injected with a fluorescent DNA nanodevice — the I-switch. (inset) Once inside, the switch is specifically taken up by a set of six cells called coelomocytes
DNA, at short lengths of 50 nanometres (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre), is similarly rigid. But longer strands can, “like the leaves of a coconut tree”, be woven into fanciful structures and shapes. That is what her laboratory at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru has been doing.
Krishnan, 38, a PhD in chemistry from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, makes it sound simple, but DNA origami, as this field has playfully come to be known, is at the cutting edge of science. And the use of these DNA nanostructures to investigate biological processes and carry cargo within living systems is even more nascent. Hers is one of a handful of laboratories in the world that are working on it.
In this DNA Legoland, sequences of the molecule so tiny that 20,000 of them can fit on the tip of pencil, can be cut to exact lengths using restriction enzymes present in bacteria; they can be “super-glued” together in a manner that their ends are either ‘ragged’ or flush together. Literally any molecule can be coupled with these DNA sequences; and the locations in the sequence where this happens can also be determined exactly.
DNA rods can be joined together at junctions to create two-dimensional matrices, and these, in turn, can be piled up to form elaborate scaffolds. The objects created can be rigid, “like baskets”, or dynamic like “scissors, whose flexibility gives it function.”
So malleable is the material that scientists have created miniature “stars, triangles and boxes” using it, according to Krishnan. But these are to her what “Porsches and Ferraris” are to someone looking to get as easily as possible from one point to another — flights of fancy. Schematic of an icosahedron made from DNA containing nanoscale cargo within its internal void
Instead of trying to create more elaborate structures, she is focussing on trying to find uses for them. These nanostructures, she realised a few years ago, would be ideal to set right what goes wrong on the nanoscale. “It does after all,” she says, “take a thief to catch a thief.”
The first structure her lab created was the I-switch — two strands of DNA joined by a flexible hinge at the centre, and with each open end connected to a fluorescent compound. The hinge of the I-switch opens and closes in response to changes in the level of acidity. In mildly acidic solutions, the switch stayed open and the fluorescent compounds emitted a green light, while at higher acidity, the hinge closed into a ‘V’ formation with the chemicals now emitting a red light.
The nanodevice functioned perfectly in the petri dish, detecting changes in acidity with far greater accuracy than other compounds. But would this work inside a living cell?
To test that, Krishnan’s team injected the I-switch into a worm. Not only did the device work as well inside the worm as it had outside, but miraculously, it went only to a particular type of cell inside the worm. It seemed it was possible for DNA-based nanodevices to be exactly targeted within a living organism.
Based on this, she hopes that it might be possible in the future to use the I-switch in humans. Tagged with compounds that attach themselves to particular cells in the body, the I-switch could be sent to individual organs. It could then minutely monitor changes in acidity, which are responsible for a large number of diseases.
Disease is complicated phenomena, one or more errors in a long sequence of events, a bit like a bus ride “from Kanyakumari to Mumbai” that passes through many towns en route. We can, says Krishnan, currently only determine that the bus arrived late in Mumbai. It isn’t possible to detect where en route it might have malfunctioned.
But with the I-switch, we would be able to tell where exactly in the body the normal sequence of reactions was disrupted.
This could have applications in tracking (or imaging) neurological and enzyme-related disorders, and embryonic development.
Krishnan’s next project was more ambitious. Using DNA junctions that had five open ends, she created an icosahedron, a solid shaped a bit like a ball, except with 20 triangular faces instead of a smooth curve. It took a week of reactions in the laboratory to do this.
The icosaherdon had two things going for it — it could be assembled in two halves, and it had a remarkably large cavity. It was, in other words, the perfect container to trap other nanoparticles. It took another three days of reactions for Krishnan’s team to encapsulate gold nanoparticles into a DNA icosahedron. An electron micrograph of an actual DNA icosahedron containing encapsulated gold nanoparticles
Now the team repeated what they had done with the I-switch. A natural, fluorescent polymer (also an indicator of acidity) was encapsulated within the DNA icosahedron. The compound was once again injected into a worm, and in a repeat of the previous success, it went straight to the very same cells. Except that the implications this time around were far greater.
The I-switch could only monitor acidity, but the DNA icosahedron could contain any molecule. It could, therefore, be used for the targeted delivery of molecules that could monitor many other things.
In parallel, a group of researchers in the US had used a DNA-based solid structure to deliver molecules that suppress tumours in mice. The icosahedron could similarly be used for drug delivery.
These DNA-based structures have other advantages over synthetic chemical structures too — they are more easily accepted by living organisms, and they are, according to Krishnan, absolutely identical, “much more uniform than other compounds.”
Exciting as these discoveries have been, Krishnan and her team know that they have many hurdles to cross. The range of the I-switch needs to be augmented; the DNA icosahedron needs to be tested for targeted delivery to other cells; and most importantly, a “cheaper way of manufacturing DNA-based structures needs to be found.”
According to Dr K Vijayraghavan, head of the Central government’s Department of Biotechnology, even though novel DNA based structures have started finding “extraordinary applications”, there are very few people in India working in this uncharted field. “Yamuna Krishnan’s team has done a terrific job by jumping right in,” he says.
Going by her plans though, it seems like she has just about put her toe in the water. “In the next five years,” says Krishnan, “I want to uncover new biological processes using DNA nanodevices. Processes that we have been unable to understand because we haven’t had the tools to do that.”
“I’m going to find new biology to surprise biology.” akshai@tehelka.com
India’s Muslims, goes the conventional wisdom, are a votebank. That bank is now working aggressively towards becoming the central bank of Indian politics with a view to dominating its future political currency. If conversations, events and initiatives of the past four weeks are an indicator, Muslim social and political organisations as well as prominent Muslims have evolved a one-point agenda: to deny the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongman Narendra Modi a shot at becoming India’s prime minister after the 16th General Election that is due in a year. Their tactic: defeat the BJP and its potential allies in every Lok Sabha constituency where the Muslim vote can sway the result.
“Narendra Modi is the No. 1 enemy of India’s Muslims,” says Salman Hussain, a fiery Islamic scholar who teaches at one of India’s most influential Islamic seminaries, the 19th-century Darul Uloom Nadwatul, at Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. “If Modi becomes prime minister, more Muslims will be massacred, more mosques demolished.” While that may be rabble-rousing at its worst, there is no denying that the anti-Modi sentiment among India’s nearly 180 million Muslims has deepened since a cry went up in the BJP last month to name Modi the party’s top prospect for the Lok Sabha election.
“The BJP is fundamentally an anti- Muslim party and Modi proved that with his role in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat,” says Arshad Madani, who leads a faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, an influential sociopolitical organisation of clerics. Five months after Modi became chief minister, more than 2,000 Muslims died in February-March 2002 in violence by Hindu zealots of the BJP-RSS after a train fire killed 57 Hindu passengers. “Muslims know that if the BJP comes to power, their troubles will worsen.”
Indeed, the chant of Modi-as-PM that shot up in decibels at an all-India meet of the BJP in New Delhi in early March set the cat among the pigeons. Until then, the Muslim electorate across India was widely disenchanted with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA) for unkept promises in its nine-year-rule. They were miffed as the UPA has failed to introduce reservations for them in jobs and educational institutions, a pre-election promise. They were also angered by the sudden hanging in February of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri who had been on death row for years after being convicted as a conspirator in the 2001 Parliament attack.
Muslim leaders have long slammed the Congress for what they see as its failure to improve the Muslims’ lot after a panel led by former Delhi High Court Chief Justice Rajinder Sachar reported in 2006 that Muslims were one of India’s most neglected social groups in terms of education, employment, poverty and health.
Disappointment has also been rife among the Muslims at the refusal of the Congress-led UPA to declare the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), the premier Muslim educational institution set up in the 19th century, a minority institution as the Muslims have long demanded. “AMU had hoped Congress President Sonia Gandhi would make the announcement in her telephonic address at the university’s last convocation,” says political commentator Hafiz Nomani. “But she referred to such a major issue only in passing.”
But with Modi’s name to the fore, the foremost concern among Muslims now is to stop the BJP from returning to power in New Delhi at any cost.
The clamour for Modi has also upended efforts within the BJP to draw in Muslim support, chiefly through a Muslim-only ‘morcha’ under the aegis of its parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as well as by Modi’s efforts in recent months to mollycoddle Muslim clerics as well as ordinary Muslims in his state to dust up his image. The demand for Modi so worried BJP stalwart LK Advani, who was the party’s prime ministerial candidate in 2009, that he had to caution his party at the March meeting that it will have to find ways to attract Muslim voters if it truly wants to regain power at the Centre.
“It is true that some Muslims have supported the BJP in recent years,” admits Qasim Rasool Ilyas, a functionary with the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a 40-year-old community outfit that oversees the implementation of the civil laws. “By putting Modi forward, the BJP runs the risk of losing even that little support.” From Lucknow in the north to Hyderabad in the south and Kolkata in the east, the dominant discourse among the Muslim community is as follows: coalition governments that have run India unbroken since 1996 will continue as the norm. Over the past 14 years, the BJP and the Congress party have led two coalition governments each. Whichever of the two parties wins more seats at the next General Election would team up with the floaters to notch a majority and form the government.
Except for those political parties that are direct opponents of the Congress in their regions and would, therefore, never join hands with it, or the Communists who would never pair up with the Hindu sectarian BJP, all other regional parties are capable of going either way. Hence, Muslims should vote against the BJP, its allies and the fence-sitters who fail to unequivocally clarify before the elections that they would have no truck with the BJP.
“Wherever a party’s relationship with the BJP is suspect, it would lose the Muslim vote,” says psephologist Yogendra Yadav, who has joined the recently launched anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party. Says Ilyas: “The Muslim is no more attached to any one party. He now votes tactically to defeat the BJP and this is how it will be in 2014.”
The Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a social and cultural outfit of which Ilyas has been a member for decades, is currently preparing an extensive advisory to guide Muslim voters across most of the Lok Sabha’s 543 constituencies. It will be released before the next elections to help Muslim voters decide the best way to utilise their vote in defeating the BJP and its allies. Jamaat volunteers and its affiliate outfits, such as its student, women and youth wings, would be pressed into disseminating the message among Muslims so that “secular” candidates may enter the Lok Sabha.
Several other organisations, such as the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, a body of Muslim intellectuals, too, plan to release similar guides on supporting “secular” candidates. “We aim to educate the Muslim voters on the best candidate in their constituency who is secular,” says Mushawarat chief Zafarul Islam Khan.
Elsewhere, efforts have been launched by scholar Salman Hussain of Lucknow along with Lok Sabha MP Badruddin Ajmal from Assam, whose fledgling political party, the All India United Democratic Front, has made rapid strides in that state. The two have now called a meeting in Delhi where they aim to assemble disparate elements from smaller Muslim political outfits to chart out a common strategy, much like Hussain had tried in the 2012 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, to little success.
Muslim leaders reckon the community’s vote can make and unmake pretenders to 100-150 Lok Sabha seats. These seats are not to be confused with those that Muslims win. Today, there are only 30 Muslims in the Lok Sabha, just 5.5 percent of its 543 seats. As per the 2011 Census, Muslims are nearly 15 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people. But although Muslims in the Lok Sabha are barely a third of their share in the population, their arc of electoral influence is far greater. In 35 seats, they number around one in three voters or more. In 38 other seats, Muslims are 21-30 percent of the electorate. If the 145 seats where they are 11-20 percent are added to this, Muslim voters have the ability to influence the outcome in a whopping 218 seats. ‘Muslims have woken up. Those who have always opposed the Muslims are now saying they can’t imagine taking power in Delhi without the support of Muslims’ Arshad Madani President, Jamiat Ulema-E-Hind
Ironically, until now, the Muslim vote has been most effective where it is around 10 percent of the electorate, big enough to sway the result in a multi-cornered contest by going all in for a single candidate, but too small to raise alarm in the BJP or its allies to trigger attempts at a counter-polarisation of non-Muslim votes. On the other hand, wherever their numbers are 20 percent and above, Muslim votes have mostly been ineffective because of a multiplicity of Muslim candidates divvying up their support, often handing victory to the BJP on a platter.
“The challenge before the Muslim community is to make sure it votes as a block for a single candidate even if multiple Muslim candidates are in the fray on a given seat,” says Yashwant Deshmukh, who has run opinion polls in national and state elections across India for two decades.
Muslims have shortlisted Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal as their key battleground states because their results would most impact who leads the next government: the Congress or the BJP. Next in importance for the Muslims are Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra and Karnataka, where the more seats in the kitty of the Congress the less likely would be the BJP’s chances to form the government. Indeed, the selection of the primary battleground states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is based on their experience of coalition politics since 1998, when the BJP formed its first stable national government heading a multi-party coalition with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister. The key to the BJP’s victories in the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha elections lay in its wins in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These back-to-back victories jolted the Muslims, who are around 20 percent in these states’ overall population.
Chastened, the Muslims voted tactically in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the 2004 Lok Sabha election, giving the BJP fewer seats and bringing the UPA to power. Although the BJP did better in 2009 in Bihar due to its alliance with Janata Dal (United), which virtually wiped out Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, it still fared poorly in Uttar Pradesh, thanks to the voting by Muslims there that gave the UPA a second term.
Indeed, the Muslim vote has dictated the last two poll cycles in Uttar Pradesh. In the 2007 Assembly polls, Muslims massed behind the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), giving it a clear majority, ending 15 years of unstable coalition politics. In 2012, Muslims deserted the BSP leader, Chief Minister Mayawati, turning to the Samajwadi Party (SP) and providing it with a majority. “Eight out of 10 Muslims voted for the SP,” says Rajya Sabha MP Mohammad Adeeb from Uttar Pradesh, an independent who campaigned with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav last year, but now accuses him of turning his back on the Muslims. “They won because of the Muslims.”
That no political party can take the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh for granted is clear from their divergent patterns of voting for the Lok Sabha and the Assembly polls. Despite backing a clear-cut winner in the 2007 Assembly election, the Muslim voters showed another hand in the 2009 Lok Sabha election, dividing their allegiance roughly equally among the SP, the Congress and the BSP, depending on who was strongest to beat the BJP, which then crashed to the bottom of the heap.
Until Modi’s name suddenly leapfrogged to the headlines in March as a prime ministerial contender, political watchers were generally of the view that the failures of the UPA at the Centre and of the one-year-old SP in Uttar Pradesh would benefit the BSP at the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. ‘Muslim politics is undergoing a very progressive paradigm shift reflected at multiple levels where they are not hostage to any one political party. Now they have multiple choices’ Yogendra Yadav Psephologist
Muslims leaders say Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, the eldest son of Mulayam, has failed their community, which comprises a whopping 40 million of the state’s nearly 200 million people. Dozens of incidents of sectarian violence have caused a loss of Muslim life and property across Uttar Pradesh. While the SP promised to free Muslim youths arrested earlier for their alleged roles in terror plots, no such action has yet been taken. The state government has also stonewalled calls to disclose the contents of an independent inquiry it commissioned into the disputed arrests of the youths.
“This government (of Akhilesh Yadav) is refusing to govern,” says Maulana Zulfikar, a cleric connected with India’s most influential Islamic seminary of Darul Uloom at Deoband near Muzaffarnagar city in west Uttar Pradesh. Muslims are also angry with Akhilesh as he has failed to nominate heads for statutory organisations that cater to the Muslims, such as the Minorities Commission, the Urdu Academy and the Sunni Central Waqf Board, which administers the massive properties deemed to be jointly owned by the Sunni Muslims in the state. This might drive them to the Congress party, especially if Modi is a prime ministerial candidate, says Zulfikar.
Abdul Bari, a veteran of the Jamaat-e-Islami, is candid: “Muslims are dominant in over 36 Lok Sabha constituencies in east and west Uttar Pradesh. They will explore alternatives to the SP.”
And yet, there is grudging acceptance that with Modi as a frontrunner, Muslims can’t move away from either the Congress or the SP. “It’s no longer a secret that Modi is the BJP’s PM candidate,” says Abdul Khalik, a retired bureaucrat in Lucknow. “Muslims may be unhappy with the Congress but they have no other option to vote for.” Indeed, both the Congress and the SP now believe they are in the play for Muslim votes once again, as BSP’s Mayawati has a history of tying up with the BJP.
In just two weeks in March, four public meetings focussing exclusively on the Muslims were called at Lucknow, three of them bringing out tens of thousands of Muslims on the streets. While one meeting, on 2 March, was directly called by Mulayam, he also occupied centrestage at another rally that Arshad Madani of Jamiat Ulema- e-Hind called on 17 March.
On the same day, the Congress party’s Muslim face, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, who hails from Uttar Pradesh and once headed the party’s state unit, descended on Lucknow at a town hall sort of meeting with Muslims, exhorting them to break free from the SP’s grip. Earlier, on 3 March, MP Adeeb led a huge rally of Muslims jointly with the Communists to demand that Muslims arrested in terror cases be released. “Muslims in Uttar Pradesh have the capacity to make and unmake national governments,” he says. At that rally, the Muslims hooted Ashok Vajpayee, the SP candidate from Lucknow for the 2014 polls, and refused to let him speak. ‘Muslims want to come out of fear and the choice of Modi will drive them towards the Congress even though the Congress, too, has done nothing for them’, Mohammad Adeeb Rajya Sabha MP
Of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, Muslims number over 20 percent of the electorate in two dozen seats in west Uttar Pradesh, including Bareilly, Badaun, Pilibhit, Rampur, Sambhal, Amroha, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Bijnor, Amroha and Moradabad. In east Uttar Pradesh, Muslims play a decisive role in at least eight seats — Azamgarh, Bahraich, Gonda, Srawasti, Varanasi, Domariyaganj, Gonda and Balrampur.
The various Muslim outfits are now in a dialogue with each other to ensure that the experience of Azamgarh in 2009 is not repeated. At that time, a chunk of the Muslim votes, which are nearly 13 percent for that seat, was eaten away by a fledgling Muslim outfit named Ulema Council, leading to a win by the BJP. Now an influential section of the Muslims is making efforts to rally support for the SP. Says Salman Khan, a leader of the Azamgarh traders’ association: “If the BJP projects Modi as PM, it would lead to a sectarian polarisation.” Two other candidates that the Ulema Council fielded in 2009 ate away Muslim votes in Lalganj and Jaunpur.
That a fight between the Congress and the SP may actually benefit the BJP is worrying Muslims a lot in a constituency named Domariyaganj that borders Nepal. It is currently held by Congress’ Jagdambika Pal. The SP has named Assembly Speaker Mata Prasad Pandey to take him on. Troubled Muslim religious leaders have held several meetings to decide whom to support. “Modi is the most talked about issue here among the Muslims,” says local businessman Malik Mohammed Shabbir. “He has to be stopped.”
In Bahraich in central Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims are over 30 percent of the electorate, they are weighing other options as the incumbent MP, Kamal Kishore of the Congress, who was once a commando detailed to protect former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, is considered to have frittered his political capital.
In Bareilly in west Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims are 34 percent, a new Muslim political outfit floated by the brother of the most influential Muslim in the region, the caretaker of a centuries’ old Sufi mausoleum, is causing trepidation among those who don’t want to see BJP strongman Santosh Gangwar recapture a constituency he lost in 2009 after five straight wins since 1991. The toss-up for the Muslims here is between the Congress and the SP, which has given the ticket to a greenhorn named Ayesha Begum, the daughter-in-law of Taukeer Raja Khan, the man behind the new Muslim political outfit.
In states other than Uttar Pradesh where the Muslim voters may be willing to go against the Congress, Modi is haemorrhaging support from the allies of the BJP. Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has crafted a political miracle by fetching up Muslim votes even for the BJP because it was aligned with him in two Assembly elections. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, his JD(U) won 20 of the state’s 40 seats and the BJP 12. But his aversion to Modi’s name is now legion. Says Yogendra Yadav: “For three years, Nitish has been telling the Muslims of his state that ‘when you vote for me, you vote for me’.” Adds MP Adeeb: “Nitish knows that if he backs Modi, the Muslim voters in Bihar will quickly move en masse to Lalu.”
Indeed, Yogendra Yadav believes that West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, too, would need to clarify her position on the possibility of backing the BJP in forming the next government at the Centre to her state’s 27 percent Muslim population. “She will have to do something before the Lok Sabha election, which would make her position clear vis-à-vis Modi,” he says. The Muslim voters’ disenchantment with the 34-year Communist rule contributed in no small measure to bringing Banerjee to power in the state in 2011.
For the same reason, Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik, once a BJP partner, and former Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu, who was a kingmaker in the BJP-led coalition government of 1999 but has been in political wilderness since losing power in the state in 2004, are keeping miles away from the BJP.
“Although the BJP has no presence in Andhra Pradesh, no party here can dare to openly align with it now that Modi’s name has come up,” says Zahid Ali Khan of Hyderabad, a veteran activist and editor of a leading Urdu daily newspaper, Siyasat.
That, in effect, is true of virtually all political parties in the country wherever the Muslim votes count. The sprawling residence of India’s prime minister at New Delhi’s upscale 7, Race Course Road, may well turn out so near and yet so far for Narendra Modi. With inputs from Virendra Nath Bhatt in Lucknow, Imran Khan in Bengaluru and Ratnadip Choudhury in Guwahati ajit@tehelka.com
From Lucknow in the north to Hyderabad in the south and Kolkata in the east, the dominant discourse among the Muslim community is as follows: coalition governments that have run India unbroken since 1996 will continue as the norm. Over the past 14 years, the BJP and the Congress party have led two coalition governments each. Whichever of the two parties wins more seats at the next General Election would team up with the floaters to notch a majority and form the government.
