Lootera (लूटेरा) my 1 min review

First things first. Sonakshi Sinha is beautiful, and in this film, has delivered a performance that marks her out as the best actress among her contemporaries. Ranveer Singh is suave and brooding by turns. The film itself has charms that are rare in today’s Hindi cinema. It harks back to a world of grace that is no more. There is quietness and slowness, restraint and melody. It is lovely to watch.

And yet, I left the theatre disappointed. 

The words ‘film industry’ speak of the conjunction of two very different worlds: film, which is art, and industry, which is technology and business. Most of the big new releases these days get the industry bit right. The parts are all manufactured to high quality and precision; the locations are perfect, the sets are excellent, the cinematography is just right, and the sound is appropriate, at the least.  

But you can’t manufacture soul in any factory. And that’s where film after film falters or fails.

Lootera tried to borrow its soul from one of the greatest short stories of all time, a little gem by O’Henry. This was grafted onto another story, about the lonely daughter of a Bengali zamindar in the 1950s. That is a world whose cadences were captured masterfully by Satyajit Ray in films like Jalsaghar and Charulata. 

Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap have managed to bring back some of those cadences into Lootera. They have managed to infuse the perfect body of their film with some borrowed soul. For this, I am more than happy: I am grateful. My disappointment is about the failure of imagination that drives Bollywood’s best talents to go about their business like the Thieving Magpie - also the name of an opera by Rossini whose music has been used in Lootera - to build their films.

Thane building collapse, and what's killing us

The problem of illegal constructions in Thane came to the notice of the Maharashtra government in the early 1990s. They did what all good governments do every time there is a problem: they set up a committee. The committee, under an IAS officer named Nand Lal, studied the problem, and submitted its report of 230 pages in December 1997. It mentioned percentages of cuts taken by politicians and municipal officials in Thane (37.5 per cent), names of 54 corporators and 36 civic officials involved, and indicted the then chief of the Thane Municipal Corporation, JP Dange - who was subsequently promoted to Chief Secretary. Speaking to my colleague Anand Mishra of The Asian Age after the recent collapse of a building that killed 74, Nand Lal rued that “no heed was paid” to his report.

It was ritually accepted, but is still gathering dust, more than 15 years after it was submitted.

This is the story of report after report of committee after committee. Every time something happens, a committee is formed, and the matter is buried. The report of the committee is rarely acted upon, and often kept secret.

Even the most high profile of cases get buried in this manner. Sometimes, crucial but politically inconvenient recommendations are neglected, as happened in the case of the Justice Verma committee report that was filed after the Delhi gangrape.

Even the police is a victim of this. Commission after commission has been set up on the subject of police reforms for decades, but no report has ever been implemented.

The Srikrishna committee report that was filed after the Mumbai riots of 1992/93 has been gathering dust for 15 years. The report of the Justice Reddy committee on Armed Forces Special Powers Act has been gathering dust since 2005. And so on.

It is not necessary that every report of every committee must be implemented in full, but every report of every committee should be placed in the public domain upon completion, and brought before Assembly or Parliament for open debate. Otherwise, the purpose of setting up the committee is negated and its efforts are wasted. 

An approach that focuses on the greater common good, rather than partisan considerations, is required of ordinary citizens.

At present, the nexus between corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and policemen has gamed the system completely, to the eventual detriment of all. Everyone is looking for his own little 'fayda', but the big picture is horrific. We are creating a gigantic mess.

A look at the Thane building collapse again shows this. It is a very small example, but the characters arrested all represent the usual stalwarts of our criminal society: one politician, one policeman, a couple of government officials, and a couple of crooked businessmen.

Those fellows got 74 people killed in just this one building, but actually, every city is full of people like that, and perhaps, buildings like that.

The Sanjay Dutt case

Looking at the debate over whether Sanjay Dutt should be pardoned or not, it becomes clear that the argument is taking place entirely because of who he is, not what he did. Had he not been the famous man he is, there would have been far, far fewer people speaking for him - or against. His case is being treated a certain way because he is famous.
So, let's accept that. And what result is it having? Well, on one hand you're hearing that he should be pardoned because he has been reformed. On the other, you're hearing that he should face the punishment meted out by the Supreme Court, because there should be no special treatment for the rich or famous.
I agree that there should be no special treatment for anyone regardless of fame. By that yardstick, he should not also be targeted because he is famous.
Let's for a moment forget his name, and see his story.

Dutt's story

A young man, growing up, encounters money, fame, and the loss of his mother to cancer. His father is a busy man. He himself is a troubled youth and takes to drugs. He becomes a drug addict and is sent for rehabilitation. He manages to clean himself up, and get married. He is turning his life around when his wife dies of a brain tumor. He is again shattered.
He tries to pick himself up and get back to work, but his money and fame bring him into bad company. Around this time, a mosque is demolished in a town in Uttar Pradesh, and riots start in Mumbai too. The initial fury of the Muslim community sees youth from that community in the role of aggressors. Then the reaction to the reaction starts, and with Balasaheb Thackeray and the Shiv Sena calling the political shots in Mumbai, it becomes a bloodbath.
Before these riots, Mumbai's famous underworld was largely secular. The big don of the day, Dawood Ibrahim, worked with his two lieutenants Chhota Rajan and Chhota Shakeel. He lived in Dubai, hobnobbed with visiting starlets and stars, and made the odd appearance at a cricket match in Sharjah.
The riots changed that. Legend has it that a box of bangles was sent to him at his Dubai house as an insult, because he had failed to protect his people during the riots, or avenge them after.
The revenge came in the form of the horrific 1993 bomb blasts. That was the start of Islamist terrorism in mainland India.
Sanjay Dutt is said to have met several of Mumbai's 'bhais' in Dubai during the shooting of a film. He is accused of allowing his house to be used for unloading weapons including the AK series rifle that eventually got him into trouble.
Eventually the only charge against him that was proved was under the Arms Act, for keeping that one rifle in his possession.

Equal justice?

Well, would anyone in this country have any idea of the number of 'kattas' and unlicensed weapons? Every villager in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh has one. They should all be in jail. The law does nothing about them, because they are not famous.
Does anyone in this country have any idea of the number of assault rifles circulating around this country? Nope. Every insurgent group in the Northeast and Kashmir has them, the Maoists have them. When one of those guys surrenders, the Indian government gives them a shawl around the neck, a cash stipend, free board and lodging, and withdraws all cases except the most serious ones like murder and rape. They are not charged under the Arms Act.
So, let's say our man was a bad guy, a khalnayak. He clearly stopped being one long ago. He went to jail, spent a year and a half there, and was released after none other than Bal Thackeray wrote a letter to the Supreme Court on his behalf. After his release from jail, Sanjay went straight to Thackeray's house and took his blessings.
He started his career again, got married, had children, and was leading a completely normal life within the law until this judgment.
If the aim of justice was reformation, it had already been achieved. So, why should the man be sent to jail once more? He is already reformed.
Just because the Supreme Court has said it doesn't mean the calls for mercy are wrong. After all, the system of reviews and pardons is there for a reason, and it is a former judge of the Supreme Court who is speaking of them.
Every case should be treated on merit. To react to everything the same way is the logic of 'andher nagri, chaupat raja, takey ser bhaji, takey ser bhaja'. If a case under the Arms Act has a man who was misled in his youth and is now reformed, it cannot be treated like every other case under Arms Act. The particular circumstances and qualities of the individual and his life must be taken into account - without regard to his fame or wealth.
Don't punish him just because he's famous.

The problem in Northeast India that everyone knows, no one wants to talk about

This piece was written as an editorial for The Thumb Print, a web magazine on Northeast India, in October 2012. It was published in the November edition of the magazine. I am posting it now because I was reminded of it by the arrest of Nagaland Home Minister Imkong Imchen with Rs 1 crore in cash, guns, ammunition, and liquor, during election campaigning in the state


Stories of corruption among the high and mighty have shaken India in recent weeks. Even the first family of India, the Gandhis, have not been spared, for once. However no news of that size and shape has emerged from the Northeast. If anyone is saying anything on this it has certainly not made a splash. It seems as though the only honest politicians and bureaucrats left in the country are in the pristine seven sister states.
What a joke.
It is popularly believed by all and sundry that pretty much the entire government machinery in every state is corrupt. There is bribery from the clerk to the minister level. In the past, when insurgency was at its peak, several ministers in the region were also reputed to be profiting from the extortion rackets run by militant groups. An investigation by the National Investigation Agency in Assam even proved complicity between senior officials and insurgents.
Thousands of crores of rupees in development funds disappear into the ever open jaws of the state governments, which do little to justify their existence. The bureaucracies are bloated and there are seemingly three people for every task, but none of the tasks get done efficiently. Ministers whiz around in cars with red lights on top and bodyguards in tow, acting important. When they are not doing this they presumably occupy themselves by doing destructive politics and trying to pull each other down. Or fixing crooked deals.
There is no outcry about this because everyone is part of the system. The contractors are of course profiting from it. The insurgent groups, who are often linked to contractors, also get their cuts. They take the money and thereby join the corrupt system.
The bureaucrats, politicians, even security force personnel, from every state capital all the way to Delhi are already part of the system.
The local media is in many cases owned by political interests, or dependent on them for advertisements and favours. They play along.
Even local NGOs often get funding from the system. They are also compromised.
The local youths are largely in the pay of one or another of these interests. If they are not, they have no power and no voice.
So, no one says everything out loud, though everyone knows what is happening. Sometimes, rarely, some proof emerges in public.
The Indian government doesn’t really need to bother about the money because most of it finds its way back into the Indian economy. In any case, Indian politicians are stealing thousands of crores from the public themselves, so it’s no difference to them.
The Northeastern public mostly don’t pay tax so they don’t care either. It’s not their money. Yes, so they were supposed to get roads, bridges, schools, healthcare facilities and so on that never see light of day, but they are trained to believe whatever the neta of their ethnic group or tribe says.
The neta, like the insurgent, always says only one thing: “It is Delhi’s fault”.
If everything is Delhi’s fault, and the state governments are merely decorative,  then they are a pointless drain on the economy. It would be far better and more productive to downsize them drastically and give the funds straight to people’s banks in cash. It would still be money for nothing, which everyone loves, and it would be more honest and direct. Why this charade of running offices for the benefit of local people?
And don’t let it be said that it is outsiders who are to blame for all this. The outsider may have had some portion of the blame. But for years now it has been the local elites who are cheating their own people. It is the local elites who control governments and hold power. They’ve cried wolf about outsiders for decades but they are the biggest wolves in their own areas. They just dress in local sheep clothing.
The region’s backwardness is not the fault of Bangladeshi rickshawallahs or Bihari chana wallahs, or even of Bengali clerks and schoolteachers. The blame for that lies squarely with the region’s rich and powerful leaders, including insurgents. They have had great power for decades. What of the responsibility that came with it? Have they fulfilled their responsibilities?
The fact that a good chief minister can transform a state is being proved by Nitish Kumar in Bihar. Why has no CM in the Northeast done anything constructive?
If the Northeast, or any part of India or South Asia for that matter, is to progress, it HAS to sort out the issues that plague development.
As long as the wealth of the people is being looted by a corrupt elite (who divert attention by pointing to outsiders) the people will remain poor. They must understand that it is in their interest to have clean systems that work work efficiently. It will lead to development for all.
The people must also be wary of obscurantist forces that impede development out of fear, just as they must be wary of capitalist forces that try to loot the region’s natural wealth.
The world is racing ahead, with or without Northeast India. Even Myanmar, after all these years of being closed and backward, has started to race ahead now.
The choice is simple. Join the race, or join the list of places that no one cares about until guns or bombs go off and people die. Think Afghanistan. Living in such places is hell on earth.
Respect has to be earned. It cannot be gotten by beating up weak or poor people, or permanently going around with a begging bowl asking for money. There is no glory in that. If the Northeastern economy prospers, if there are fine institutions and great infrastructure in addition to its stupendous natural beauty and rich cultural mosaic, people will actually give Northeasterners respect. Now all they give it is a mix of curiosity and sympathy at best, and active denigration at worst. The only real respect for the region at present is for its musical and sporting talent, which are the only positive things to have come out of there in years.
If you are a person who cares about your region, the first thing you need to do is look at it honestly. Don’t let false pride or insecurity prevent you from admitting the truths you know in your hearts to be true. No illness can be cured if the patient denies that he needs medicine.
Our systems are sick. They need fixing.

Why I am upset by Afzal Guru's hanging

An old college friend, perhaps surprised by my reaction against the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, asked me why I am adopting this position even though I have borne the brunt of militancy in Northeast India. My answer to him was that I am adopting this position precisely because I grew up as a ‘mainlander’ in Northeast India. I know both sides of this situation more closely than most people, who are only acquainted with one side or the other.
The situation in Kashmir is different from the Northeast, for a number of reasons. However there are certain things that are common to both. Both places have seen long spells of insurgency and protests against the Indian state, and the brutal response of the state in return. Both have areas under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the presence of army and paramilitary forces to ensure security.
In both places, the multitudes of security agencies based there over decades have failed to ensure security for anyone including themselves. The fact of the matter is that militants, spies and security men all operate in the same spaces, without any one of them displacing the other. In fact, the presence of one actually ensures the presence of the other. If there were no militants, there would be no deployment of security forces, right? But if there were 20 militants, and 2000 security force men from somewhere else got deployed, and then they raped a few local women, beat up a few random men, and generally made themselves unpopular, you would probably see MORE militants, and then more security forces, and then still more militants, and then still more security forces...
The worst sufferers are the common people of the place.
This is roughly what has happened in various parts of India. Everywhere that central forces have been used to try and crush militants, the number of militant groups have grown year on year. From one or two groups in Kashmir and Manipur, now there are 10 or 20 at least. The pehelwans of the security forces, who are trained to think in terms of violence alone, have kept increasing the levels of violence in conflict areas from the start until they reach a point where they realise it is all one huge mess. This is because, in an attempt to create confusion, the Indian intelligence agencies start to prop up their own militants as counters to the actual militants, until no one knows who is working for whom and it all gets very confusing.
Everyone in that bizarre matrix who is not protected by a militant group or an agency of the state becomes a potential target for extortion or exploitation.
Humongous amounts of money are made by some people among both security forces and militants. A war economy comes into being in which everyone with any real power (which in such areas flows out of the barrels of guns) becomes a stakeholder.
The average constable or militant has a really miserable and hard life, and is usually honest to their respective causes. They are expendable pawns in much, much bigger games.

Who is a militant?

This is just a very sketchy outline of the approximate situation in the conflict zones of Kashmir and Northeast India. It was necessary as background to start answering the question on Guru.
There is no doubt that he had at some time in his life been a militant. What does the word ‘militant’ mean? It can mean “engaged in warfare or combat” or “aggressively active for a cause”. While the first meaning, of engaging in combat, is illegal, the second one is not. It is possible to be a militant feminist or environmentalist, for example; both would be considered not only legal but even socially laudable. Similarly, it is possible to hold strong political views that may not accord with those of policemen, and still stay on the right side of the law.
Guru was a militant alright, but his period of engaging in warfare was very brief. There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a lot of Kashmiri youths took up arms to fight for freedom from India. Guru, who wanted to become a doctor and had just got admission to an MBBS course, was among those who were swayed by the prevailing air of rebellion.
Such things have happened elsewhere in India at other times. Our country has seen a rebellion in Punjab, at least 15 such movements across various states in the Northeast, a Naxal uprising in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, occasional rumblings in Tamil Nadu, and an ongoing Maoist and tribal rebellion against the state through a vast swathe of India from the Nepal border down to Karnataka. In fact, if you take a map of India and colour out the bits that have one form of rebellion or other going on against the state, you’ll realise that the only bits of India you can safely leave out are the big cities. Everywhere else in this country, there are multitudes of people who are seriously pissed off with the state for one good reason or another.
In the cities, you don’t have insurgency, but the people who are not part of “India Shining” are often lured into crime or political violence. Go meet the cadre of any political party. They are not investment bankers and engineers. They are more likely to be vada pav sellers or auto wallahs.
The search for power is therefore common to people everywhere. Nor is the mere fact that someone or some group is protesting against the state unusual. A country as ‘multinational’ as India has to deal with it as a matter of course. 

The trouble with Kashmir

In my humble opinion, India has dealt with it very badly when it comes to Kashmir. The situation of Kashmir is complicated by its history and geography. It was a Muslim majority state with a Hindu king who wanted independence from both India and Pakistan when the British left. So the genesis of the ‘azaadi’ movement in Kashmir starts in significant measure with Maharaja Hari Singh’s reluctance to join India. His reluctance was shared by his bitter opponent Sheikh Abdullah, who was the popular people’s leader among the Muslims of the the Kashmir Valley. The Sheikh had launched a Quit Kashmir movement in 1946 that was opposed to the unpopular king and also called for the abrogation of the treaty by which Kashmir had become part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The valley of Kashmir had fallen to the rule of the Dogra kings after the Sikh empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh collapsed and his satraps became independent. The Dogra raja, who stayed on the right side of the British by keeping out of their wars with the Sikhs, struck a deal with the British after they defeated the Sikhs. He bought Kashmir from them for Rs 75 lakh. Kashmiris ask whether he bought all of them and their descendants too.
Further examination of this complicated history will get in the way of taking the story forward, so I will leave it at that. I am not writing a history book here; I am merely trying to make a few quick points en route to the present topic, which is Afzal Guru.
The Maharaja was forced to join India by the action of Pakistan, which sent in raiders to take Kashmir by force in 1947 itself. They would probably have succeeded if the people of Kashmir themselves had not resisted the invaders, who came expecting to be welcomed as liberators.
At the beginning of that first war of 1947, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir officially became part of India, pending a plebiscite which was promised by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at the United Nations. That promise has never been kept. The Pakistani forces had taken about half of the state of J&K before they were halted. They did not withdraw their forces, and neither did India, and both kept saying “pehle aap, pehle aap”, so neither side withdrew.
That is where matters have stood since then. India and Pakistan have stayed their ground through two wars and many skirmishes. The Kashmiris have been rumbling on about the promised plebiscite. The people of Jammu and Ladakh, who differ from the Kashmiris in ethnicity and religion, have thrown in their lot with India.
Despite all this, life in Kashmir went on quite peacefully for years after 1947, through all the wars with Pakistan, in each of which the Kashmiris largely remained true to India. They had a sense of their distinct history and identity, which was as Kashmiris. They were not looking to become Pakistanis. And so, writers including the very perceptive and caustic Sir VS Naipaul went and stayed in Kashmir, and wrote a book largely set there, without mentioning any militancy. Movie after movie was shot there by Bollywood stars. The tourists flocked. Life went on.
Things took a sudden and drastic turn for the worse only after 1984. That year, Maqbool Bhat, a founder of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, was hanged in Tihar jail. The JKLF itself had little presence in Kashmir at that point. It had been founded in Birmingham in England, and the murder of an Indian official for which Bhat was hanged had taken place in England.
In 1987 a state election was held. The National Conference and Congress parties which were in power faced rising unpopularity. Kashmiris allege that the elections were rigged, a charge that has been made by writers on all sides of the political divide. Those elections were the turning point. Till there, perhaps, matters could have been controlled.
One politician who stood for election to the legislative assembly and came second decided to chuck democracy and pick up the gun instead. His name is Syed Salahuddin, and he joined the Hizbul Mujahideen. Another young man, Yasin Malik, who had been radicalised by Bhat's execution, started the local units of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. Entire political parties with their cadres and supporters left the democratic process in disgust after the 1987 elections. Militancy in full earnest started by 1989.
Many idealistic young men joined the fight against what they perceived, with some cause, as an unjust Indian government. They were convinced that the only way to get justice was through violence. The Indian government threw in the army and the killing started on both sides.
Afzal Guru was among many who joined, and later, surrendered. They became disillusioned with militancy and tried to return to the mainstream. Some of them were able to do so, but some of them were denied a second chance in life. Guru has consistently maintained that he was in the latter category. The police never stopped harassing him and extorting money from him, he claimed. He wanted to live a normal life but was denied the chance.


The truth about Guru

Is this true? Well, only his immediate family and the policemen involved can tell for sure. But it is a fact that there is rampant corruption in our police forces. It is also true that police routinely pick up the ‘usual suspects’ for any crime, whatever the crime. It is also true that many a time, police wrongly fix someone in a case for their own reasons, which can range from media and political pressure to personal scores. The rate of convictions in Maharashtra, for example, is below 10 per cent, meaning 90 per cent of those in jail are eventually found innocent by courts.
So if Guru was suspect, the police isn’t squeaky clean either.
They picked him up within three days of the Parliament attack. The men who investigated the case were from Delhi Police’s Special Cell. They were ACP Rajbir Singh, a famous ‘encounter cop’, and his colleague Mohan Chand Sharma.
How many of those encounters were real has been moot for years now. There was an infamous one in Ansal Plaza in Delhi, for example. If you Google that you can find for yourself that it was dodgy, to say the least.
Rajbir died in March 2008 after he was shot with his own service revolver by a real estate agent in Gurgaon with whom he had some shady ‘business dealings’. By then, he was said to be an alcoholic, and quite unhinged.
Sharma died after the Batla House encounter. He was killed in a shootout with terrorists, but there were questions after a photo of him walking out of the encounter surfaced. He was clearly wounded but also conscious and walking with support from two men.
Guru has now been hanged.
With his hanging, one chapter is closed, but a darker one may now be opening. His involvement with the attack on Parliament is not in dispute. However he was not among the actual attackers. He was charged with helping the actual attackers find a house in Delhi. He also helped them buy other things such as clothes and a bike.
The police said he did it on orders from a Jaish terrorist nicknamed Ghazi Baba. Guru claimed he did it on orders from a man named Davinder Singh from Kashmir Police’s special cell. Ghazi Baba was killed in an encounter with BSF in Srinagar 2 years after the Parliament attack, in 2003. The operation was lauded by BSF chief Ajai Raj Sharma, who was Delhi Police chief at the time Parliament was attacked. He had taken charge as BSF chief in 2002.
Here one may pause to wonder what the Border Security Force was doing in Srinagar, which is not on the border. However all manner of forces get deployed in counterinsurgency operations in places like Kashmir, so let that pass.
Anyhow, after Guru’s arrest, two other men, SAR Geelani and Shaukat Hussain, were also arrested and charged with the conspiracy to attack Parliament. The trial court sentenced them to death. Their death sentences were overturned by the higher judiciary, which found no merit in the case against Geelani. He got out of prison, and was shot at by an unidentified gunman. He took three bullets but survived.
Guru was sentenced to hang purely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. 

Why I opposed Guru’s hanging

This finally brings me to why I am upset about this hanging. The Supreme Court passed a judgment, and it has been honoured, but as an individual citizen I continue to have misgivings.
The reasons for my misgivings are as follows. Firstly, I am wary about police versions as I am of militant versions. I know that both sides commit excesses in their fight against each other. They see it as all being fair in war. I disagree with both. I think they often make problems worse with their extremism and their wrongdoings.
The courts pass judgment on the basis of evidence and witnesses. I think that the process can be manipulated by those with influence. Remember a film called Damini that had Sunny Deol playing a lawyer with a “dhai kilo ka haath”? That was about how the court system can be manipulated. It happens in real life too, but there is no Sunny Deol to the rescue.
I don’t question the courts, but I do wonder about whether all the evidence is true or manufactured, and whether all the witnesses are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. These are misgivings I have on most occasions, so I am not making an exception for Guru’s case. On the other hand, people who will freely curse the police and doubt the court system for every other type of case suddenly develop great faith in them when it comes to terror cases. That makes no sense.
Even if the police version is believed in entirety, there remains the question of whether a man should hang for helping some people rent a house and buy a bike. Whether he knew what they were planning to do cannot be proved one way or the other. Those men died in the attack, on the spot, so only Guru himself would know whether they had told him of their plans. In court, he consistently denied he knew, though he had said something else in his police confession.
Given all this, I feel he should have got the benefit of the doubt.
After all, the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, whose guilt is beyond doubt, are still alive for a crime they committed 10 years before the Parliament attack. And in Punjab, the terrorist who killed a serving Chief Minister, Beant Singh, is still alive even though he proudly admits he did it and is refusing to ask for mercy. His date for hanging was fixed at March 31 last year, but he is still not hanged.
So, why the double standards? Why are older cases still held back while a more recent case was dispensed with?
The answer, it would appear, lies in politics. The President is a political appointee, and his decisions are political decisions, not purely legal ones. Tamil Nadu is electorally important to the Congress, and hanging Rajiv Gandhi’s killers would be unpopular with the Tamil extremists who are backed by mainstream politicians including both Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa. So, no can do.
Punjab is a tricky case. The Akali government in the state is openly allowing Sikh militants to regroup and fanning identity politics, but no one dares touch them. The BJP is in alliance with them and conveniently looks the other way.
There were no such compulsions in the case of the Kashmiri, Guru. His state politicians including the Chief Minister Omar Abdullah were against his hanging, but they didn’t even get to know about it until it was a done deal.
Such things can’t and don’t go unnoticed. The reactions from across the political spectrum in Kashmir have been uniformly angry.
The anger is giving a chance to terrorists to fish in troubled waters. Yasin Malik and the JKLF surrendered arms many years ago, in 1994. Now, Hafiz Saeed landed up to share a stage in Islamabad with Malik, in protest against Guru's execution. Saeed, who is a nasty piece of work, has also met Syed Salahuddin and promised revenge.
Meanwhile, President Obama has announced the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The ball is in play there. Expect a Taliban resurgence there. Also expect a lot of jihadis to arrive in Kashmir. That is what happened last time a superpower withdrew from Afghanistan. That was the Soviet Union, in 1988...after which some of the fighters made their way to Kashmir to look for employment. Yes, jihad is also a job.
So what India has very stupidly done is create a situation in Kashmir that is exactly the same as the one that started the whole militancy there in 1989. Back to square one, with a vengeance. Except, this time it is worse in many ways.
Every intelligence officer, politician, academic and journalist who knows anything at all about all of this has therefore condemned the hanging of Afzal Guru. AS Dulat, the former chief of RAW who was Kashmir adviser to AB Vajpayee, is one of them. B Raman, former deputy chief of RAW, is another. Pravin Sawhney, a former army officer who now edits the military journal Force, is a third. Prof Radha Kumar, who was one of the three interlocutors appointed by the government of India for Kashmir, is a fourth. And so on.
The only people convinced the right thing was done are those who are clueless about Kashmir, or politically blinkered, or both.
Until a majority of Indians start to learn a little more about the stories behind the rhetoric, there is no hope of things getting any better, in Kashmir or anywhere else. Things will only get worse.
Until we realise that Kashmir is not a barren piece of land, but a land with real, living, breathing people we will continue to make mistakes in our Kashmir policy. Those mistakes will return to haunt everyone. The Kashmiris will suffer most, but so too will mainland India. The divides will deepen and the worst fears of each side may come to pass.
All this can be prevented. What is required is wisdom and empathy, on all sides.

DAVID: The one minute review

The characters are fascinating, the music is excellent and varied, most scenes are beautifully shot, the actors are variously menacing, or quirky, or charming, as required by their various roles, the actresses are all talented and very beautiful except Isha Sharvani, who is ethereal...it's all good, except that the three strands of the story never become one coherent story. Was that the whole idea, that it SHOULD remain three separate strands? Well, then, I'm afraid that left me feeling rather unsatisfied as a viewer.

As anyone who's ever written a book of fiction can tell you, there is a crucial difference between real life and fiction. Real life can get away with not making sense, not having a neat resolution, not bothering with a nicely paced progression. Fiction mostly can't. 

That's the trouble with David. I went looking for a film with 3 lives, and 3 destinies that I expected would somehow be connected by the one name. I got exactly what was advertised: 3 lives, 3 destinies, one name. And no connection. Well, very little. In that lack of connection between the Davids, the filmmaker lost his connect with me.

Nonetheless, David can be pleasurably watched just for all the things that are right about it, and director Bejoy Nambiar should be complimented for all the things he did right. He also deserves kudos for showing the courage to experiment, in a field where playing safe is the default option. 

Vishwaroopam protesters, irritants without a cause

So I went and heard what Kamal Haasan had to say, and watched his film Vishwaroopam. After watching it, I think the protests against the film were complete rubbish, and entirely unwarranted.

The film is an action thriller on the theme of international terrorism. It is set in New York and the region now known as AfPak, meaning the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.Both the main villain in the movie, played by Rahul Bose, and the hero, played by Kamal Haasan, are shown to be Muslims. This Good Muslim vs Bad Muslim formulation itself is perhaps not very imaginative, but that is the worst that can reasonably be said against it.

As mainstream entertainment cinema, it does what it is supposed to do, which is entertain. There is plenty of action, a bit of song and dance, and a dash of suspense.
It cannot reasonably be considered more offensive than plenty of other films that have been made on the subject of terrorism in recent years, including many that played to packed halls in India. For example, Aamir Khan's Fanaa had him playing a Kashmiri terrorist, which is certainly closer to home than Rahul Bose playing an Afghan terrorist.

We also see similar stories playing out in the daily news with rather alarming frequency, and have, for at least the past 13 years. It's been on TV, there are enough and more clips online, and those who are especially unfortunate have seen some of it live, in places like Mumbai, for example. Those acts have been perpetrated by terrorist groups that operate in the name of Islam. It is known around the world as Islamist terrorism (and if there are terrorist acts by Hindu extremists in the name of Hinduism, it should be called Hindutva terrorism. Denial never changes truths).

As Javed Akhtar pointed out, those fringe elements from the Muslim community who are protesting the film now for showing a certain kind of terrorism in fiction did not come out in protest when there was actual terrorism in the name of Islam in fact. They are accusing Kamal Haasan of projecting Islam in a bad light, but what light do the real actions of Al Qaeda, Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and their ilk project Islam in? People's impressions of Islam have been formed, and ruined, by the actions of those groups, not the cinema of Kamal Haasan.

The kind of people who are protesting now are the ones who give their community a bad name. They should be told to shut up, because they are annoying and silly.

Fast track horror?

It makes me very sad to even think of this. Imagine if there was already fast track courts for rape cases, and the death penalty for rapists. That night when that girl and her friend boarded the bus after watching The Life of Pi, perhaps they would have got home safely, because the men who raped her would have been scared of the consequences of doing what they did.
Or, maybe, they would have done it anyway; it was not a planned act, it was something that started with words, led to blows, and then led to rape. It was a situation that escalated. If they had raped her knowing they could be hanged for it, they wouldn't just throw her and her friend out of the bus. They would be too scared to do so. Instead, they would probably drive them in the bus to some remote spot, and kill them both, and destroy the bodies.
The poor parents and families would then have to go to the police saying they were missing. The police would probably not take it seriously, thinking the couple had eloped. They might register a missing person complaint, at last. The case would languish for years, because there would be no special fast track system for missing person complaints.
It is possible that no one would ever know what happened.

26/11 and the dark side of globalisation

Yesterday, Mumbai commemorated four years of 26/11 with speeches and homilies and the kind of rituals that India is famous for. The security measures we have managed to implement since that day are also largely limited to speeches and rituals. On ground, little has been done to prevent another 26/11.

Mumbai’s ambitious coastal security plans are largely just that, plans. The patrol boats have technical issues, the bulletproof vests are still being purchased, bomb squad vests turned out to be substandard ‘Made in China’ ones, costal police stations still don’t exist.

All this is only to be expected. If a system as a whole is sick it is silly to expect it to suddenly start working perfectly after one kick.

Procurement throughout the government is mired in corruption and controversies. The police force is struggling to deal with modernity and technological change, quite apart from corruption and rampant political interference in transfers and postings. It is understaffed, underpaid, and insufficiently trained.

Instead of making serious efforts to restore basic systems to health, our leaders appear keen to perform some ritual cutting of ribbons that would magically fix everything.

This is emblematic of the Indian mindset.

When corruption is recognized as a problem, a Jan Lokpal Bill starts being touted as a magic bullet. When terrorism is a problem, a new National Counter Terrorism Center becomes the magic cure. For everything, the emphasis is on some shiny new therapy. Meanwhile the body itself continues wasting away.

Reasoned thinking would force one to conclude that basic systems and processes must start to work efficiently before the larger issues can be reliably solved. In a broader context, this would have to happen across South Asia for terror attacks to stop.

Most terror attacks emanate from Pakistan. In that country, the systems are weaker than here. Democracy is fragile, the courts dare not act against terrorists – the rare judges who have passed judgments against terror groups have had to leave the country and go underground – and even journalists are routinely subjected to lethal attacks. 

Indian Right-wing extremists, who see all of Pakistan as one, don’t seem to realise any of this. 

All indications are that the democratic government, large sections of civil society and media, and many traders and businessmen are in favour of better ties with India. It is in the interest of all Indians to extend the hand of friendship to these sections in Pakistan. This reality was recognized by the BJP as much as the Congress. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani both made efforts to reach out to them.

Renewing such efforts will be especially important in the next two years, as US and Nato forces leave Afghanistan, and the situation in the region starts to deteriorate.

It is likely that Afghanistan will return to a state of chaos, with Taliban gaining influence. Everyone knows this and is preparing for it. The security establishments of India and Pakistan will find their interests colliding. The terror groups will find space again, and possibly return to action with renewed vigour.

It is important that India gets its basics right in policing and security before 2014 to prevent murderers like Ajmal Kasab slipping in. At the same time, the country must pursue peace with Pakistan, move towards peace in Kashmir, and stay out of military engagement in Afghanistan. The Americans may want us to get in deeper there, but that is fraught with danger. The Soviet Union failed there; the US and NATO have failed. There is no reason for us to enter that minefield.

All this talk of foreign affairs may seem far away, but it is not. Kasab came here from Karachi because he was motivated to fight for Kashmir. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and ISI are said to have launched the attack with an eye on Afghanistan, because Pakistani forces were being forced by the Americans to fight the Taliban. Another theory says the LeT was losing cadres to the Taliban and wanted to stop staff attrition. An American named David Headley did the site mapping. The whole thing was quite international.

It was a manifestation of the dark side of globalisation. 

Late Bal Thackeray, man of peace?

In his lifetime, Balasaheb Thackeray was a divisive figure, known for his vitriolic remarks against South Indians, North Indians, Biharis, Muslims ... pretty much anyone who was not his beloved Marathi manoos. In death, remarkably, he became, at least for a day, a unifying figure, a man of peace.
Thackeray’s funeral procession started from his home in Bandra East and surged into the adjoining neighbourhood of Mahim, an area dominated by Muslims with a smattering of Christians, Parsis and others. People lined the roads. There were men in skullcaps and women in burqas. All shops were shut, and even water was hard to come by. Some among the Muslims provided drinking water for the masses in the funeral procession.
Further down the road, a small church, the Victoria Church, was having Sunday service. They wanted to hold a small prayer for Thackeray; the procession halted briefly for this, and a quick service was held on the pavement near the vehicle carrying the body.
At Matunga, a predominantly South Indian neighbourhood, similar scenes repeated themselves. Sikhs, who had kept their gurdwaras open to all for food and shelter, joined the procession at some places. There were slogans in Hindi of “Balasaheb amar rahe”. North Indians and Biharis were there in that crowd too.
It wasn’t just the Marathi manoos who turned out for Thackeray’s funeral. That crowd of a million was also a crowd of Mumbaikars.

The entire procession was peaceful. It was Mumbai’s syncretic culture that shone through in the end.

Balasaheb, Bombay and Mumbai

Bal Thackeray’s influence on Mumbai is not easy to comprehend. How did a man his colleagues at the Free Press Journal in the early 1950s knew as “mild-mannered and meek” come to be the tiger whose fear stalked Mumbai in life, and indeed, even in death?
Old timers who’ve known him down the years can offer some clues to why. P.K. Ravidranath, a former colleague of Thackeray’s who knew him as a cartoonist in 1952, and through the years after, says, “He was the one who gave the Maharashtrian an identity of his own in his own capital city”.
Mumbai came to be capital of Maharashtra only by and by. It started life during the Raj as a British city, capital of Bombay Presidency, which included the present states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, parts of Karnataka, and Sindh in Pakistan. The city then was truly cosmopolitan, and its leading lights other than the British were mainly Parsis, though it produced illustrious exceptions like MA Jinnah and BR Ambedkar.
When linguistic states were formed after independence, Bombay was not intended to be a part of Maharashtra by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He wanted it to be a union territory like Chandigarh. It took years of agitations by the Samyukta Maharashtra movement to reverse that.
The identity of the city, therefore, was a mixed and contested one. There was a sizeable Gujarati population, a Sindhi population, a Tamil population, and people from along the Konkan coast down to Udupi, Mangalore and Kerala, among others. People from the hinterlands of Mumbai who migrated to the city often found themselves at the lower end of the social ladder, battling for jobs with migrants from elsewhere. They did not always fare well.
Thackeray the cartoonist created a character out of these people. While his senior RK Laxman created the Common Man in his cartoons, Thackeray created the Marathi manoos as an identity in Bombay politics. It was this demographic that he then came to represent.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Bombay was an industrial city, with textile mills dominating. The politics of the city was a contest between the Congress and the communists. Workers’ union leaders were powers to reckon with; even in 1982, Datta Samant, who led the textile unions with their lakhs of workers, could easily bring the city to a halt, and did.
Bal Thackeray won his following, some say with tacit support from the ruling Congress in the early days, from among the same people who might otherwise have become communists. The creation of a political space based on his ‘sons of the soil’ slogan was the singular political achievement of Thackeray, and explains in some part why many among the Maharashtrian masses see him as a demigod of sorts.
It is because he championed their cause. He empowered them and gave them dignity; they may have remained poor, but they were no longer powerless. They had to be given respect, even if it was only out of fear. Denigrating them as ‘ghatis’ was no longer free of consequences.
In his person, and by creating a larger-than-life image, Thackeray also came to symbolize the collective power and pride of these masses. He is therefore an icon in the purest sense of the word.
His politics has been fractious, divisive, and often bloody, and his legacy in the shape of a changed identity for Bombay, which he renamed Mumbai, is unpalatable to many. But it is small surprise that Mumbai held its breath when Thackeray had trouble breathing. The lives of this man and the metropolis were that closely entwined.

Why Mumbai shut down over Thackeray rumors

It was a dull, grey morning that broke over Mumbai on Thursday; the city was wrapped in a post-Diwali haze. A silence and stillness at odds with the festivities of Diwali had descended. A city that never sleeps seemed to not have woken up. And all it took was a rumour.

Shopkeepers, taxi drivers, office goers, clung to their phones asking each other if Balasaheb Thackeray, the chief of the Shiv Sena, had indeed died. In Bandra East, the suburb where Thackeray’s house is located, crowds had started gathering the previous night; now they swelled. Shops across most parts of the city remained shut. Taxis and autos were few.

Outsiders to the city wondered what was going on. Why should the natural death of an old man of 86 lead to fears of rioting?

The short answer is that the man is a demigod to multitudes in this city. They would congregate in thousands to mourn him when he dies, and grief might turn to anger at the slightest provocation. It has been known to happen before.

When the Kannada film star Raj Kumar died in Bengaluru in 2006, of a heart attack at the age of 77, there were riots. Eight people including a policeman were killed, at least 20 vehicles were burnt, and damages ran to crores of rupees.

Thackeray is more of an icon in Mumbai than Raj Kumar was in Bengaluru. He has been a colossal presence in the city for the past 50 years. Not that any Mumbaikar would need a survey to tell him this, but, love him or hate him, he is the biggest icon of Mumbai. This was borne out by a survey conducted by Tehelka magazine and TNS in 2007. Mumbaikars voted Thackeray as “The biggest icon of Mumbai”. Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest superstar Bollywood has ever seen, came second. Sachin Tendulkar was third. Shah Rukh Khan made a very distant fourth.

Thackeray also made the top three in the list of most hated figures in Mumbai; he was third behind gangsters Dawood Ibrahim and Arun Gawli.

He has always been a strongly polarizing figure. His position as most loved and much hated means he arouses strong passions. It would therefore surprise only the politically naive or the ideologically blinded if Mumbai grinds to a halt, with sporadic incidents of violence, when Thackeray passes away.

His followers have a history of violence, and they have in the past rioted when one of their leaders died. This was in 2001; Anand Dighe, the most powerful Sena chieftain in Thane, wound up in a hospital with a broken leg following a road accident. He died the next day from a heart attack. He was 50. His followers, who suspected medical error because they couldn’t imagine their leader dying from a broken leg, ransacked the hospital and burnt it down.

In Mr Thackeray’s case, such an outcome is less likely, because his followers know of his old age and ill health. However, don’t expect business as usual for at least two days of his passing, whenever that happens. Cities don’t let go of icons easily.

Chittagong, my 1 min review

Chittagong is a true story of a real revolution. It is the tale of a few unlikely warriors who took up arms against the British empire in the town of Chittagong, now in Bangladesh - and actually freed it for one April day in 1930.
They were around 50 boys between 12 and 14 years of age, led by a schoolteacher named Surya Sen they called Masterda. Two girls, Preetilata

 and Kalpana, became part of their cause. There were perhaps five grown men in their fight.
These people raided the armoury in Chittagong, took it over, captured the telegraph office, and disrupted rail communications. They were surrounded by a British Gurkha army battalion but managed to fight them off until they were outgunned with machine guns.
There is obviously enough drama in this story. In Chittagong, the film, it has been told in a documentary fashion. Used as we are to highly stylised, dramatised, action sequences, it becomes odd and unrealistic to see action sequences without superheroes. There is no Salman ‘Tiger’ Khan here, no Batman or Spiderman. It’s just these very regular boys and a few scrawny Bengali men. They may be heroes, but they don't look it.
Manoj Bajpai, who plays Masterda, is understated, perhaps too much so, like most of the cast, including Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
The striking thing about the film is how matter of fact life and death is.
The pacing of the narrative in the first half is too rapid to allow moods to build. In the second half, events take on a dramatic tension that comes through in spite of the undramatic storytelling. The narrative, told through the eyes of a 14 year old boy who was part of this, is circular and ends on a purely documentary note.
I wish director Bedabrata Pain had made it either a quieter, slower film...or a louder, more exciting one. A little more of Zatoichi or Kill Bill might have built mood and atmosphere more effectively.
We aren’t used to our heroes and heroines biting their cyanide capsules, or taking their bullets, and dying without murmur. We are from what Soren Kierkegaard, mourning the death of rebellion, prematurely or presciently lamented in The Present Age.

Aiyya, my 1 min review

The first half hour left me cringing and thinking aiyya, why did I come here, and aiyyo, when will this end...but the film and its band of quirky characters gradually grew on me. Rani Mukherjee is cute in her role of Meenaxi, an ordinary girl with a tendency to escape into her own mental, filmy wonderland. The handsome and fragrant (!) Prithviraj enters her real and fantasy worlds 

and all is soon chaos.
The references to Alice in Wonderland make this a layered narrative, more sophisticated than it appears at first. The film is entertaining with its over the top songs and dances, but in the end it is the quieter moments and scenes that work better for the most part. The only exception is towards the climax of the film, where one sharp descent into madness is dark and edgy.
The ending is too pat, the beginning too abrupt, but somewhere in the middle there's a film that aficionados of cheap desi cinema, like me, would enjoy.

***

The militant liberals, walking talking oxymorons

In our networked world, there are fashions that grip a majority of people of a certain class and background everywhere around the world at certain times. It could be an item of clothing, or a gadget, or even a worldview such as “Left liberalism”, which is the prevailing intellectual fashion among cultural elites.

I admire both Leftist politics and liberalism, but the militancy of some “liberals” makes me wonder whether for them it just another ‘cool’ accessory, like the clothes and gadgets.
The intolerance of liberals is a paradox I’ve been unable to fathom. If Left liberalism becomes a religion and is practised with similarly fundamentalist attitudes then it becomes a parody of itself. It ceases to be liberalism and turns into an intolerant faith.
To practitioners of this faith, anyone who questions anything they say or do is an enemy who must either be silenced or converted. This was the attitude of the man who wanted the fistfight with the philosopher.
I’ve experienced milder versions of this myself on some occasions. Sometimes, I’ve noticed that in the course of debating a point, the avowed liberal lets slip animosity towards the courts, democratic procedures, and any processes or institutions that contradict their views. On the question of the Bus Rapid Transport system in South Delhi, for example, plenty of liberals railed against the courts for admitting the Public Interest Litigation suit against it. They also questioned the utility of having a technical body conduct a study to ascertain how well the BRT is working. They were willing to attack important processes and institutions that they otherwise cheer for, because the results were not to their liking.
To me, this is worrying. 
Like fundamentalists, these individuals cannot bear to have their certainties questioned. Their world is very simple, black and white. Their views are predictable.
This is the secular equivalent of the religious attitude. In that, you believe something because it is the word of God. There is no altering of views once you’ve accepted a faith; that would be apostasy. You might consider those who don’t believe in the same gods and books as you do to be infidels. Your beliefs would not be subject to tests of reason. Anyone questioning your beliefs would be met with vehemence, or even violence.
This is the attitude I see in militant “Left liberals”.

A few days ago, I was at a friend’s place for a birthday party. We were having a philosophical discussion when one of the participants became agitated. He challenged another, a philosophy teacher who had dared to politely disagree with him, to a fistfight. It was ironical, considering the intolerant man was espousing the more liberal view. 

There is no doubt that many who take strong Left liberal positions are intelligent people with their hearts in the right place. They tend to be young men and women educated in fine colleges, from relatively wealthy backgrounds, and eager to help those less fortunate than themselves. All this is admirable, but somehow some of them end up mirroring the attitudes of the fundamentalists they so detest.

In this worldview, all corporations and their employees are evil; the police are always lying; the government is mostly bad; and politicians are abominable. Rebels, including Maoists and other terrorists, are mostly misunderstood good guys, but Baba Ramdev is not. The Right is always wrong, the Left is always right. Rich people, excluding their family members, are rapacious capitalists. Development is awful, but progress is wonderful. However everyone should have electricity. And what’s the meaning of this grid collapse? We need the Internet, the Mac and the iPhone or Blackberry, and sorry, we need our ACs, too. But power plants and dams are damnable; just don’t tell me where my electricity comes from. Air travel is evil but we can’t walk to London or New York, so it’s okay. Everything organic is good, too bad it’s so expensive. Don’t tell me Apple is a corporation, it’s only a fruit. And so on.

Such a worldview betrays confusion and a failure to grasp complexity. It captures elements of the truth, but it is highly reductive, like this characterisation of the militant liberal. However I may ponder about the reductive nature of my own characterisation, but militant liberals (an oxymoron if ever there was one) seem to harbour no doubts about theirs.

The progressive attitude is one that allows for abundant doubt. Science, which powers progress, is based on doubt, just as religion rests on faith. In the scientific method, every theory is provisional, and subject to constant measuring and testing. The laws emerge by inductive reasoning from experimentation. The conclusion is arrived at after the experiment, not before. You change the theory if experimental results disprove it. The theory could be about how the universe came into being or Bus Rapid Transport.