Thursday, December 25, 2025

In The Belly Of The Beast

By
Ajit Sahi
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Ajit Sahi visits a Taliban nerve centre that Pakistani Army has wrested control of, and finds that the peace may be hanging by a thread

Terror tomb Pakistani soldiers in a Damadola cave that served as Taliban headquarters; TEHELKA visits the site (below)
Photo: AFP

SUDDENLY, IT’S dark and utterly suffocating. I’m only two metres into the cave, but it’s impossible to crouch and walk anymore in the bottleneck. And the Taliban lived here months and years? Unbelievable. I turn and shout, “Please move back!” Presently, I rush out to the open, stretch, take a deep breath and look around.
I am standing atop a hillock with miles of rippling landscape all around. It’s much chillier than in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital to the east where I was two hours ago before a Pakistan Army helicopter brought me here flying over, among others, the legendary Kabul River. Some 20 km to the west are the mountains of Afghanistan, silhouetted by a haze of clouds. It rains here anytime.
Soldiers in khaki salwar-kameez, their fingers tense on their machine-gun triggers, guard the cave-bunkers. One young soldier has hoisted a launcher onto his shoulder; its rocket aims at an unseen enemy that the Army admits still isn’t all that far. Until last October, this exact spot was a nerve centre of the Pakistani wing of the Taliban, known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Possibly scores of its cadres lived here when the Pakistan Army launched a full-scale attack, including aerial bombing. About 30 bodies were found after the three-day offensive.
“This was a stronghold of the miscreants,” says Major Jahanzeb, waving an arm at the clutch of the bunkers. “You can see how well-prepared they were.” This former defence enclave of the TTP first hit headlines in January 2006 when unmanned drone aircraft of the CIA fired four missiles on it in a bid to kill Osama bin Laden’s key lieutenant, Ayman Al- Zawahiri, who the US suspected hid here. He didn’t. Until the Army’s offensive in October, this was one of the Taliban’s most secure redoubts.
These TTP bunkers are located in a village named Damadola that lies in Bajaur, a 1,300-sq km hilly tract in northwest Pakistan that was a Taliban stronghold for eight years. Bajaur is one of the seven pastoral “agencies” together known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). FATA is a thin north-south strip that is most of the vertical part of Pakistan’s 2,600-km border with Afghanistan.
Located at FATA’s top, Bajaur is its smallest but most populated agency, with more than 1.2 million of FATA’s over three million people. Nearly all the residents of FATA are Pashtuns, who identify themselves socially, politically and culturally only by the tribes to which they belong. By tradition and Constitution, FATA has far greater administrative autonomy than other Pakistani provinces such as Punjab and Sind. FATA runs on centuries- old laws, such as the one that awards collective punishment to a tribe’s people for an individual’s crime.
“Except for Khar, the capital of Bajaur Agency, the TTP dominated the rest of it — the roads, the posts, the valley,” says Pakistan military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas. After a false start, in which the army lost significant ground wrested from the Taliban, the area was reclaimed in a fresh offensive and is now said to be under control. “We hammered them,” says Colonel Muhammad Nauman Saeed, Commandant of the Bajaur Scouts, which ran the operations.
Few doubt the Army effort to chase the Taliban out. But many claim the Pakistan Army has only achieved a partial success, since the TTP leadership is still at large. “The Army failed to capture Taliban leaders like Maulvi Faqir Ahmed and Qari Zia-ur-Rehman,” says human rights activist Idris Khattak, who lives in Naushera town 150 km to the east and reports for Amnesty International from the region. “The people fear that the Taliban may yet come back to the area.” Maulvi Faqir is believed to have fled from Damadola following the Army attacks.
Reportedly, the Taliban are still active in many places in Bajaur. According to Hisbanullah, a journalist in Bajaur who works with Pakistan’s Geo television news channel, the Taliban kidnapped five men in Bajaur last week. Of them, they beheaded a well-known Islamic scholar, Maulana Hakimullah. A note left with his body warned of a similar fate for those who informed against the Taliban.
Hisbanullah says Pakistan Army controls only 80 percent of Bajaur while the Taliban control the rest. “There is a great possibility that the Taliban might take control of many areas now controlled by the army, as none of the main Taliban leaders from Bajaur have been killed or arrested till now,” says Hasbinullah.
The Taliban continue to be active across FATA. On April 23, in North Waziristan, the second southernmost FATA agency, the Taliban ambushed a Pakistan military convoy, killing seven soldiers. Audacious Taliban gunmen using rocket launchers surrounded the Army convoy and opened fire. Elsewhere in FATA, the Taliban beheaded five people they accused of spying for the US and Pakistan. Handwritten notes were found with the bullet-riddled headless bodies.
Indeed, it is surprising that the Pakistan Army has not gone after the Taliban leadership holed up in North Waziristan. The US believes that at least two warlords — pro-Taliban militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and TTP Commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur — are using their bases in North Waziristan to mount attacks on the US-led military in Afghanistan across the border. This has triggered doubts over the Pakistan Army’s sincerity in flushing out the Taliban. Colonel Nauman, however, says that his army is stretched thin and the operations in North Waziristan cannot yet be mounted on a massive scale.

Pashtuns sympathised with the Taliban, seeing them as victims of the US invasion

The continuing Taliban activity should certainly be cause for sleepless nights in the Pakistan Army, if it is serious about wiping out the Taliban as it vociferously claims (see interview with Major General Athar Abbas on p17) — as well as the US, which would be loath to see the Taliban resurge once Western troops leave Afghanistan in 2011 as President Barack Obama has planned.
According to activist Khattak, the highly tenuous peace continues to hold in Bajaur only because the local people have asked the Army to stay on, fearing the Taliban’s return. Indeed, US and Pakistani action against the Taliban will succeed only if FATA stays rid of the terrorists who have long held sway there.

Arms haul Weapons and ammunition seized from the cave. 75 militants were killed in the raid
Photo: AFP

It could be long before the Taliban are fully flushed out of FATA. It is well known that the US and Pakistan had used the FATA region to create, fund, arm and train Islamic fighters to taken on former Soviet Union’s military when it occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. “Pakistan became a frontline state against the expansionist design of the Soviet Union,” says Colonel Nauman. “To be able to launch an operation against the Soviets, FATA was the most suitable springboard.”
BECAUSE THE Pashtun tribes of the region were hardly Islamists, the US pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars there and, working with the Pakistan Army, brought in Arab and Central Asian Muslim fighters to the theatre to bludgeon the locals’ objections to the hardcore Islamist agenda of the Taliban. After the Soviets withdrew, Afghanistan emerged as a state of warlords with money who appropriated much of the equipment the retreating Soviet Army left behind.
For several years, Afghanistan saw a bloody civil war between the Taliban and Northern Alliance of the non-Pashtun tribes. The porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan — there are four big passes and umpteen minor passes into Afghanistan from Bajaur alone — gave the Taliban strategic depth in Pakistan to fight their war in Afghanistan. In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul.
Colonel Nauman, who speaks fluent Pashto and has led the Bajaur Scouts for two years, reflects the dominant thinking in the Pakistan Army when he says that the failure of the US to continue its engagement with the anti-Soviet mujahideen proved to be a fatal mistake. It is now a fact of history that the Taliban government in Afghanistan gave Al Qaeda sanctuary, from where Osama bin Laden orchestrated the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States. This proved to be a watershed. The US attacked Afghanistan in December 2001, and to escape the bombings, the Taliban fled into Pakistan, especially into FATA.

The army claims the Taliban lost support once it turned locals into human shields

According to Pakistan Army officers who have engaged with the local Pashtuns over several years, the retreating Taliban found easy acceptance in FATA because the locals had known them for two decades since the anti-Soviet war. Besides, the two were ethnically the same. The Taliban had sympathy among the Pashtuns in FATA because they saw them as victims of the US invasion. What assured the Taliban of hospitality in FATA was the tribal custom that mandated the host to protect anyone who seeks a sanctuary.
Over the next four years, while continuing to regroup inside Pakistan, the Taliban also began to infiltrate the Islamic seminaries in FATA, the madrassas. “They started teaching a perverted version of Islam,” says Colonel Nauman. “They began recruiting children.” By 2006, the Taliban began to run the local administration in several areas, man checkpoints and collect revenue.
They also roamed freely displaying arms. Alarm bells rang when the Taliban began to move east of FATA, into the “settled areas” of the Northwestern Frontier Province (NWFP), the Pakistani province that adjoins FATA. (NWFP was last month renamed by a Constitutional amendment as Khyber Pakhtunwa.)
“In short,” says Colonel Nauman using a phrase popular with Indian security agencies, too, “the writ of the government was non-existent in FATA as the Taliban had begun to rule.” Two years ago, the Army found a letter of “approval” signed by an Afghan Taliban commander allowing an industrialist to open a cement factory in FATA. “That made us sit up,” says Nauman. By now, the Taliban had also taken over the local courts, and were administering justice in Bajaur.
Simultaneously, the Pakistan government was also under tremendous pressure from the US to up the ante against the Taliban. Terror attacks inside Pakistan had increased as well, most notably by ultras inside the Red Mosque in July 2007 and on the Marriot Hotel in September 2008, both in Islamabad. In the same month of the attack on the Marriot, Pakistan Army launched Operation Sherdil, a massive offensive including aerial attacks, and reached Bajaur’s capital, Khar, in four days. Although Damadola is only about 5 km from Khar, it would be another 13 months before the Army would be able to clear out the TTP nerve centre there.
The Pakistan Army claims that the peace currently prevailing in Bajaur will hold because a key tribe, which lives in areas bordering Afghanistan and which supported the Taliban until recently, has signed an agreement with it abjuring its support for the Taliban. This was the famous 28-point “surrender” to the Pakistan Army in return for amnesty and protection, signed by 700 tribe elders.
But here, too, the Taliban returned and Pakistan Army had to restart the offensive. It was a big relief for Army generals that tribesmen stuck to their promise made in the surrender document and refused to back the Taliban. Indeed, sealed as it was as per age-old tribal custom, this agreement gave hope to the Pakistan Army that in future, too, they should prefer signing the tribes on according to ways familiar to them.
The Pakistan Army also claims the Taliban have lost support of the local people in FATA on their own, after they started using innocent people as “human shields” as also converted people’s homes into their hideouts. It must be said that the Pakistan Army did not provide us access to the local populations for conversations to verify these claims about the Taliban.
However, activists such as Khattak, who are by no means apologists for the Pakistan Army, do confirm that the Taliban terrorised the people of FATA and in the settled areas, forcing them to provide them with logistic and financial support or face slaughter. In fact, Khattak believes that the Pakistan Army isn’t doing enough to finish off the Taliban. About six months ago, Khattak recalls, the Taliban kidnapped his neighbour, a farmer, returning him only months later after his family sold off his farm to pay ransom for his release.
THE ARMY has faced tough battles even in the Swat Valley, which is to the northeast of Bajaur, just outside FATA in NWFP. In November 2007, it launched an operation against the Taliban there and claimed to have secured it in six weeks. However, a local government installed there following elections chose to negotiate with the Taliban, and the Army was returned to the barracks. Predictably, the Taliban moved in again, began killing all those who had sided with the Army, and took control of the valley.
“They executed them brutally,” says Major General Athar Abbas. This caused a complete lack of support for the army in the Swat Valley. When it re-launched its military offensive, the Army “faced great difficulties” and had to “over-rely” on force, which resulted in “great destruction, death and displacement”. To be sure, 2.2 million people had been displaced by the middle of last year. Abbas claims that most people have since returned to Swat, but admits the army needs to keep control to ensure that the Taliban do not return.
In fact, the Pakistan Army faces three key challenges in its biggest face-off with the Taliban. One, it continues to put its men at risk across FATA and northwestern NWFP, where it has lost more than 800 soldiers to the Taliban fire since the operations began in Swat in November 2007. (Over 2,600 soldiers have been injured.) Two, it would be impossible for the Army to clear out every area infiltrated by the Taliban across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Major General Abbas admits that this cannot happen and says the Army can only clear the area for the government to move in and do its job.
Three, the biggest challenge, is the huge deficit of trust the Pakistan Army faces not just with the US, but with the people of Pakistan as well. For nearly two decades, the Pakistan Army and its Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) mentored the Taliban. Indeed, the Taliban were born during the rule of General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s most dreaded dictator who ruled from 1977 until his death in an air crash in 1988. General Zia backed the Taliban, a policy that successive Pakistan rulers, including General Pervez Musharraf, followed.
When Musharraf did a U-turn after the 2001 attacks in the US, the Taliban and its allied militant groups began turning against the Pakistani establishment, bringing on terror attacks aiming to hit Musharraf himself, the ISI offices, Army buildings — including its headquarters — and at public places across Pakistan. Yet, incredibly, it is still believed by many in Pakistan that the Army seeks to keep the Taliban alive in the hope that they will recapture Afghanistan once US-led military forces quit that country after July 2011.
Indeed, it is true that Islamabad cannot afford to end up a loser in Kabul after Western troops withdraw, especially since India is making every effort to win a stake in Afghanistan. “The art of being wise,” runs the adage painted on a board at the headquarters of Bajaur Scouts, “Is the art of knowing what to overlook.” Stretched while it is in its fight against the Taliban, the Pakistan Army can hardly overlook its nation’s need to ensure a hand in Afghanistan in the years to come.
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“Our Operation Has Broken The Taliban Myth”
Major-General Athar Abbas, DG, Inter-Services Public Relations of the Pakistan military, spoke to Ajit Sahi in Rawalpindi. Excerpts:
Why is there no military operation against the Taliban in North Waziristan?
The operation in South Waziristan was of a huge magnitude as the state had completely lost that space to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It had become a sanctuary for all terrorist groups, whether based in FATA or Punjab. The Masood tribesmen are fierce fighters. Abdullah Mehsud had wiped out the paramilitary and destroyed the posts. Starting October 16 last, the army conducted ground operations from three directions and in six weeks time the main centres were cleared. Even now, stabilisation operations are on. Until the countryside is consolidated, any big operation will risk the control procured in the area.
Could the Taliban return?
The military with the police, the administration and other paramilitary forces is manning Swat and other areas. You cannot rule out individual incidents of terrorism. But there is only a remote possibility of their [Taliban’s] carrying out a big attack. Of course, there is no ideal situation. It takes much longer for insurgencies like this to completely go off. But the markets are open, people are back to work, and the administration that had bolted has started functioning.
What were the challenges in Swat?
We cleared the Swat valley in six weeks from November 2007. Many militants were killed and many escaped to nearby valleys. Elections were held and the new government negotiated with the Taliban. The army was asked to retreat, because of which the terrorist re-captured the valley and many more were killed. As a result the military faced a lack of public co-operation in its second operation. Therefore, the Swat Taliban were given a new offer. But we realised the terrorists wanted more power, area, and authority. They started moving out of Swat into other areas and continued their brutality. That was the time when public opinion changed. There was a national mood to start an operation against the Taliban. Beginning May last, we attained success in five-to-six months. The army had to land on peaks as the roads were completely blocked. We had to go through narrow gorges in Taliban areas. More than 2.2 million people were displaced. We cleared areas no one had entered before. There were huge Taliban hideouts and sanctuaries in Swat.
Why do you object to US drone attacks?
The drone harms more than it helps. We won’t like to lose public support, which is crucial to any counterinsurgency. Public opinion has been divided in the country. It is fragile and therefore one is very careful when conducting operations. The media in our country is, like yours, aggressive but currently supports the operation. It has anti-American segments and strong anti-war lobbies also. Of course, this is our war not a US war. This issue is important in these operations.
Shouldn’t governments take over?
Our comprehensive strategy is to clear, hold, build and transfer. The third and the fourth is a civilian component. The effect of the military operation is that the myth [of the Taliban] is broken, they are dislodged from their main bases, and their training camps and logistics disrupted. The writ [of the State] is to a great extent established. The mid-tier leadership including a few top leaders [of the Taliban] has been eliminated. The locals’ confidence is restored. The civil administration has capacity problems. It hasn’t stopped terrorist acts in cities and towns but [these acts have] gone down to great extent.
What are the serious outstanding issues?
The madrassa problem needs attention. The rehabilitation of the displaced is a serious issue, which can lose us in the refugee camps what we won in the operations. There is a capacity problem of the administration and it requires attention. The militant is also very proactive and therefore requires management. We have a problem with hate literature in our country. It is proliferating and we need to look into it.
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ajit@tehelka.com

Prêt A-Blog

By
Aastha Atray Banan
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Indian fashion blogs, like their foreign predecessors, are fast reinterpreting fashion for the common people, finds  Aastha Atray Banan

Bengaluru chic Bengaluru bloggers Faiza and Ruhi Sheikh and Smrithi Rao. Photo by Harris Backer

IT SPELLED change with a capital ‘C’ when 13 year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson was invited as a special guest to the Marc Jacobs fashion show at last year’s New York Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. She even sparked an online spat when her giant bow-shaped headpiece obstructed the view of one of British fashion’s most senior writers, Grazia magazine Style Director Paula Reed, at the Christian Dior haute couture show in Paris. But Tavi remained unfazed, because her fashion blog, Style Rookie, gets 1.5 million hits a month, compared to which Grazia’s circulation in the UK alone, which stands at 229,732, looks bleak. Back home, fashion bloggers Payal and Priyanka of High Heel Confidential tasted sweet success when they were invited for the recently-concluded Lakme Fashion Week as part of the media. The message was crystal clear: the Indian fashion fraternity had finally woken up to the fashion blogger.
Fashion bloggers have recently become an influential posse. Though the first fashion blog appeared only in 2002, their number has grown considerably since then. Google them today and you will find more than 18,400,000 hits.
Though still in its nascent stage in India, the trend is spreading like wildfire. The fashion-conscious youth of metros like Mumbai and Bengaluru are aching to get their point of view across. Payal and Priyanka of High Heel Confidential, which chronicles Bollywood’s style quotient, say, “This medium allows room for immediate reactions, opinions and comments. Designers, buyers, celebrities… know exactly what the people are thinking and bloggers are beginning to play as important a role as critics in swaying opinion.”

‘The biggest problem with Indian fashion is that there is no concept of prêt. There are no fashion houses like H&M or Zara, that bridge the gap’

In fact, fashion bloggers have aided the democratisation of the fashion industry. The days of a small sect of fashion designers and editors calling the shots about what to wear are over — replaced by a space where the consumer holds power. Media professionals Sonu Bohra, 23, and Jasleen Kaur Gupta, 26, startedFashion Bombay, on which they list budget yet unique buys for Mumbai women. “We take pictures of each other dressed in the trends that we spot. We are far from size zero, and hence a reader of our blog can know exactly how a silhouette will look on their body-type.” Much like 24 year-old Smrithi Rao from Bengaluru, who is a DIY queen on her blog Vintage Obsession. “All my DIY stuff is something everyone can try at home,” she says. Mumbai-centric blogs like 26-year-old Manu Tyagi’s Wearabout and 22 year-old Karishma Rajani’s Purple Peeptoes showcase ordinary people on the street with extraordinary style. Manu says, “I think fashion is about creating different looks with what one already has — to make one’s ‘wardrobe staple’ versatile.” As Ruhi and Faiza Sheikh of The Republic of Chic say, “These blogs mix designer wear with stuff from a little-known store.”
 

Mumbai motley Mumbai bloggers Sonu Bohra, Jasleen Kaur Gupta and Karishma Rajani. Photo by Garima Jain

THIS HIP CLIQUE has very definite opinions on the latest trends that walk the ramps. “The biggest problem about Indian fashion is that there is no concept of prêt. There are no fashion houses like H&M or Zara, that can bridge the gap,” says Jasleen. And though designer Little Shilpa’s funky headgear is a hit with the front rows, socialites and editors alike, Smrithi couldn’t disagree with it more: “Who will wear a fan on their heads — that too one that is switched on. It looks as if it’s all made of scrap!” She would love to see the good ol’ hide-those-hips harem pants on the ramps, and maybe some of those jumpsuits — like the ones by her favourite designer, Jean Paul Gaultier.

‘The biggest problem with Indian fashion is that there is no concept of prêt. There are no fashion houses like H&M or Zara, that bridge the gap’

Internationally, the diversity of perspectives has influenced the collections of designers. For example, Diane Von Furstenberg’s spring 2010 collection showcased harem pants, capris and wide-legged trousers for the first time — a favourite with everyday fashionistas.
How do mainstream fashion writers react to the Indian fashion blogging phenomenon? Nonita Kalra, editor-in-chief of ElleIndia, India’s largest selling fashion magazine, feels that bloggers could be useful for the industry as they are expanding its reach: “They communicate in a language that younger people understand.” But Mid-Day Fashion Editor Shweta Shiware bemoans the fact that serious fashion writers may be made redundant due to this: “It’s not whether they make sense or not, but about how quickly their blogs reach readers.”
Also, the phenomenon of the fashion blogger has been marred by allegations that the “independent voice” may be in danger of being silenced. Robert Johnson, associate editor at men’s magazine GQ, was quoted as saying: “Bloggers are attractive to the big design houses because they are so wide-eyed. As soon as they’ve been invited to the shows, they can no longer criticise because then they won’t be invited back.” So will Indian fashion bloggers still retain their “we are the voice of the masses” stance when they hit the big time, get front row fashion show invitations and brands start scrambling for ad space? We will just have to wait and watch.

WRITER’S EMAIL
aastha@tehelka.com

The Shock Therapy Man

By
Aastha Atray Banan
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Aastha Atray Banan profiles the controversial economist Jeffrey Sachs as he attempts to revolutionise India’s public health system and bring people back to government hospitals

Photo: Deepak Salvi

THOUGH ONCE described by top rock band U2’s frontman and global celebrity Bono as a “great economist, whose autograph will be in time, worth more than mine”, economist Jeffrey D Sachs sounds astoundingly optimistic when he insists that India can solve its public health issues by 2020. That despite the country’s population swelling to 1.6 billion by then, people would be able to get medical attention and medicines in government health clinics across the country. The only thing that prevents a complete dismissal of this claim as an over-confident assertion of unachievable targets, is Sachs’ 25-year history of engagement with governments over issues of debt and poverty management — a trajectory that has earned him as many friends as detractors.
Currently director of the Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Sachs’ engagement with India’s public health services translated into direct involvement with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), billed as India’s biggest rural health programme. In Mumbai, at the launch of his book, Improving Access And Efficiency In Public Health Services, which he co-authored with Nirupam Bajpai and Ravindra H Dholakia, Sachs told TEHELKA that he had been hoping for a scaling up of India’s public health system for more than a decade. “India spends only about 1 percent of its GDP on its public health system, which is very low compared to most countries, which spend at least 3 percent. Though the steps taken at NRHM have been small, they are important. NRHM now has almost 6,000 workers and the facilities have improved in quality. One change always kick starts another,” he says. The book is a discussion of the challenges and successes of the mission in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Sachs outlines plans of establishing model health districts in India. “The main goal of these units will be to establish a new public health management system at the district level which can ensure high-quality services and proper feedback when corrections need to be made. We aim to show that with the correct management structures and increased outlays, India can make very large and rapid improvements in health outcomes, especially in reduced maternal and child mortality,” says Sachs.
“There has been a very bright beginning,” he says as he sits in the coffee shop of a Mumbai five-star hotel overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ask Sachs why India’s public health sector is in a mess and his analysis is plain: “In India, traditionally, the poor have never had a voice. And if we take the case of poor women, then the voice is even more muted. It is the men who do the talking and health is primarily a woman’s concern. So, when a poor man in India is voicing his concerns and needs, he thinks of things like subsidies, fertilisers and electricity,” he says, as he gestures with the salt and pepper shakers on the table. He pauses, then says, “But that’s changing. The dynamics of India are changing. Women are speaking up and hence, even politicians are taking note. Now, elections could be won on the health services that a politician promises. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is personally very dedicated to this project and, hence, it will surely do very well.”
Sachs proceeds to outline what he says are the three major challenges facing India: “The basic health system needs to overhaul. There are too many infant deaths and mothers dying at childbirth. Secondly, chronic malnutrition is a big rural India problem. That stems from larger issues such as the low agricultural outputs and even the dynamics in a household. The third main issue India needs to tackle is lifestyle diseases, which have snowballed in the last five years. Obesity, cardiovascular diseases and even smoking rates have shot through the roof,” he says, adding with a concerned note, “In fact, it would be true to say that India is now battling both the old, basic diseases of poverty and the new ills of wealth.”

‘Sachs is my professor and a great economist whose autograph will be in time worth more than mine,’ says Bono, U2 rock group celebrity

The model health districts that Sachs discusses are an echo of the much controversial Millennium Village project that he was instrumental in establishing across Africa. Through projects set up in 80 villages across the country, Sachs attempted to show that by simultaneously running several relatively straightforward but tightly focussed, technologybased programmes on a number of fronts — health care, education, job training — people could be rapidly lifted out of poverty. However, this approach has several critics, who feel that the adopted villages should not be made into passive recipients of handouts from donors and lectures from experts. Rather, they need to be actively involved in the decision-making, and hence get empowered, which, they allege, Sachs is not ensuring. “There is nothing passive about the villages. These are community- led programmes. These critics, once again, sit in their offices 10,000 miles away spouting ignorance,” he says, anger evident.
Sachs shot to fame in 1985 when he imposed his controversial “shock therapy” model in Bolivia. At the time Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, was suffering runaway inflation at an astonishing 24,000 percent per year. The only way to beat inflation, he argued, was a clean break with the past: a regimen of fiscal and monetary discipline combined with an end to economic regulation. His charm worked and he persuaded the government to go along. Within weeks, hyperinflation was controlled. Since then, he has also assisted the government of Poland and started the Millennium Village project in Africa.

War Games People Play

By
Ajit Sahi
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“…Something has gone drastically wrong. [The CRPF men] seem to have walked into a trap set by the Naxalites.” — Home Minister P Chidambaram, on the Maoists’ killing of 75 paramilitary men and a policeman in Chhattisgarh on April 6

The Last Nail? Plywood coffins being readied to carry the casualties of an uncivil war. Photographs by: Shailendra Pandey

IT LITERALLY is the dead of the night. “Bastards,” spits the lowly officer, his vest soaked with sweat, the surgical mask now lowered to his chin, tired eyes bloodshot with rage, the furious voice a whisper, for who wants to talk around sixty-one coffins being filled with dead men so many of who you knew by nicknames? Laced with chemicals, wrapped as mummies, the bodies brought from their mass autopsy are lowered into the plywood caskets that were banged together all evening. Silent young men nail the lids shut and load them onto trucks.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the officer’s vitriol is flung not at the Maoists who had hours earlier inflicted the biggest casualty on the uniformed men in their four-decade-long insurgency. Instead, the officer is beyond mad with the government “because it knows nothing here and will get us all killed”. What he doesn’t say, because he doesn’t know, is that the government doesn’t care either.
You would imagine a government that proclaims the slain men as martyrs and tops their coffins with the Indian tricolor for Chidambaram’s photo-op a few hours later would be moved to a nightlong wake for the dead; that its politicians and officers — both uniformed and civilian — would lead from the front to recoup from this terrible tragedy and rebuild the morale of their foot soldiers; that, grieving and in solidarity, they would swarm the makeshift mortuary, that at least some would go sit beside the hospital beds of three heroic survivors.
After all, the dead gave their lives so that, to borrow from Chidambaram’s rhetoric, “the writ of the State” could run in the forests of Chhattisgarh. But at 2 am on April 7, hours before Chidambaram’s farewell to the dead and barely 18 hours after the CRPF combatants were gunned down, it is only the angry lowly officer, a sub-inspector, representing the State at this government hospital at Jagdalpur town, 150 km north of the site of the deadly Maoist attack. It must be said that he is here on his own and not detailed for the job.
No chief minister, no state home minister, no other minister, no member of Parliament, no MLA, no director-general of police (Vishwa Ranjan, a man popular with journalists in all seasons), no chief secretary, no home secretary, no inspector-general (TJ Longkumer, who Chidambaram later told journalists had planned the dead men’s fatal foray into the forests), no district magistrate (frenzied a few hours later as reporters surged at Chidambaram’s press conference because he didn’t want anyone to throw a shoe at the Union home minister), no superintendent of police, not one high-ranking officer of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), to which 75 of the dead belonged, were here; just the very angry CRPF sub-inspector. “They were like my children,” he says.
Typically, the survivors mattered less than the dead. Head Constable Raj Bahadur and Constables Pramod Kumar Singh and Baljeet Singh are lucky to survive the carnage, having taken bullets everywhere but in the guts. A hundred paces from the mortuary, they lie writhing in pain on dirty hospital linen stained from previous occupants’ dried blood. Only one has a mosquito net. There are no doctors or nurses. Two constables who’ve come on their own watch over their wounded mates. The ward is a hovel; the toilet is a stinking blocked drain. “Our officers are home sleeping,” an attendant says.
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Five hours later, just minutes before Chidambaram and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh visit the heroes, bureaucrats and the hospital’s administrators fuss in panic over the non-functioning air-conditioning. “Can’t it run for just 15 minutes?” asks one. Bottles of intravenous fluids now hang from their stands, their needles pushed into the arms of the wounded. These weren’t here six hours earlier. The linen has changed. The hovel is now spic and span. A couple hours later, Chidambaram chokes at a press conference, grieving the dead and expressing his resolve to wipe out the Maoists.
DRASTICALLY WRONG
Perhaps bigger than the tragedy that befell the men who died in the Maoist attack is the tragedy of Chidambaram beginning to fall for his own rhetoric. This is the classic case of the emperor that had no clothes but none would tell him the naked truth. Tuesday’s horrific killings should jolt Chidambaram and his government into realising that rhetoric is not the reality, that his paramilitary men are sitting ducks for the Maoists just about anywhere, anytime. Instead, he continues to claim that the security forces would wipe out the Maoists in three years.
“We salute the brave jawans who have laid down their lives in the defence of freedom, liberty and democracy,” a solemn Chidambaram said at the press conference, reading from a text. Then the rhetoric and the hubris surged: “Let us not forget that the goal of the Naxalites is to overthrow the established authority of the government through armed liberation struggle. We cannot, and we shall not, allow them to succeed in that goal… The State has a legitimate right to deploy its security forces to resist, apprehend and, if necessary, neutralise militants who are determined to strike at the very roots of our nation.”
Chidambaram also claimed that a fuller account of what happened during the April 6 attack on the CRPF patrol would emerge from the “debriefing of the injured jawans”, which might happen at a later stage. This reporter already spoke at length with the wounded CRPF men at the hospital on the night of the attack, hours before Chidambaram visited them. Their accounts are a shocking testimony to an utter lack of preparedness to meet the Maoists.
To begin with, at least 48 of the 82 men in the ill-fated CRPF patrol that the Maoists fired upon had zero knowledge about the area they had been patrolling for one day and two nights before the fateful morning. These 48 men belonged to the Alpha Company of the CRPF, which had transferred to the local camp of the paramilitary at a location named Chintalnar only a week before the attack.
That these personnel, unfamiliar with the nearby forests the Maoists heavily dominate, were sent out for a three-day “area domination exercise” can only be described as a suicide mission. “When the firing began,” says Constable Pramod Kumar Singh, 28, “we had no chance.” Pramod and Head Constable Raj Bahadur, both from Alpha Company, did not know east from west at the site. “The Maoists were everywhere,” says Bahadur. “On the hill on the left and on the hill on the right, on the trees, and behind us. Everywhere.”

18 hours after the CRPF combatants were gunned down, only an angry, lowly sub-inspector represents the state at the makeshift mortuary

In fact, the patrol’s journey over the two nights was a virtual advertisement of their itinerary. The 82-man party had left its camp at Chintalnar on the evening of April 4 and headed for a village 12 km away for a “search operation”. That is CRPF-speak for banging doors in a village and rounding up folks there for grilling and sometimes worse. By 11 pm, it had retreated close to its camp and halted the night outside another village.
The party slept around midnight and was up at 2 am, and had left in another hour. The next day, too, was spent in “search” across several villages. The night of April 5, it halted outside another village, sleeping again in the open after the community cooking and dining. Once again, it was up at 2 am and had begun its march an hour later. Around 5.30 am, the Maoists attacked it. It is stunning that the CRPF war room strategists failed to realise that they were making the men vulnerable to Maoist attacks by making them stay out two consecutive nights in a location most men in the patrol did not know.
WALKING INTO A TRAP
Indeed, two things emerged from conversations with CRPF personnel at Jagdalpur. One, such “area domination exercises” cannot possibly be run for three days without a very high risk of being attacked. And two, it is absurd to have only 80-odd men in a three-day patrol that’s entirely on its own, away from the camp. “There should have been at least 500 men in that party,” said a CRPF constable of the Alpha Company who was not in the party attacked upon on Tuesday but had been involved in an offensive last September. “This team was outnumbered by at least one to five.”
Of course, what is even more embarrassing for the government is that the Maoists attacked barely 4 km from the CRPF camp in south Dantewada district. In fact, this is an area where a 50-km stretch has four CRPF camps as well as numerous government-run refugee camps to which tens of thousands of the tribal people have been forcibly brought since 2005 by the controversial governmentbacked Salwa Judum militia that is drawn from among the tribal people.
Given that the vast southern region of Chhattisgarh where the Maoists have a free run is bigger than Kerala, just what does the State control if the Maoists finish off an entire patrol 4 km from a full-fledged CRPF camp? (In fact, the attack site is only a kilometre from a path much traversed by the CRPF.) Three hours into the Maoist attack, a rescue vehicle — a modified Tata 407 known as ‘bunker’ that is supposedly bombproof — started from the camp to evacuate the holed-out personnel. The Maoists blasted an IED through it, killing its driver — just 2 km from the camp. Chidambaram acknowledged that the Maoists fired at and stopped rescue parties from reaching the location.

Survivors remember maoists roaming among the fallen men. The rebels took away their weapons and wireless sets

Chillingly, the survivors remember the Maoists roaming among the fallen men after the shooting ended, possibly four hours later. “I heard men, women and even children,” says Raj Bahadur. “I kept my head down and pretended to be dead.” Every man in the CRPF patrol had held a weapon. These included about 60 INSAS rifles, 10 AK-47 assault rifles, 10 SLRs, four SLRs with improvised grenadelaunchers, 40 bombs and four mortar guns. The patrol also had 15 wireless sets. The Maoists took away everything. The rescue parties, including from the Chintalnar camp, began arriving much later.
CANNON FODDER
It is common knowledge that the rebels know the forests like the back of their palms because they were born here, that they most possibly have the backing of an overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of the tribal people living across more than 20,000 sq km. On the other hand, the few thousand CRPF men here hail from all over India, and have lived here only months, if that.
Of the 61 coffins laid out for Chidambaram’s send-off (15 other bodies, brought to Jagdalpur on April 7, could not be autopsied before his arrival), 31 men belonged to Uttar Pradesh. Others came afar, from Assam to Kerala. Two officers who perished in the assault — Deputy Commandant Satyavan Singh and Assistant Commandant Bajrang Lal Meena (who headed the Alpha Company) — were from Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan. The forests were never theirs. Only two coffins bore names native to Chhattisgarh.
In any case, it is not as if the slain men had been trained in jungle warfare specifically for Chhattisgarh. Surviving Constable Baljeet Singh, 26, who joined the CRPF in 2007 and was among the few men from the Charlie Company in the fated patrol, says he was trained in the forests near Jalandhar in Punjab, and only a month there. The forests of Chhattisgarh, he admits, are way thicker and trickier. The training in Punjab was in “how to load and fire the guns, to take positions under attack”. Why wasn’t this training specific to tackling the Maoists? He thinks and says: “I guess guerilla tactics are the same everywhere, from Kashmir to Chhattisgarh.” After a pause, he adds: “I am only a constable.”

Survivors say they knew the patrol had a slim chance when maoists attacked. They fought as long as they could

Even Raj Bahadur, who at 48 years is a 22- year CRPF veteran and seen action from Kashmir to Tripura, has never witnessed anything like Chhattisgarh. “This was the worst I was ever in,” he says. It is incredible that the three survivors have never met a surrendered or captured Maoist.
One would imagine that the many captured Maoists, ranging from ideologues such as Kobad Ghandy arrested in New Delhi to the armed insurgents nabbed in the forests, would have proved a goldmine of information for the planners of the security forces’ counter-offensive. But the three survivors — who are the most crucial foot soldiers the paramilitary has — cannot recall attending any briefing from the CRPF planners to share Maoist warfare strategies with them. If anything, these men said that constables such as themselves (who numbered around 60 of 82 on Tuesday) are routinely told nothing but “only to go out and search” and, if need be, “shoot”.
It is difficult to put down such obstinacy to anything but the hubris of the officers. In September 2009, a posse of the elite COBRA force struck deep in the Maoist territory and destroyed a factory manufacturing guns locally called bharmar. A surrendered Maoist, a woman, had accompanied and guided that team to the site. The deed done, the woman urged the COBRA team to leave immediately. But they ignored her warning. That proved to be a fatal mistake, as the next morning, the Maoists laid a siege to the entire area.
A CRPF team led by Deputy Commandant Meena — who died in Tuesday’s attack — had to rush to evacuate the COBRA combatants, but not before the Maoists killed six, including two assistant commandants. “The Maoists walked parallel to us at some distance for 6 km, firing continuously at us as we carried the dead on our shoulders,” says one CRPF constable, who participated in the rescue. “I fired two mortars so that the helicopter with the injured could fly.” He fired two more after the helicopter took off, just in case.
In Tuesday’s attack, too, the CRPF survivors say they knew right at the start of the attack that the team had a slim chance of surviving. “We survived because we were too far at the back,” Raj Bahadur says. The survivors held out, firing their guns as long as they could before piercing bullets rendered them unconscious. Deputy Commandant Satyavan Singh, the patrol’s leader, and Assistant Commandant Meena were possibly among the last dozen to be alive. “Meena asked me to take care of myself,” Pramod remembers. “That’s the last I saw of him.”
As Chidambaram left, so did the doctors and the officers at the ward. On Thursday, the three survivors were restless to leave the hospital. Raj Bahadur hopes that any compensation that may come his way will help pay off the Rs 1.5 lakh of the debt he still owes back in Agra for his daughter’s wedding four years ago, which his meagre take-home pay of Rs 18,000 has failed to pay off. Pramod is worried sick because his father in Aligarh has cancer and has lost all his hair to chemotherapy.
Baljeet just wants to go home in Haryana’s Sonepat to his new bride he married on February 16. He spent only 23 days with her before coming back to Chhattisgarh. If he gets leave, he would get only some weeks with her before returning to the forests for months of separation — a pattern that would recur throughout the years he will spend defending freedom, liberty and democracy.

WRITER’S EMAIL
ajit@tehelka.com

As A Goldsmith Weighs The Gold

By
Ajit Sahi
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Weighing The Scale Of Justice
 

Justice Nazki
Photo: Ambarin Afsar

“Decline the offer,” his father bluntly told BILAL NAZKI just a day before the latter was to be sworn in as a judge of the Jammu & Kashmir High Court in January 1995. “Being a judge needs the highest integrity and you may not always display it.” But Nazki humbly urged his father, a two-time Sahitya Akademi award winning poet and author, to let him become a high court judge. At which, the father held out the Holy Quran and administered an oath to his son: “Weigh the scales of justice as a goldsmith weighs the gold.” The next day, Nazki went to court and was sworn in.
In his nearly 15-year judgeship with the four high courts of J&K, Andhra Pradesh, Bombay and Orissa until his retirement last November, Nazki never let his father’s profound wisdom leave him. “My father was both deeply secular and deeply religious,” Nazki says. His other influences range from Socrates and Plato to Descartes and Spinoza. One of the most outstanding high court judges in recent history, Nazki is celebrated for having provided judicial relief to tens of thousands of the poor and the disadvantaged wronged by the system.
Ironically, Nazki retired as Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court only after holding that job for four days. It certainly rankles that despite his brilliant track record, he never found himself in the running for the Supreme Court. A native of Srinagar, Nazki was set to join the Aligarh Muslim University to study philosophy when a community elder forced him to take up law. “No one in my family had ever studied law in generations,” he says, adding candidly, “I was an average but honest lawyer.”
In 1991, Kashmiri militants abducted and pumped four bullets in his stomach. He escaped after they left him for dead. He was in hospital for two months. Perhaps this attention helped him become the Advocate General of the state. In 1995, he was elevated to the high court. Less than two years later, he moved to the Andhra Pradesh High Court, where he passed several historic judgements, including the order that the police must compulsorily file an FIR in case they kill alleged criminals in “encounters”, and the police claim must then be independently verified.
Nazki spoke to AJIT SAHI of TEHELKA. Excerpts:
How do you view the process of appointing chief justices of high courts and judges to the Supreme Court?
The policy for such appointments needs a relook. I have been involved in the decision- making for elevating two dozen judges at two high courts. But I am not satisfied with it. I was a judge for nearly 15 years before I could be chief justice, and that too only for four days. Another judge to whom I need not be inferior may become a chief justice after only eight years.
The seniority of a judge is considered from his original high court, in my case, Jammu and Kashmir. So although I served in J&K only two years and at Andhra Pradesh High Court for 10 years, my chances of becoming chief justice of a high court rested on my seniority in J&K.

It Rankles That He Never Found Himself In The Running For The SC In Spite Of His Brilliant Record

Let me tell you about a senior. Justice VK Gupta served nine years as chief justice in Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand but was not elevated to the Supreme Court until he retired in 2009. From 2002, when Justice RP Sethi retired from the Supreme Court, J&K had no representation in the Supreme Court. Still, Justice Gupta wasn’t elevated. Why? Secondly, Kashmir has a larger population than Jammu and a bigger bar. Yet, all the four judges from Jammu & Kashmir High Court who went to the Supreme Court were from Jammu, including AS Anand, who became Chief Justice of India (CJI).
Are you suggesting a bias?
I must clarify I am not suggesting either a regional bias or a communal one. These four were very good judges. It was a manipulation achieved, in my view, by a person who was very powerful in the Indian judiciary for a very long time. In the last 25 years, six judges from J&K have become high court chief justices, four from Jammu and two from Kashmir. BA Khan, the other from Kashmir besides me, was chief justice for only one-and-a-half months. I was chief justice for four days. Whereas the other four were chief justices since 1984 until last year. Three of them — Anand, Sethi and TS Thakur — were elevated to the Supreme Court. I was Acting Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court for eight months. My immediate deputy was Justice Sudarshan Reddy. He is now in the Supreme Court for more than two years. Another judge junior to me in Andhra Pradesh was Justice J Chalmeshwa. He was high court chief justice for more than two years. These things need to be debated and discussed. This has to be somehow addressed.
So how can the system be reformed?
A law is necessary. Many judges feel this. But you don’t talk when you are in the robes. Earlier, the powers to make the appointments lay with the government. In 1992, Supreme Court judge JS Verma, who later became CJI, devised the method of appointment by the collegiums. This hasn’t had such good results.
Should there be all-India seniority?
No. This is a pluralistic and federal country and every region should have representation in the Supreme Court. For example, Allahabad High Court has 170 judges whereas Bombay has 75. An all- India system would unduly favour Allahabad judges. All I say is that the policy has to be debated. But the judges can’t start an internal debate. It will give the impression that the judiciary is at loggerheads with itself. I have never talked in 15 years, even to my friends. Even after retirement, a judge should not say something that discredits the institution.
Mustn’t judges declare their assets?
I don’t object to the demand. But according to service rules, even bureaucrats and police officers must declare their assets. You don’t need to impeach them to remove them. But how many are removed? One of the greatest judges of the last century, Lord Denning, said someone has to have the last word. Let the judges be that. But more importantly, the litigant should believe I’m honest even if rule against him.
How best can a judge play his role?
I would often say in court that this is not a file; it is a human being. If a judge feels that, he will find a way. A judge should feel for a litigant like a doctor would for his patient. In Kashmir, a sweeper approached my court against her dismissal. I was shocked to find she was paid Rs 25 a month. I stayed her sacking and ordered the government to pay Rs 30 a day, not just to her but to all 40,000 staff like her working in schools and hospitals. At an average of five to a family, I would say my order helped two lakh people. It gave me far greater satisfaction than most others.

‘The system of appointing judges by a collegium hasn’t had such good results. I am not satisfied’

In Andhra Pradesh, I found that compensation had not been paid even 20 years after thousands of acres were acquired. As Chairman of the Legal Services Authority, I took the cheques to the villages. We couldn’t even locate 60 claimants. When I gave an 85-year-old man a cheque for Rs 3 lakh, he garlanded me. I said to him, “You are patient. I deserve a garland of shoes not flowers.” In another case in Maharashtra, two men were still in jail five years after being acquitted of a murder charge as they could not pay the bail. I waived the bail and ordered the government to pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation.
Who is a good judge?
Once Abraham Lincoln jumped out of his carriage to save a puppy from a pit. When asked why he didn’t let his security do that, Lincoln said he felt a pain in his heart for the pup. A good judge is one who feels a pain in the heart. I look out of my window and see poor people sleeping on the pavements. I get a luxurious flat because I’m a judge. What about them?
Two schools of thought exist among the judges. One says nothing is black and white — keep room to come out [of a ruling]. Another says law must be black and white. I belong to the latter. A few years ago [then President APJ] Abdul Kalam told a judicial officers’ conference — we must rule in a language the litigant understands. I must have decided 60,000 cases. At least, people understand what I said.
Why is judicial merit declining?
Before their elevation, most judges are lawyers usually specialising in one kind of practice. As judges, though, they have to rule on all kinds of cases. So judges learn from the bar. If the quality of the bar goes down, so does the judges’. Once in Andhra Pradesh, I spent weeks studying chemistry before giving life imprisonment to a scientist who applied mercurial salts to his wife’s vagina, slow poisoning her to death.
What most ails the judiciary?
The delays are too long and costs of litigation too high. Most people are just not aware of their legal rights. We don’t have enough judges. Is it realistic to have 14,000 judges for more than one billion people? They decide one crore cases annually. What more do you expect? More than three crore cases are pending across India. Every year, we add about 50 lakh new cases. An Australian judge once boasted to me that he had decided 11 cases that year. I told him I decided 20 a day. Stunned, he asked, “How do you do it?”

‘It is not a file. It is a human being. A judge should feel like a doctor feels for his patient’

Our judges are among the most efficient in the world. I don’t think any judge works less than 18 hours a day. We utilise our vacations updating ourselves on law, writing judgements and attending meetings because the judiciary has to be administered. These facts don’t come out because judges don’t speak out.
How can these problems be resolved?
There is no way to regulate litigation cost unless the bar does it itself. For those who can’t afford [expensive] lawyers there is a ridiculous mechanism — the Legal Services Authority. On one side you have a capable lawyer — on the other is a lawyer who is paid Rs 500. You are not providing any real legal assistance but only technical assistance. The Legal Services Authority needs a lot of funds to engage experienced lawyers for those who cannot afford them.
How should the courts react to insurgencies such as the Naxal violence?
Even in the worst of conditions, the State must act according to the rule of law. If it doesn’t, it will complicate the problem. The State must be the first to honour the rule of law. The citizens must be the second. I have first-hand knowledge of the militancy in Kashmir. Those who are not sympathisers of the militants help them. Suppose you are a law-abiding citizen and four people with guns enter your house forcibly in the dead of the night, force you to make food and ask for keys to the car and for money. But police suspect you to be militants’ sympathiser. People feel police should protect them, not harass them.
Once the judiciary stood for workers’ rights. Now it rules for big businesses.
The shift is attributable to the belief that even the condition of the poor and the downtrodden can be improved if overall economics is improved. So if you allow a person to have an industry, you also see how much employment it will generate. There is a shift in government policy. Judges must have been influenced by it.
Why are the Indian police so terrible?
The police are impossibly overburdened. They haven’t been trained. In the US, the police begin with a clue and look for suspects through it. In India, police begin with a suspect and look for clues through him. The police here know no investigating techniques except beating the suspects. How many people who have read psychology work in the police? Ideally, police should only maintain law and order and prevent crime. But once crime occurs, another agency should investigate it.
Is there hope for the judicial system?
It will take us time to fully establish the rule of law because we are only a 60-yearold democracy. You are not born a democracy. You grow into it. In fact, our country is on the right path. Such a phase had been seen in the US and the UK, too.
ajit@tehelka.com

The Man Behind The Lipstick

By
Aastha Atray Banan
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Why is performance artist Nikhil Chopra more famous internationally than in India, asks Aastha Atray Banan

Photo: Tina Lange

IT’S A good thing that Nikhil Chopra is a dandy. Being stared at all day would make feebler mortals quaver. In his latest act, “Drum Solo”, the performance artist became a star drummer boy at Chatterjee and Lal, transforming the Mumbai gallery’s white interiors into a black lounge. For five hours daily, from March 15 to 19, Chopra thrashed a drum kit to an inch of its life — with no intention to make music: “That’d make it less interesting. Making sound: now that’s what matters,” grins the 35-year-old. “I’m working with an idea unknown to me. I’ve never been so loud! But it does what’s necessary: amplify improvisation.”
Mortimer Chatterjee of Chatterjee and Lal, which also hosted Nikhil’s works in 2007, says, “Performance art draws a wide cross-section of people — regular gallery goers, people from the film and theatre world and art students who want to see new practices. In ‘Drum Solo’, Chopra is playing a celebrity rockstar, and there’s an element of danger, as this concept could fall flat on its face. It could also be a critique of the acknowledgement an artist gets.” He wryly notes, “Usually, art shows only get covered if there was a great party along with them.”
Beatless Nikhil Chopra’s “Drum Solo” piece had him thrash a drum kit for five hours daily
Photo: Deepak Salvi

A performance artist creates a ‘living picture’ by inserting himself into still and video backdrops. The method first became popular internationally in the 1960s with artists like Yves Klein and Yoko Ono, but it’s still new for Indians — which might explain why Chopra is more famous outside India than in his native land. The New York Times Magazine has called Chopra’s performances “enchanting”, theChicago Art Magazine described how “he held power” over his audience, and London’s ArtReview listed him among their 30 most important emerging artists in March 2009. But Nikhil is certain that Indian audiences are dying to welcome something different. As art critic Nancy Adajania says, “He has been an exception to the malaise of complacency in the Indian art world.”
Chopra entered the world of performance art during his MFA at Ohio State University, when the Punjabi boy from Jammu invented a character called Sri Raja. For a performance called “Sri Raja III at Khowaja Press”, he sauntered through Delhi’s walled city in regal costume towards an Urdu printing press. His other success was with “Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing”, which follows a Victorian draughtsman. He shaved off all his body hair publically, even performing as a drag queen.
Sometimes during a performance, Chopra confesses, he does ask himself, “Why am I here?” Audiences, he says, “want to keep the illusion alive as they want to enter an artist’s world. I don’t look at them but through them. After a while, they become comfortable to stare at me freely, and then suddenly I am an object.”
For Chopra, the best thing about his works could be how he gets to live out his dreams: “I have license to do anything and be anyone. I once got supremely drunk! I also got to play drums, which I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. I was a rockstar for just that moment. Now, ain’t that a great feeling?” Might be better to ask: sounds like teen spirit?
aastha@tehelka.com

Eyes wide shut

By
Ajit Sahi
-

For the human race to survive, Mahatma Gandhi would always insist, its women must eventually take charge of the affairs of men. In the last 150 years, incredibly courageous women’s rights movements have waged epochal battles across the world, most notably in the US, to wrest parity from generations of chauvinistic men, bringing themselves adult suffrage, working rights and numerous social, political and economic benefits. So, for India to become one of the world’s first big democracies to reserve for women one-third of all its 545 Lok Sabha seats and 4,000-odd legislative seats across 28 states is a powerful moment in history. Why then oppose the Women’s Reservation Bill? Are these misogynists foolishly ranged against the tide of history, or feudal lords threatened to extinction by an idea whose time has come?
First, it needs to be asked why the UPA — which has shown little urgency during its six years in power to bring substantive policies to improve the well-being of India’s more than half-a-billion women — should so aggressively push for this Bill to become law, without allowing any vigorous debates within and outside Parliament, going to the extent of issuing a whip to force its MPs to toe the line. It is stunning that the Bill — or the government — has not disclosed how the reservation for women would translate into tangible benefits for women, society and the nation. Finally, why is the government refusing to allow a sub-quota for the backward castes, as the opponents of the Bill have demanded?
The real story behind both the support for and the opposition to the Bill, lies in India’s complex castebased politics. Typically, the upper-caste dominated parties, such as the Congress, the BJP and even the Left, back the Bill. Whereas parties peopled by the middle and the lower castes, such as the RJD, the JD(U) and the Samajwadi Party, are opposed to it. As it were, the backward and the lowest Hindu castes, traditional supporters of the Congress, began deserting it in the 1980s. Their honeymoon with the BJP, too, began tapering off during the 1990s. The emergence of backward caste leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati over the last 30 years saw these lower segments of society become a formidable political force against the Congress and the BJP.
Since 1989, no party has won absolute majority in seven general elections. Instead, backward caste and Dalit leaders have forced coalition politics on the socalled national parties, the Congress and the BJP. There seems no formula in sight for the upper caste leadership of the Congress and the BJP to contain and possibly reverse the charge of the backward caste political parties. Because women’s struggles are yet to fully emerge among the backward castes as a social movement, it is plain obvious that in an open contest on seats reserved for general women, there won’t be enough backward caste women to take on the upper caste women. This is how the BJP and the Congress hope to increase their numbers in the Parliament at the next elections.
Of course, there’s the worrying issue of declining merit in Parliament, which has become a rubber stamp to approve any government policy, because the antidefection law forces MPs to toe the party line. In the absence of genuine grassroots women leaders, a large number of them elected in the reserved quota will have little connect with the masses and may well make Parliament even more a body of yes-men and yes-women, than a true representative of 1.1 billion people.

ajit@tehelka.com

A Grain In My Empty Bowl

By
Ajit Sahi
-

A crusader for justice is silenced. Actually not, says Ajit Sahi

SHAHID AZMI
1977 – 2010
The Home Ministry, Intelligence Bureau, RAW and police all stand to gain from Azmi’s killing

HAD SHAHID Azmi been gunned down in Russia, China or Iran, his news would have been all over The New York Times the next morning. Working on the principle that the enemy’s enemy is a friend, the western media offer spectacular support to internal dissent against regimes that appear in eternal conflict with western governments and businesses. But Azmi lived and was assassinated in India, fighting the brutal police State that the Indian democracy has become in its dubious war against terrorism. Because the Indian State is hand-in-glove with the western powers, and because India’s dominant middle classes solidly back that relationship, the western or Indian media are unlikely to hail Azmi, who was killed in Mumbai on February 11, as a martyr to the cause of bringing justice to hundreds of the poor, mostly Muslims, falsely accused of terrorism.
But martyr Azmi is, no less than Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights activist who had already become a western icon for her courageous campaign against Vladimir Putin himself when she was shot dead at her Moscow apartment three years ago. Indeed, Russian, Chinese and Iranian dissidents take much heart from the western might backing them. Azmi’s campaign was, therefore, more courageous, for his work was doubly tainted as he defended “terrorists” allegedly once removed from anti-US terror groups, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
We need to directly ask just who benefits from Azmi’s killing. The answer is a Who’s Who of Indian security: the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, RAW and the Intelligence Bureau, whose grand constructs on terrorism Azmi demolished each time he won a case. Maharashtra Police despised Azmi, for he represented, mostly successfully, many accused in a string of blast cases. Azmi had been preparing for the defence of dozens arrested since 2008 as members of Indian Mujahideen, which has been linked with last Saturday’s blast in Pune that killed 10 people. Azmi was also actively involved in organising legal defence for many arrested in Gujarat on charges of masterminding and carrying out terror attacks.
Last July, Azmi made enemies at Mumbai’s Central Prison winning a historic ruling from the Bombay High Court against jail warders who had assaulted several terror accused. “I grew up seeing the police barge in night and day in our slum, terrorising and kidnapping people,” Azmi told me on December 11 as we sat chatting after office hours, he on his chair, where he was shot dead exactly two months later. “It bred in me a hatred — nafrat — for the police.”
I first met Azmi in July 2008 while researching a story on the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the shadowy outfit blamed for many terror acts. After stonewalling for days, Azmi allowed me an hour’s cab ride with him to the courts downtown. Eventually, he would provide me with facts that comprehensively nailed the fraudulence of the police in framing innocent Muslim men. The state has never challenged my SIMI report that TEHELKA published a month later.
It was Azmi who pressed me to probe the abuse of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), an exposé that my colleague, Rana Ayyub, and I published in TEHELKA last month. I was to return to Azmi this month to work on three cases of 2006, including the train blasts in Mumbai that killed 187 people and the blasts in Malegaon in which 37 people died. Nearly all the accused whom he represented are held on false or forced confessions and zero evidence. Azmi had launched a challenge in the Supreme Court to MCOCA, under which these cases are being tried, claiming that the law is illegal as only Parliament can write anti-terror laws. That judgement is now awaited.
By any account, Azmi led an incredible life: he was only 32 when he was killed. The third of five brothers, Azmi’s life turned the day sword-wielding Hindu fanatics rushed at him as he walked home from school just days after mobs razed the disputed Babri mosque in Uttar Pradesh in 1992. A Hindu neighbour saved him. “Shahid was never the same again,” his oldest brother, Arif, said as I sat with him last week at Azmi’s house a block away from his office. One day, at age 16, Azmi upped and left, ending up first in the Kashmir valley, and then across the border, with a gun on his shoulder. But he soon came back, disillusioned with the insurgency.

The Home Ministry, Intelligence Bureau, RAW and police all stand to gain from Azmi’s killing

NONETHELESS, POLICE arrested him from home in 1994 for conspiring to kill India’s top politicians. The only evidence was a confession he never made. Yet, he was given five years. While at New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, Azmi enrolled for graduation and began writing legal documents for other inmates. Freed in 2001, he came home and joined journalism and law schools. Three years later, he quit a paying sub-editor’s job to join defence lawyer Majeed Memon as a junior at Rs 2,000 a month. “I want to work for the poor,” Azmi told his brother, Arif. It was widely known that Azmi wouldn’t charge any fees from a majority of his clients.
But his past never left him. Some years ago, in a heated moment, Azmi argued in court that even Lord Ram had waged violence to secure justice. The media screamed blue murder. A police case was launched. The judge called in Azmi for a chat. “But it’s true,” Azmi said when the judge cautioned that there were rumours he had been convicted for terrorism. “I wear that conviction as a badge of honour.” The judge told the police he never heard Azmi speak of Lord Ram. The case collapsed. On Monday this week, another judge wept in court. People stood around in silence. Outside that court, Azmi’s long-time lawyer-partner, Saba Qureshi, hung out listless, trying to talk to clients, some beyond grief. “I see him everywhere,” she said, looking out from the balcony. “What will I do?”
But I know what I will do and what Saba should, too. I had just arrived in Chennai on February 11 when I heard that Shahidbhai,as I had come to call him, was dead. Alone in my hotel room, I broke down and wept. My mind went back to the killing in 1991 of Shankar Guha Niyogi, the trade union legend who had organised the tribals in Chhattisgarh and who I had met days before he was shot dead. In the last 18 months, Shahid had come to signify for me a revival of purpose in my life I had rendered barren with years of aimless journalism. That I was hanging out with Shahid meant I was finally moving on my mandate to align with the struggles for justice and empowerment.
My tears ran dry as I roamed the windswept streets of Chennai that night thinking of Shahid. Then Ataur Rahman, the ageing father of two of the accused in the 2006 train blast case, called me from Mumbai. “Ajitsaheb,” Rahman whispered, his voice rock bottom with resignation. “What will happen to us now?” I told him, and I have been telling everyone: Shahid isn’t dead and will never be. I, for one, am far more determined to pursue the path he has shown. Just what bullet can take away the invaluable lesson in courage he has taught me?

WRITER’S EMAIL
ajit@tehelka.com

How to break the circuit

By
Aastha Atray Banan
-

Arshad Warsi could have been just another dancer. Aastha Atray Banan tells the story of Bollywood’s newest pin-up

Self-portrait Arshad Warsi photographs himself as Ishqiya’s brash and sexy thug, Babban
Self-portrait Arshad Warsi photographs himself as Ishqiya’s brash and sexy thug, Babban

IN AN INDUSTRY that prefers to keep its actors separate from its stars, the rise of Arshad Warsi provides a rare glimmer of hope. But Warsi hasn’t been standing comfortably atop Bollywood’s ladder of success for too long. While his actorly talents have been in no doubt since his debut in the charming prince-and-pauper tale Tere Mere Sapne (1996), it’s taken the decidedly unchocolatey Warsi a long time to become a bankable name at the box office.
From not being able to afford an auto from Juhu to Andheri in 1992 to becoming the nation’s best-beloved goon — Circuit in the Munnabhai films (2003, 2006) — and now the roughhewn, rough-tongued, yet indefinably sexy Babban in Ishqiya, Arshad Warsi’s journey hasn’t been a smooth one. But the 41- year-old Warsi wouldn’t have had it any other way. “My father, originally a musician in Lahore, was a mess at business matters. I came back from boarding school in Deolali at 17 and realised I had to work to get by.”
He went from door to door selling cosmetics and worked in a photo developing lab. “I remember standing on the road, eating a vada pav and thinking, ‘life has to get better than this.’” So when he was offered Rs 1,000 to dance as part of Akbar Sami’s troupe, he grabbed the chance. Dance proved to be the stepping stone he’d been waiting for. In 1991, he won the Indian dance championship. “I got a Yamaha bike as a prize. My life was riding from Juhu to Churchgate every day, choreography, and dancing,” remembers Warsi. He went on to win fourth place in the modern jazz category at the 1992 world dance championships in London. Back in Mumbai, he started a dance studio called Awesome, assisted director Mahesh Bhatt and choreographed shows for Bharat Dabholkar and the title song for Boney Kapoor’s Roop Ki Rani, Choron Ka Raja (1993).
That life could have become routine. But as Warsi says, God had other plans. Joy Augustine, who directed Tere Mere Sapne,met him at a party and urged him to send his pictures to producers ABCL. “I dressed up as a taxi driver and posed next to a taxi. I got a call from Jaya Bachchan’s office, but didn’t want to act because I was scared of failure,” he says. “Jayaji told me later she chose me because in each picture, I had a different expression”. Once he took the role, though, he let it rip. “I gave myself a crash course in acting during that movie. And it worked. I realised I was a natural. I took to acting like a fish to water.” A sleeper hit, Tere Mere put Warsi on the fast-track. Today he regrets signing one movie after another. “I didn’t have a clue how the industry worked. I let my manager decide what films I would do. Somehow, things just went downhill too soon.” He knew he had hit rock-bottom when he started getting calls urging him to return signing amounts. So began the struggle all over again. “Thank God Maria was a popular VJ,” says Arshad of his wife of 10 years. Maria Goretti, a St Andrews College student who fell for Arshad when she joined his dance troupe, kept the household afloat till directors Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Rajkumar Hirani came calling. Though first considered for the role of Munna, he was eventually offered the role of Circuit. “I had watched Arshad in Tere Mere Sapne. I knew he could do this,” says Hirani. But like the other actors who had refused the role, Warsi wasn’t sure he wanted to play sidekick. He was going to reject the offer when a tarot card reader friend advised him to take the role. He relented. And Munnabhai MBBS became an unimaginable hit. “Hrithik sent me flowers, Mr Bachchan called. Everyone loved me. I didn’t know what was happening.”
The sequel, Lage Raho Munnabhai, together with Shashanka Ghosh’s zany Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II (2003) and Kabir Kaushik’s critically-acclaimed Sehar (2005), helped establish Warsi as one of the finest actors around. In Sehar, even as he reprised a role done to death in Hindi cinema — the honest police officer in a system rotten to the core — Warsi displayed a quiet intensity. The regrettably under-watched Waisa Bhi gave a glimpse of Warsi’s talent for nuanced black comedy. But the public perception of him remained dominated by Munnabhai and the moneymaking slapstick capers that followed: Golmaal(2006), Dhamaal (2007), Krazzy 4 (2008). “I was getting slotted as a comic actor. I think Ishqiya has changed that perception,” he says, relaxing at his Versova home as he twirls the moustache that makes his Babban, a goon with an overactive sex drive, so drool-worthy.

‘I was scared of failing as an actor. But I Realised I was a natural. I took to acting like a fish to water’

NASEERUDDIN SHAH and Vidya Balan, his co-stars in Abhishek Chaubey’s deep dark desi western, Ishqiya, are full of praise. “He is easily the best all-round actor in this generation. Only a very special kind of actor can be as generously giving towards co-stars,” says Shah. “He is so subtle, yet so effective. He reminds me of the great European actors who can fit into any role. But he is completely under-utilised,” says Balan, who shares a steamy kiss with Warsi in Ishqiya. Chaubey, too, had full faith in Warsi’s method. “Once you explain the character, he just takes it from there. He has no hang-ups, no ego. He’s a mature man.”
Surrounded by his wife and two beautiful children, Warsi looks content, yet aching to climb more mountains. “You haven’t seen the best of Arshad yet,” says Maria, looking over at her husband fondly as he kisses their son goodnight. But despite the accolades, and his first production, Hum, Tum Aur Ghost, releasing in March, Warsi still feels like an outsider in the film fraternity: “I don’t have that greed for success. I’m just making sure my children don’t have to struggle like me.” He understands the neuroses of success, having had to prise it from a reluctant world: he bargains to be on magazine covers, for the way he is shot, to make sure he stays in the black. Someone once said, careers, like rockets, don’t always take off on schedule. The key is to keep working the engines. Arshad Warsi has certainly got that down pat.

WRITER’S EMAIL
aastha@tehelka.com

Electronic high

By
Aastha Atray Banan
-

Considered ‘too niche’ only five years ago, a new genre is rocking the Indian party scene, finds Aastha Atray Banan

Turntable fever
Turntable fever
DJs Nikhil Chinappa and Pearl are the first couple of electronic music

ON THE LAST day of Sunburn Festival 2009, as the No 1 electronic DJ in the world, Dutch-born Armin Van Buuren, took to the colossal stage, 15,000 electronic fans couldn’t believe their luck. It was surreal — a beach on Goa was transformed into a psychedelic club embellished with tentacles and other deep sea-like creatures, where bikini-clad girls with neon antennas in their hair danced with men with super-sized spectacles, as they glugged beer and watched the sun set over a seemingly never-ending party. This moment was one of victory for the lovers of a festival celebrating music once considered “too niche”.
VJ and DJ Nikhil Chinappa, the man responsible for roping in Van Buuren, in partnership with PDM Entertainment, says, “The more people get bored of Bollywood music, they get drawn to genres like electronic. Also, international DJS want to come to India, especially because the electronic scene in Europe is stagnant — in India, it’s just beginning.”
Electronic music, which is produced using computer workstations and makes use of synthesizers and unique music samples, entered India almost a decade ago, but went underground because of its inability to appeal to the masses. Now, even though the Internet is its only source, festivals like Sunburn and platforms like Submerge (that promotes electronic music through gigs in the country), seem to be spelling out a music revolution.
“We remember being at a festival in Ibiza and dreaming about doing something similar in India,” say Nikhil and his wife and co-founder of Submerge, DJ Pearl. “But India has its obstacles. The 1-am deadline really hurts the clubbing scene,” says Pearl, the only female electronic DJ in India.
Despite these hurdles, as Time Out’s music writer Amit Gurbaxani points out, it has become economically viable to host electronic nights. “Sunburn saw a 10-fold increase in crowd, while a rock festival like Eastwind got cancelled this year, because of lack of funds. When a brand of music is backed by big sponsors, it’s just so much easier to draw in people.”

‘At electronic gigs you need to forget a real world exists,’ says DJ Pearl

But that’s not all that is needed, says Pearl, “A good DJ should be passionate and should work the crowd.” And if the junta loves it, Bollywood can’t be far behind. Tapan Raj from the Midival Punditz, who is now composing the background score for Karthik Calling Karthik, says, “There are filmmakers who want to experiment, and an audience that wants something different. Change has begun.”
That being said, what the electronic scene now needs are only the “freaks”, laughs Pearl. “An electronic festival or gig needs the weirdos to up the excitement factor. When you are there, you need to forget that a real world exists. Isn’t that the reason we all got into this?” Amen.

WRITER’S EMAIL
aastha@tehelka.com

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