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THURSDAY 28-November 2019 Vol:04 Issue No: 47 Price:5/- Pages:16

OPINION 03IN KASHMIR, ‘DEMOCRACY AND

MORALITY CAN WAIT’

NOSTALGIA 04 EDITORIAL 06SONGS OF DEFIANCE KASHMIR SITUATION DEALS BODY

BLOW TO INDIA’S IMAGE

Back to Village-2GOVERNANCE AT THE DOORSTEP

The second phase of Government’s flagship ‘Back to Village’ (B2V2) outreach programme aims to provide governance at the doorsteps of the rural populace and to enlist community

participation commenced across the Jammu and Kashmir.

NEWS THIS WEEK 02 Follow us on : www.facebook.com/kashmirpen [email protected] kashmir_pen www.kashmirpen.com

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Village sar-panch, govern-

ment officer killed in firing by militants in Anantnag dis-

trictA third person, also a govern-

ment employee, was taken to a hospital in Srinagar, and is said

to be in a critical condition. Suspected militants killed a sarpanch and a government offi-cer in Anantnag district of Kashmir on Tuesday. The incident took place during the “back-to-village” pro-gramme, a public outreach initiative by the government, in Badazgam vil-lage. The additional deputy com-missioner of Anantnag, who was leading the meeting with residents, was safely escorted out of the area after the firing, unidentified officials said. The sarpanch, Rafiq Shah, and government employees Manzo-

or Parray and Zahoor Ahmed Sheikh were injured in the firing. All three were taken to a nearby district hos-pital, where Shah and Sheikh suc-cumbed to their injuries, Parray is in a critical condition in a hospital in Srinagar. Sheikh worked in the horti-culture department.

Second edi-tion of Centre’s

initiated the “back-to-vil-

lage” initiative began on Nov. 25-will contin-ue till Nov.30

The second phase of ‘Back to Vil-lage’ will begin from November 25. As many as 23 IAS officers

and 293 KAS officers and 4,500 other government officers will go to villages and listen to the grievances of people in 4,300 panchayat halqas across Jam-mu and Kashmir. The programme is aimed at taking governance to the

doorstep of people in villages. The Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat Congress, which is an organisation of over 500 panchayat members, has expressed concern over the non-implementation of the grass-roots level projects announced during the first phase of the govern-ment’s flagship ‘Back to Village’ pro-gramme held between June 20 and 27 last year. This is the first outreach programme announced by the gov-ernment after the abrogation of Arti-cle 370 on August 5. The Valley has been on the edge ever since.

Lieutenant Governor , Gi-rish Chandra

Murmu Murmu reads out Pre-amble to mark

constitution Day celebra-

tions.Lieutenant Governor , Girish

Chandra Murmu led the cele-brations of the Constitution Day

by reading out the Preamble of the Constitution. A function was held on 26th Nov at the Assembly complex to mark the 70th Anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of India. Farooq Khan,Advisor to Lieutenant Governor, BVR Subrah-manyam , Chief Secretary , Admin-istrative Secretaries , all officers and officials of the Civil Secretariat were present on the occation. Every year November 26, the constitution Day is observed to celebrate the significance of having adopted the Constitution of India in 1949 which came into effect on Jan-uary 26, 1950, marking the dawn of a new era. To acknowledge the con-tribution of the framers of the con-stitution and sensitize the people regarding the exalted values and the precepts enshined in it,Divisional Commissioners, Deputy Commis-sioners,Heads of the Department s and the Heads of all the Police For-mations were directed to undertake simlar activity in their respective of-fices

THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019

KTMF not to file GST returns

until internet is restored in

KashmirThe Kashmir Traders and Man-

ufacturers Federation (KTMF) on Saturday said traders asso-

ciated with the federation will not file Goods and Service Tax (GST) returns since there is no internet facility available in Kashmir valley. Reacting to circular of Sales Tax Department (STD) issued on Fri-day, General secretary of the KTMF Bashir Ahmad said it is not possible for the traders of Kashmir valley to file their GST returns as internet of all Cellular companies, including Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), re-mained suspended since August 5, when centre scrapped Article 370 and 35 A, besides divided the state into two Union Territories (UTs). He said the STD has asked traders to file their returns in the of-fice of respective Deputy Commis-sioners in the valley from Novem-ber 25 to 30. “There are thousands of traders in the valley and it is not possible for everyone to stand in long queues and file their returns,” Bashir said. He said the KTMF has di-rected all traders not to file GST

returns till internet facilities are re-stored in the valley. When trader pur-chases goods, he or she is paying GST on the spot, he said, adding similarly when a manufacturer sells anything he deducts GST from the trader and later deposits it accordingly. Bashir said the KTMF is not against GST or filing returns. But, since there is no internet how is it possible to file returns, he added and said the department issued the order to traders without even providing them the basic facility to file the re-turns.

Airtel lost up to 30 lakh cus-

tomers from J&K

The network shutdown in Jam-mu and Kashmir impacted the subscriber base of telecom

companies in the quarter ended Sep-tember, owing to which Bharti Airtel lost up to 30 lakh customers, while Vodafone Idea too lost customers, ac-cording to a latest report by broker-age ICICI Securities. “Bharti Airtel lost about 25-30 lakh customers due to network shutdown in Jammu and Kashmir, which would return on reported base post resumption of services there. On a like to like basis, the net sub addi-tion was zero,” the ICICI Securities

report said. On Vodafone Idea, the re-port said that it continued to lose subscribers with a net loss of 89 lakh customers during the quarter and re-sultant overall subscriber base at 32.0 crore. “We note that this is the fifth consecutive quarter of subscriber base decline given the integration-led challenges and Jammu and Kashmir impact,” the report said Bharti Airtel’s end of period (EoP) subscriber base, ICICI Securi-ties said, was at 27.94 crore with re-ported net subscriber addition of 26 lakh subscribers quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) aided by the consolidation of 65 lakh.

Internet gag in Kashmir a

grave violation of fundamen-

tal right to life: CPI (M)

Terming the internet gag in Kashmir for the last almost four months as grave violation

of fundamental right to life, CPI (M) Monday said the communication blockade has put the people to im-mense hardships and the dealt a se-vere blow to the valley’s fragile econ-

omy. Right to internet is part of right to life and right to education, State Secretary of the CPI(M) Ghu-lam Nabi Malik said in a statement this afternoon. He said according to National Telecom Policy, the Central Government itself has recognized in-ternet a basic necessity for education and communication. Despite this, he said, the Government has snapped mobile data and broadband services in Kashmir, following the abrogation of the special status of J&K on August 5. Pre-paid mobile and SMS services continue to remain snapped which has created unimaginable miseries to common people. Health schemes like Ayush-man Bharat are dependent on inter-net and in the last almost four months patients are suffering due to the lack of internet services. Similarly, Horti-culture industry has suffered hugely due to the communication blockade imposed since August 5. Due to the lack of communication facilities, the grower could not remain in contact with the traders outside state and ul-timately they suffered huge losses. Trade and tourism sectors have been directly hit due to the com-munication blockade while students, researchers and other professionals are facing huge crisis due to snapping of internet services. Students who are preparing for national level competi-tive examinations have been worst af-fected while media has been virtually fractured due to the lack of internet facilities. Journalists are facing huge crisis and are not able to perform their professional duties freely.

OPINION 03 Follow us on : www.facebook.com/kashmirpen [email protected] kashmir_pen www.kashmirpen.com

THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019

In Kashmir, ‘Democracy And

Morality Can Wait’GOWHAR GEELANI

When it comes to Kashmir, both “de-mocracy” and “morality” can wait! The dawn of August 5, 2019 came on Kashmiris like a “betrayer”. In the eyes of many perceptive Kash-

miris, “the latest betrayal should not be a cause of real surprise or shock if one were a good student of history and the Kashmir conflict”. For them, what happened on August 5 this year was a stark reminder that something similar had happened several times before — first in August 1953, and then again in 1964. For Kashmir, the season of betrayals has been never-ending. On August 9, 1953, the “prime minister” of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, was unceremoniously dismissed as the head of the state, and then imprisoned for over two decades in separate stints from 1953 to 1975. To begin with, Sheikh Abdullah, on charges of “treason”, remained in prison for 12 years with two brief intermissions — in 1958 and 1964. Independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru allowed Sheikh Abdullah, once his bosom friend, to visit Pakistan to meet the Pa-kistani military dictator, Gen. Ayub Khan, in Rawal-pindi in 1964. However, Sheikh Abdullah was again put behind bars on his return to Srinagar. This time, however, for a longish term. By then, Nehru had also passed away. Celebrated historian Perry Anderson not-ed in The Indian Ideology: “The Intelligence Bureau had little difficulty convincing (Pandit Jawaharlal) Nehru that he (Abdullah) had become a liability, and overnight he was dismissed by the stripling heir to the Dogra throne he had so complacently made head of state, and thrown into an Indian jail on charges of sedition.” Not only was the Sheikh accused of being “seditious” he was also falsely accused of “receiving money from Pakistan” in what became known as the Kashmir Conspiracy Case. In the 1940s, Sheikh Abdullah was largely seen as an unrelenting figure of Kashmiri nation-alism. He was the founder of the National Confer-ence, which in 1931 began as the Muslim Confer-ence and was the first political party of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir. Besides this, Sheikh Abdullah became the first Muslim “prime minister” of Jam-mu and Kashmir after a Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu), Ramchand Kak. He had also spearheaded the Quit Kashmir movement against the Dogra ruler, Maha-raja Hari Singh. The late Professor Balraj Puri, a well-known academic from the Jammu region, was enraged over Sheikh Abdullah’s dismissal as prime minister and his detention. With the aim of registering his pro-test over the issue, he met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi. But Puri’s earnest trip to Delhi did not bear any fruit. He wrote in his book In Kashmir Towards Insurgency that “Nehru warned me against being too idealistic and asserted that the national interest was more important than democracy”. Historian Anderson, while referring to Puri as “an anguished admirer (of Nehru) from

Jammu”, wrote: “When an anguished admirer from Jammu pleaded with him not to do so, he replied that the national interest was more important than democracy: ‘We have gambled at the international stage on Kashmir, and we cannot afford to lose. At the moment, we are there at the point of a bayonet. Till things improve, democracy and morality can wait’.” Similarly, according to a Kashmiri academ-ic, Prof. Ghulam Rasool Malik: “Nehru’s quiet reply (to Balraj Puri) had been that democratic rights were not applicable to Kashmir.” This was written by Prof Malik in his essay “In The Arms of Fire” in a book titled A Desolation Called Peace. Meanwhile, soon after Sheikh Abdullah’s dismissal from office and later arrest in 1953, the Congress Party installed Ghulam Mohammed Bak-shi’s regime. Bakshi’s government was considered both brutal as well as corrupt and, according to An-derson, “depended entirely on the Indian security apparatus”. When after a decade in office, Bakshi’s util-ity was over and he too was considered a liability for New Delhi, the Congress installed another man named G.M. Sadiq. Unlike Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi (both “prime ministers”), Sadiq was installed as chief minister. Sheikh Abdullah was discarded for Bakshi, and Bakshi for Sadiq. As an aside, all Assem-bly elections till 1977, and also the one in 1987, were rigged. Additionally, it was during Sadiq’s gov-ernment that the nomenclatures of Sadr-i-Riyasat (president) and Wazir-e-A’zam (prime minister) were dispensed with, and replaced by those of “gov-ernor” and “chief minister”, which was perceived by native Kashmiris as a major assault on Kashmir’s regional autonomy after the Sheikh’s arrest and re-moval. In the mid-1960s, chief minister G.M. Sadiq dropped all cases against Sheikh Abdullah and his associates, including the infamous Kashmir Conspiracy Case. In the eyes of many key Kashmir watchers, there has been hardly any difference between how the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is operating in Kashmir at the moment, or how the so-called secular Congress Party has dealt with Kash-mir in the past. Both parties have stripped off Kash-mir’s autonomy in the name of “national interest”, “national security” and “national integration”. On August 5, 2019, the BJP not only re-moved Kashmir’s autonomy, the saffron party also divided the state into two separate Union territories — Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir. Native Kash-miris have interpreted the BJP’s move as a “strategy of revenge and repression”, with an ideological and civilisational view on Kashmir. A Kashmiri on the street says that it is a “smash and grab” operation.But please do remember, when it comes to Kashmir, “democracy and morality can wait”! (Asian Age)

The writer is a journalist, author and political com-mentator

“Historian Anderson, while referring to

Puri as “an anguished admirer (of Nehru)

from Jammu”, wrote: “When an anguished ad-

mirer from Jammu pleaded with him not to do so, he replied that the national

interest was more import-ant than democracy: ‘We

have gambled at the inter-national stage on Kashmir,

and we cannot afford to lose. At the moment, we

are there at the point of a bayonet. Till things

improve, democracy and morality can wait’.”

NOSTALGIA 04THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019

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Z.G.MUHAMMAD

I am a witness to an era. So is the whole crop of my generation and the genera-tion after. Born and brought up in a city, should I say of defiance or desolation; I have been the witness in the words of a

poet `to the threshing of the grain. Something eerie was there in the zephyr —yes the morning breeze that blew across our city; it sang different cradlesongs for us. Songs, which for over three centuries have mixed with chilly wintry winds and soothing summer breezes. That taught ‘us no love for the authority but for the defiant’ and abiding love for the ‘commoners’ —the devout. I do not remember in my childhood having ever seen a minister walking through our streets or visiting our school; top man ever to visit our school would be the school inspector. I remember every majzoob pacing barefoot in freezing winters in our city. I re-member every friar and mendicant walking through bazaars in ward four but I do not re-member having ever seen an ‘assembly mem-ber’ pacing through the streets or the maze of lanes that even today like un-deciphered manuscripts reveals unspoken to the discern-ing eyes. However, I have the foggiest idea about an election- perhaps 1957 in which Ghulam Rasool Renzu of Khanyar was pit-ted against Gazi Abdul Rahman of Maharaj Gunj. It is for a slogan “Mashalee Sundooq Ko Vote Do”that lives buried somewhere in the hinterland of my mind that I remember this election. It was Dr Abdul Wahid, who sometime back narrated an interesting inci-dent about this election: Tazi Rahman, who was an independent candidate with tacit sup-port of Bakshi Sahib accused his rival Renzu being a communist and not believing even in Nikah; and Renzu next day with His Nikah Nama in his hand countered his rival at a public gathering near Nowhatta’. Those days when pegging pictures of leaders on clay daubed walls of Baithaks (drawing rooms) was in fashion, I do not remember having ever seen a picture of any minister or even then Prime Minister adorn-ing walls of our house or the houses of my friends Bashir, Majid, Ayub and Nazir. Or on the drab walls of shops and workshops of our neighbours, the darners, the coppersmiths, the tailors, the woodcarvers and the walnut wood-polishers. Contrary to this pictures of the then jailed leaders Sheikh Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Beg along with that of Allamah Muhammad Iqbal, with beautiful verses of the poet in ornate papier-mâché frames adorned the walls of shops and houses. Out of greater boldness, some political workers like Abdul-lah Sodagar and Qadir Shakhsaz outside my first school provocatively displayed pictures of these leaders in front of their shops earn-

ing ire of powers that be. The walls of sitting and drawing rooms of many in families were also adorned with pictures of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Liaqute Ali Khan and Mirwaiz Mohammad Yusuf Shah along-with that of Allama Iqbal. Surprisingly, Al-lama Iqbal was admired across the political divide. The songs of defiance dined into our ears along with lullabies had imbibed in our hearts love for Spartacus’s and admiration for the common people who contributed to the society in our hearts. For centuries of alien rule and misgovernance, the authorities had become synonymous with hegemony and cruelty- something we had learnt to hate. Truthfully, for us, the prime minis-ters, ministers and political hanger-on’s had no attraction. They made no difference in our life but it were the legendary ordinaries that counted for us. We looked at them as larger than life. Municipal workers, Habib Sheikh, Rahman Sheikh, watermen, Abu Sacra, Ma-qbool Saga, who cleaned and watered streets and lanes of our Mohalla were much more respected than Mahaldars and Halqa Presi-dents of fifties and sixties who had become symbols of intimidation and terror. The low-est functionaries in administration lineman and ghat-munshi were more important to people than the ministers. I remember a lineman, Abdullah Bijli and his brother Hassan. He was dwarf, his brother was taller, who carried the lad-der for him. They looked like characters picked up from Charlie Chaplin’s movies placed on the streets in our locality. Most-ly at dusk, the twin was much sought-after for fixing a fuse or restoring a disconnected electric service line. Sitting on a tailor’s shop-front in Daribal and puffing smoke from the hubble-bubble, he looked like El Cid in his kingdom. With his area of operation start-ing from Gojawara to Nawpora, he was a king in his own right. On a day, iconic radio newsreader Abdul Rashid Bandy, remind-ed me of this legendary lineman and about the authority he wielded. Stating, ‘those days the news about an inspection by elec-tricity department caused goose bumps in people. Out of fear people not only latched their doors but also placed massive limestone mortars at their doors’...This placing mortars and slabs stones at doors to protect intruders from entering into the houses has its history. That could be traced to 1819, when the Sikh army headed by ruthless Phoola Singh had entered into the city and soldiers of Ranjit Singh had looted and plundered the houses of peoples, closed the doors of Jamia Masjid and prevented people from saying prayers in the Masjid and charged guns towards the his-toric Khanqah-e-Moulas a six hundred year old wooden architecture of craftsmanship, beauty and grace.

Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and colum-nist

Songs of Defiance

T ruthfully, for us, the prime minis-

ters, ministers and political

hanger-on’s had no attraction. They made

no difference in our life but it were the legendary

ordinaries that count-ed for us. We looked

at them as larger than life. Municipal workers, Habib Sheikh, Rahman

Sheikh, watermen, Abu Sacra, Maqbool Saga,

who cleaned and watered streets and lanes of

our Mohalla were much more respected than Mahaldars and Halqa

Presidents of fifties and sixties who had become symbols of intimidation

and terror. The lowest functionaries in admin-

istration lineman and ghat-munshi were more

important to people than the ministers.

VIEWPOINT 05THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


TheContradictions In The Ayodhya

VerdictBoth sides have evidence supporting their claims but the court believes the

Hindu evidence is stronger

KARAN THAPAR

Supreme Court judgments should be intelligible and convincing. Those are two qualities I would stress above any other. In their absence, judgments could amount to sophistry. Now,

to what extent does this apply to the recent judgment on the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmab-hoomi dispute? In paragraph 796, the court sets out how it came to its verdict. “The dispute is over immovable property. The court does not decide title on the basis of faith or belief but on the basis of evidence.” Let’s then look at that evidence and ask is it clinching and irrefutable. The court accepts that both Hin-dus and Muslims have shown evidence of worship at the Masjid after 1857. However, before that year, the court says whilst “on a preponderance of probabilities”, there is ev-idence of Hindus worshipping in the inner structure, while this is missing in the case of Muslims. Para 786 says: “There is no account by them of possession, use or offer of namaz in the mosque between the date of construc-tion and 1856-57 … nor is there any account in the evidence of the offering of namaz in the mosque over this period.” For me, this is where the problem starts. Whilst claiming that there isn’t “evi-dence of the offering of namaz”, the court ac-cepts this was a mosque that existed for over 450 years. So if it’s a mosque, doesn’t it follow prayers were held there? And if there is no evidence of that between 1528 and 1857, is the court claiming the mosque was defunct or disused for over 325 years? And if that’s implied or assumed, how does the court ex-plain the mosque’s use for Islamic worship after 1857? But these questions are not an-swered. There is one further issue. The court accepts that in 1856-57, Hindu-Muslim ri-ots occurred over the right to worship at the Masjid and, as a result, the British erected a railing to create separate spaces for the two faiths. But isn’t that proof Muslims were wor-shipping prior to 1857? Now, the court relies on 18th centu-ry writings by European travellers such as Jo-seph Tieffenthaler, William Finch and Mont-

gomery Martin for evidence that Hindus worshipped at the Masjid prior to 1857. But these accounts also talk of the mosque and none suggest it was defunct or disused. Sure-ly, the accounts which provide evidence for Hindus also provide evidence for Muslims? And yet the court appears to have turned a blind eye to that. Let me now take my argument to a different level. Since the court claims it is only arguing on the basis of evidence, I’m troubled by the fact its reasoning seems to fly in the face of history. The court says: “The Muslims have offered no evidence to indicate that they were in exclusive possession of the inner struc-ture prior to 1857 since the date of the con-struction in the 16th century.” But when the mosque was built in 1528, Babar was the con-queror of India and devoutly Muslim. Later, from 1658 to 1707, Aurangzeb was emperor and said to be a bigot. Is it conceivable they would allow Hindus to pray in a mosque? And, in particular, a mosque named after Babar? Or would they have ensured exclusive Muslim possession? If the court wants us to accept Mus-lims did not have “exclusive possession of the inner structure prior to 1857 since the date of the construction in the 16th century”, it has to respond to this apparent clash with histo-

ry. Finally, look at this sentence from the conclusion in paragraph 800: “On a bal-ance of probabilities, the evidence in respect of the possessory claim of the Hindus to the composite whole of the disputed property stands on a better footing than the evidence adduced by the Muslims.” That clearly means that both sides have evidence supporting their claims but the court believes the Hin-du evidence is better. Wasn’t that grounds for splitting the site between them rather than giving it entirely to the Hindus? Now, I admit, I’m not a lawyer and certainly not an expert on deciphering Su-preme Court judgments. But, if as a citizen, I find these issues troubling, can you call the judgment intelligible and convincing? Since it’s said to be based on evidence, shouldn’t that, at the very least, be beyond reasonable doubt? Is it in this case? (

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advo-cate: The Untold Story.The views expressed are personal

KASHMIR PEN EDITORIAL

Maharashtra politics

As the NCP had not fared well in three consecutive elections - 2014 Lok

Sabha election, 2014 Maharashtra Assembly election and 2019 Lok

Sabha election, Many had declared the 79-year-old Maratha strongman a finished politician. That was perhaps the challenge that the campaigner in

Sharad Pawar needed to test his mettle one more time.

After the election results were an-nounced and the Shiv Sena parted ways

with the BJP, Sharad Pawar took the centrestage. He was the link between the Congress and the Shiv Sena while “manipulating” both the parties to his

advantage.At one point of time, when Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray and Ahmed

Patel of the Congress - the closest aide of party president Sonia Gandhi - held one-on-one meeting, they reportedly

“found” that Sharad Pawar was delaying the three-party alliance and govern-

ment formation in Maharashtra for his own considerations.

Again when the three-party alliance was almost there, Ajit Pawar rebelled - not

yet known by design or default. Ajit Pawar, after switching sides to support the BJP in government formation, had declared that Sharad Pawar remained

his leader and that the NCP and the BJP were together in the ruling alliance.

Sharad Pawar used the rebellion - if it actually was-- of Ajit Pawar to settle

another battle in his favour. There have been talks that Sharad Pawar wants to hand over the reins of NCP to his daugh-ter Supriya Sule and not Ajit Pawar, who

had been harbouring ambition of suc-ceeding Sharad Pawar, both in the party

and the Maratha politics.Sharad Pawar changed this situation

again to his advantage. He did not expel or suspend Ajit Pawar, who has enor-

mous control over his NCP, though many questioned the tactic.

Sharad Pawar kept sending emissaries to Ajit Pawar while ensuring that he

spoke to each one of the NCP MLAs. In three days, Ajit Pawar saw futility of his rebellion -- it at all it was - and tendered

resignation from the post of deputy chief minister. Ajit Pawar had not even

attended the only cabinet meeting that Devendra Fadnvis called as the 80-hour

chief minister.By the time the Devendra Fadnavis-Ajit Pawar misadventure ended in a disaster,

the BJP had been outwitted, the NCP MLAs secured and Ajit Pawar tamed. Sharad Pawar had won almost all the

battles of Maharashtra 2019.The crux of the story is: Don’t mess

up with Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra politics. He will not only outfox you but

may also finish you.

EDIT 06THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


M.K.BHADRAKUMAR.

The dichotomy between the regime poli-cy and public opinion is nowhere near as sharp as in the world of diplomacy. And nowhere in the contempo-rary situation is this maxim so sharply

visible as in the dalliance of the West Asian oligar-chies with Israel. The romance began at least a decade ago -- perhaps, more -- but it still remains an illicit affair.Israel would have liked an open relationship.It has a lot to gain thereby.But that’s possible only when pigs fly.The reason is that the authoritarian rulers of Mus-lim Middle East are acutely conscious of the so-called ‘Arab Street’. This may seem a paradox -- that oligar-chies need to be mindful of popular opinion -- but, in actuality, they do not enjoy such a big leeway as one imagines to trample upon public opinion to the extent that strong elected leadership would have. When they defy or ignore public opinion, it must be for weighty reasons -- mostly, when exis-tential issues are involved such as the regime’s sur-vival, for instance. Israel doesn’t fall into that exceptional cat-egory -- it is not as if without a relationship with Israel, the Arab oligarchies would face extinction.The dalliance between the Arab regimes and Israel is characterised by pragmatism rather than princi-ples or critical imperatives. So long as Israel lacks any ‘soft power’ in its Arab neighbourhood and the ‘Arab Street’ views it negatively, the hands of the authoritarian rulers are tied.They can go only thus far, and no further. In turn, it severely limited the relationship. The Indian leadership should realise the limitations of pragmatic external relations in diplo-macy. There is no gainsaying the fact that India’s ‘soft power’ is depleting at an alarming rate.The ac-olytes of the Modi government do not seem to care and even those amongst the few amongst them who are erudite enough to comprehend the significance of what is happening tend to put on an air of de-fiance or studied indifference -- or worse still, be-come polemical. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent remark that Imperial Britain divested India of $44 trillion is a typical remark. Faced with the quandary of searing criticism in Britain regarding the J&K situation, he takes a detour to malign Brit-ain. How this round figure of $44 trillion has been arrived at is another matter -- even if one doesn’t want to get into the modernisation of India under British rule that made the evolution of the In-dian State as a political entity possible. Today, ‘soft power’ is no longer in vogue in the Indian diplomat-ic toolbox. The obsession with ‘macho’ image is so overpowering. Under the Modi government, the accent on ‘soft power’ began with a bang in 2014 and is quite visibly ending after five years with a whimper. A number of mistakes have been made during the past 5-year period that dented India’s ‘soft power’ (which one doesn’t want to go into there). But it is the appalling situation in the Kash-mir valley that dealt a body blow to India’s image. An opinion is steadily gaining ground in the Muslim countries in India’s ‘extended neigh-bourhood’ that the Modi government is adopting State policies that are decidedly ‘anti-Muslim’. Even the elites in friendly countries such

as Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia or Turkey, who are by no means ‘Islamist’, tend to see Kashmir as a ‘Muslim issue.’ A recent opinion piece in the influential US magazine Foreign Policy is entitled ‘Kashmir Could Wreck India’s Reputation Among Afghans’. It is a nuanced analysis -- by no means ‘anti-Indian’ -- of how Afghan public opinion, which is traditional-ly friendly, is discernibly getting disenchanted with India’s repression of Kashmiri Muslims. This is a depressing scenario, because ‘soft power’ has been historically the bedrock of India-Afghan relations, and for that reason, Del-hi under successive governments right from 1947, placed great emphasis on people-to-people relations between the two countries. Certainly, our diplomacy will be by far di-minished if the Afghans perceive us as no different from Pakistan -- pursuing cold, pitiless geopolitical objectives in their country. It is small comfort that Afghans will prob-ably continue to view India as a ‘stabilising factor’.To quote Hari Prasad, the author of the article, ‘The positions of political actors in Afghanistan have ranged from neutral to explicitly pro-India, primar-ily for India’s support for the Afghan government as well as anti-Pakistan animus. But our discussions with journalists and Afghans in the region show the popular reaction is decidedly more nuanced. Many working-class Afghans, drawing from their own ex-periences of conflict and oppression, identify with Kashmir’s Muslims.’ The analysis makes the foreboding conclu-sion: ‘Afghans are closely watching the actions of In-dian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in Kashmir and throughout the region. That should be a reality check for New Delhi; its courting of Af-ghan opinion can only go so far. India may have the funding and power to shape public opinion and support in Afghanistan, but it will take much more to overcome growing mistrust.’ If the changing perceptions regarding In-dia are such in Afghanistan, can it be any different in the Central Asian region? The people in the steppes are, if anything, far more deeply immersed in Islamic culture, ethos and identity than Afghans, given the historical real-ity that their region was also the cradle of Islam in its golden era. The Uzbeks, for instance, take great pride that Babur set out from Fergana, which, incidental-ly, has a museum dedicated to Babur. One of the most evocative historical mon-uments in Kabul is the Bagh-e Babur (Garden of Ba-bur), the final resting place that the great emperor chose for himself -- rather than Agra. Even if Delhi were to build half a dozen parliament buildings in Kabul, the Afghans will continue to treasure the Bagh-e Babur as the living monument to their abiding links with India.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service officer for more than 29 years. He has served as India’s ambassador to Turkey and Uzbeki-stan and has been a contributor to Rediff.com for well over a decade.

Kashmir Situation Deals Body Blow to

India’s Image

TRAVELOGUE 07THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


A Visit To Central Park In Uptown Manhattan New York

AUTAR MOTA

Sometime around 1857, as the Population of New York kept increasing due to con-tinuous arrival and settle-ment of immigrants , the

New settlers in Manhattan felt an urgent need to build a Large urban Park . The park came to be known as CENTRAL PARK. There was a continuous expansion and Beau-tification this uptown urban park that currently has Forests, a lake ( Named as Jacqueline Onasis kenne-dy Onasis Reservoir ), Ponds, stat-ues, walkways, Bridges, Meadows, Fountains, Tonga tracks , Theatres , cafes, Clubs, flower Beds , Restau-rants, Restrooms and so many ame-nities . Places or spots to see include Cherry Hill, Bow Bridge, Shake-speare Garden, The Pool, The Loch, The Ravine on west side. On east side you can see Gapstow Bridge, The Mall ( Literary Walk), Balto, Bethesda fountain, Alice in Wonder-land, Conservatory Water, Cleopat-ra’s Needle, Harlem Meer, Reservoir and conservatory Garden. You can also rent a bicycle and enjoy a ride , go for Boating , enjoy seasonal ice skating or visit a Theatre or Zoo. There are some good Restaurants that serve Hot Coffee ,snacks and sizzling Foods . Some prominent and Popular eating places inside the Park could be named as HARLEM MEER SNACK BAR, LOEB BOAT-HOUSE, LE PAIN QUOTIDIEN, TAVERN ON THE GREEN, THE BALLFIELDS CAFÉ AND DANCING CRANE CAFÉ. There are so many vis-itors information centres inside with a Main Ki-osk near Columbus Square Entry Gate. The park is spread in about 840 acres in the upper Manhattan covering an area between 59th street to 110 street from north to south and from 8th avenue to 5th avenue from West to East. Travel by Metro ,pay $2and 75 Cents and get down anywhere from Columbus square near 60th street up to 110th street to enter this park. Managed by a private nonprofit organi-zation known as Central Park Conservancy, The Park opens at 6AM ( Morning) and closes at 1AM (Night ),365 days a year. This organization was founded in 1980 to restore, manage and look af-ter Central Park. 75% of the annual budget ($65 Million ) of this organization comes from public donations .Central Park conservancy also runs a store that sells Central Park branded T shirts, Hats, hand embroidered material and guide books etc. Proceeds from all purchases help the conser-vancy to manage the Park. The conservancy has also set up free information Booths inside the Park . It also provides guided Tours inside the Park.

Once inside, you feel you have suddenly come to a different world with birds , green trees, Pine forests, Grassy lands ,walkways, ponds , Play-ing Grounds and tranquil ambiance. The hustle of walking crowds amidst high rise buildings of New York is suddenly forgotten even if you see some skyscrapers around the park. You can Play

an open Air Game of chess and Checkers inches AND CHECKERS HOUSE inside the Park. You can see breathtaking views from the BELVEDERE CASTLE or Visit CHARLES A DANA DISCO-CERY CENTRE to see rotating Exhibits . During Late Autumn season, we saw some beautiful fall foliage. We also came across

Colourful Horse Carriages/ Ton-gas carrying tourists to vari-ous spots inside the Park. Bicycle Richshaws with tourists also keep moving. “Sir, you wanna Park Tour . Just $120 45 Minutes . This Spe-cial Horse Carriage. Michael’s ride. I carry family of President Clinton. Come Madam.” Over here, if you are a Tourist from India, you will be addressed as Babu ji by people connected with Travel and Tour Industry. Young, old , literate or illiterate is a Babu ji. And every Babu ji will receive salaam and Namaste together. Take Salaam, take Namaste or take both together, choice is yours. As we move ahead, A bicy-cle rickshaw man looks at us and comes closer: “ Babu ji , Namaste Salam. You india .Come. I gonna cheaper con-cession. $50 two persons half hour. Madam decide. Babu ji wanna go around” We go near the Bow Bridge. Shah Rukh khan has also done some film song sequences inside the Park near this Bridge. We see an Artist busy drawing a landscape near Bow Bridge. A chinese man in dark yellow robe comes close to us and wants to sell some image. I say no.We go to a restaurant and Or-der Mocha coffee with croissants. No vehicle is allowed into the park. Penalties are high and Adherence is

strict. We see families with children. We see individuals with pets. We see people sleeping and relaxing. So many young couples keep talking and getting intimate. Feelings are expressed. Others around have no business to look .If you are a Babu ji, shame is yours in such situations . We see people in shorts running or Jog-ging . Outside , on Columbus Square entrance, we see some boys performing acrobatics to attract Tourists. Outside near Columbus Square ,Busy Halal Vans and Tea / Coffee Vendors were ensuring that their customers make a line to buy Pretzels, Hot dogs, Bagels ,Sandwiches and hand held foods. Near 5th avenue entrance, we see a group of Chinese demonstrating and raising slo-gans against former Chinese billionaire Guo Wen-gui. We see them changing positions and posing for photo session and video coverage. While in New York, never miss this Park.

Autar Mota is a noted blogger and a columnist.

ART & LITERATURE 08THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


The Sacred Task of Poetry

MOHAMMAD MAROOF SHAH

What is the Faith of Poets? Isn’t po-etry a species of faith? Poets open up another window to the Divine

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine pic-ture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reason-able words.” Goethe If one is sad for no reason or has suffered any humiliation or tragedy or one wishes to enjoy travel, nature, friendship or meal better or one seeks special modes of worshipping or thanking the Divine or anyone we value, one should read poetry. If one is hankering after a Master, consider taking some help for finding the same from poetry. If one is seeking to heal some strain in relationship with anyone one holds dear, ask poets for help. If one wishes to treasure a great experience or a simple routine work or little tasks that constitute our lot, poets show how and why. If one seeks to taste something from the otherworldly joys here and now, have a lasting truce with the God one imagined during childhood, taste the rare joy of forgiving everyone unconditionally, laugh away ev-ery care or sorrow, celebrate love in a lovelier way, consider reading poets. If we want to appreciate the magical or better miraculous character of the world we better approach it through the lens of po-etic language and see how words can do wonders – heal us, lift us high above the horizons, cheer us, reveal ourselves to us. Every human is potentially a poet – as children we all live poetry – though not all write poetry or keep the poet in them alive with age. When any intense experience, like deep sorrow or ecstasy, touches us, one may sponta-neously switch on the poetic mode of being. In Kashmir almost every woman traditionally com-posed poetry on experiencing death in family that consoled her. We, in Kashmir, have traditionally been in love with the poetry of Alamdar or Lalla or Sufi poets. It is poetry that in one or the other form (poetry and music were one and the same origi-nally) constitutes the language of worship in major religions and all scriptures have used the power of poetry for their own ends which are ultimately not different from – or at least not incompatible with – the end of poetry. To be is to be open to the Muse that is Being that calls forth our response – we are required to sing to express the joy that is the gift of being. To live a fulfilling life requires keeping wondering, transcending, perfecting, creating – or live poetic mode of existence. Poetry begins with the surrender of the self to the Beauty/Love/Oth-er/Muse (corresponding to Islam) and culminates in creating/manifesting more beauty or perfection (corresponding to Ihsan as husn paeda kerden) in any experience/work. Humans have begun with poetry as their original language and it is only in later decadent times that prose was invented. Tra-ditionally people have been using language suf-fused with poetry – one may note, for instance, tra-ditionally Kashmiri women using great figurative language in not only laeli (mourning songs) and slang but in ordinary conversation as well. People seem to have progressively forgotten poetry of language and their poetic dwelling and essential

connection between poetry and thinking. Fear or neglect of metaphor is a modern heresy and evi-dence of impoverishment of our understanding of language and its higher functions. In Kashmir we have a tradition of slang (that has especially been appropriated and elaborately developed by certain Sufi circles) that makes ingenious use of symbolism – for instance such supposedly abusive expressions as paye traeth, ayeyi mazheri jalal and payei taem-ber are really prayers for encounter with/descent of the Divine in addressee’s life. Proverbs and most of folk expressions are poetically inflected. All natural/cosmic rhythms and key nat-ural processes have an element of music or lead to silence that draws us to the transpersonal depths of the Self/ Being. Rituals too appropriate this music and that partly explains their efficacy. Elaboration of practices of zikr, sama, awrad, durood etc. in-volve using the poetic or musical dimension of lan-guage. Pervasive presence of na’t in Islamic cultures means sacred use of language is not ignored. Qura-nic recitation is itself a great substitute for/comple-ment to more familiar modes of poetic recitations that invokes and evokes sacred understanding of poetry. How sacred and poetry are closely inter-twined in Islamic cultures may be gleaned by re-view of the practice of writing poetry/commenting on poetry or sacred poetry from the time of Com-panions to stalwart Ulama of Deoband and other traditional seminaries. Islamic culture is essentially a poetic culture (even the best of Muslim philoso-phy seems to have done by poets or poet-philoso-phers) that gave rise to the great poetic expressions in many traditional Islamic languages including the Persian and Urdu. Sacred connections of the science of urooz are well known to the scholars of literature and mysticism. Poetry is mankind’s chief arsenal against life’s weal and woe and a tool for developing con-sciousness of resistance against injustice. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” To be a social activ-ist or a true citizen in the Greek sense that Plato ex-plained is not possible for those who are not poets at heart. This is what Mary Karr said “Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take commu-nion, you make a community with others.” Poetry involves use of Imagination and in that sense isn’t restricted to the particular class of people ordinarily called poets. In his “A Defence of Poetry” Shelley has used poetry in wider sense that encompasses every sensitive imaginative response to the world. When you leap up on seeing a child smile, a bird sing, sun rise or stars shine, that is po-etry. Poetry is “awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.” It has been well said that “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.” Poetry seeks, as Formalist school points out, to defamiliarize the world and thereby makes it liv-able, meaningful. Religion and mysticism also are directed at reclaiming awareness of Reality. In fact sorrow is distance from reality as Simone Weil put it, and poetry gives us access to reality and not an escape from it. “Poetry is not only dream and vi-sion; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives” as

Audre Lorde noted. Edith Sitwell said that poetry is the dei-fication of reality. I think more proper expression is sacralisation of reality and the proper language then is that of myth. Fiction is true in human terms though in non-human scientific terms, it falls short of correspondence to facts. And humans need hu-man truths to keep living and that is why myths are so significant to human culture and it is another function of poetry to make accessible mythic truth. Recovering poetic dimension of our lives would put an end to poverty that exists amongst the rich more than the official poor. This is what probably explains Rilke when he said “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.” Hazlitt put the same point thus: “He who has contempt for poetry, can-not have much respect for himself, or for anything else.” So if you find anyone who ignorant of poetry, have pity on him and help him/her to treat cataract of the eye of soul. What distinguishes the poet’s way of see-ing the world from the non-poetic way? Wallace Stevens answers succinctly “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” Although religious way of seeing the world ultimately con-verges with this poetic way – and aesthetic and mystical impulses are united to begin with – many in the modern world would resist religious label and embrace “conversion” to the Way of the poet – it is the poet who shows the track of fugitive gods as Heidegger seeks to emphasize. Thus even Russell can say: “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.” Eliot points out why we need poetry: “Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, un-named feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.” Poetry saves by helping escape the person-ality through love that the poet invokes and evokes and this saves us from life’s sting as Neruda would say elsewhere. Poetry sells beauty and wonder of being and in the holy sanctuary of our own being accessible to those who have transformed ego to let the other seep in and universalize consciousness that is a joy and serenity of spirit attaining which is, in a way, the end of ethic. Poetry is an alchemical art – alchemy of happiness – which is the common project of religion, mysticism and philosophy as well. P.S Poetry helped save the faith of no less a person than Iqbal. After reading likes of Hafiz and Bedil and Wordsworth and Holderlin and Rilke one can’t afford conventional cut and dry atheism. Something of the Sacred invoked in and evoked by the Romantic poetry finds believers amongst new atheists such as Dawkins. Art and nature are reve-lations even for the secularists and understanding them aright leads one to the border of Book centric revealed religions. If one is truly a poet, one is a believer of a sort. Poets show to those who suppos-edly don’t know God or religion the path to heaven.

The author can be reached at: [email protected]

FICTION 09THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


IdealSYED ZEESHAN FAZIL

“No,no,no………This is madness. Today only a few people have some suspicions, but the way you behave , I am sure one day you will be a pronounced offender. Ah, how bad it would be…It will be difficult to

face people. Your character, family prestige …ev-erything will be gone. “ Now please tell me: why don’t you stop thinking about Naseer Sir? You better listen to me. Naseer Sir is retiring ( from government ser-vice) in few years time, and you are so young…it’s madness…you would only ruin yourself !” While Saba was seething and giving her mind to her, Taranum was only staring at the door of the staff-room . She was , as if wanting the door to open, waiting for Naseer Sir to come out… Saba just grabbed and shook her.” Here I am talking with you and you seem to be lost in your own make-believe world!.” Startled, Taranum just regained her poise and looked at Saba with all the innocence- “did you say something to me?”Amazed, but also sad, Saba murmured :“Well, this is all futile...” Looking at Saba, Taranum couldn’t help but laugh it out. With seriousness written all over her face, Saba said: “Look Taranum, I am your friend, much more than your sister, and after thinking it out very seriously, I would suggest that you better stop thinking about Naseer Sir. It is a very tricky and thorny path and better not tread it.” Smiling at Saba’s empathy, Taranum put her arm around Saba’s shoulder, and said, “Saba I swear, I am helpless. I can’t help it. Naseer has come to become the sole aim and focus of my life...” Without letting Taranum complete her sentence, Saba said, “Taranum your Dad wouldn’t let it happen...” Giving it a thought, Taranum said, “He wouldn’t go against my wishes. Thus far he has never ever gone against me. He would do any-thing for me. He has been both Mom and Dad to me; he can’t undermine my likes, my wishes, my desire...” “Look Saba, Naseer Sir too is a single; well, he may be a bit older but it hardly makes any difference. He looks still so young, as agile and energetic as anyone even less than his age. He is so handsome. He is like a challenge to me and after a great deal of thinking I have taken up this challenge ...” After hearing all this from Taranum, Saba just felt so sad. “Now, I am afraid of you, and I curse the day when you fell ill during the college picnic, which is when Naseer Sir got this chance ...” “How mean of you! ... you are cursing and I am just praising the day for that was when I got the chance to get so close with him. That night when he came to drop me home, he even met my Dad; and afterwards Dad and I talked for quite a while about Naseer Sir.” “You remember Saba, when two of us came to the university for admissions, and the last date for check-in had already gone by...? It was you only who introduced me to Naseer Sir at that crossing across the lawns. Naseer took great

pains and it is only because of him that I got the admission. Had I not met him on that day, today like most of other girls of my ilk, I would have been sitting home, imprisoned within the four wall of my house.” Saba could see Taranum’s eyes turn-ing moist while she was recounting all this. She thought she better change the topic so as to change the mood. “Ah, you are mad, I was just kidding. Well, this heart is a thing... it takes wondrous flights, dreams of impossible things...” “No my dear, you can’t just laugh at my dream. You better fall in love yourself first, then you will come to know what it’s all about!” Saba replied: “You know life is like a bus station, where you meet so many strangers who are head-ed for different destinations. So why ruin calm by falling in love with a stranger?” Taranum said: “Saba do you think that we have met just to part? Well, this is not how it is. What if the classes will be off in couple of months; after exams are over, I will enroll for the PhD, and mind it, I won’t let it go, until I succeed in my ‘mission. And yes Saba, I just forgot to tell you that yesterday I met Naseer Sir at the library and he told me that this Sunday he is coming to visit us at home. You just pray to God that Dad too like him…”Hearing all this, Saba said, “Taranum you tell me, have you and Naseer sir ever talked about your relationship?” Taranum couldn’t hold herself at this question. Putting her arm around Saba’s shoulder once again, she said, “Now here you are ... You keep telling me that I talk a lot. And yes I do. But... here the situation is entirely different. After going through scores of romantic novels and memo-rizing lots of love quotes and what not, when it comes to speaking with Naseer Sir, I can’t say a word. I am so choked that it’s like every thought and each feeling gets stuck in my throat. Well, I have heard this is what happens when you are so deeply in love ... Now you would ask what about Naseer Sir. Well, he is a professor, and ever so for-mal. But yes yesterday in the staff-room while he was going through my notes, he told me ‘Tara-num, you are a loving girl. I wish I could keep you forever in front of my eyes.’ “Saba, hearing this, I can’t tell my heart skipped a beat. And yes, yesterday after the class was over, I walked to Naseer Sir in the corridor and narrated a verse and sought its meaning. He smiled back and asked me to come over to his room. There he explained the meaning to me in such a manner that I felt all that was needed was a romantic song, then and there. Like a music mae-stro, he mesmerizes me and makes me sing to his tunes... “I am sure tomorrow morning the sun of my love will shrine bright and hot, and on Monday entire campus will come to know about my love reaching its goal.” Gathering the books around her, Saba said to Taranum: “Ok, let s wait until Monday. And Taranum, it is already getting too hot here, let’s move... and yeah, it seems that all the profes-sors, including your Naseer Sir are just enjoying a siesta in the staffroom.” Laughing at this joke, Taranum and Saba got up from the lawns and went to cafeteria for tea. Around 3 o’clock, Taranum met Prof. Naseer. Prof. Naseer: Helo Taranum, how are you? Taranum (feeling shy) I am fine, courtesy your good wishes. Prof. Naseer. So, what all is happening? Taranum: Nothing much. , and yeah... tomorrow

is Sunday. Prof. Naseer: Yes I know it’s Sunday... Oh yes I remember... Taranum: Well, I will wait tomorrow morning. Prof. Naseer: Ok, I am also going somewhere and once I am done, I will come over. I promise... Taranum just smiled and with a marked shyness just started staring in the ground. Prof. Naseer: Well Taranum, your bus is here. Taranum looked at the bus and then wished good-bye to Naseer, who started walking towards the library. Next day, Prof Naseer Ahmed met Taranum’s Dad. Both sat in the drawing room and started chatting while house-helps served tea and snacks. Upstairs in her bedroom, Taranum was, as if lost in her loving dreams, all the time waiting for her Dad to call her down. After chatting there with Taranum’s Dad brushed her head with his hand and handing her an envelope, he said , “My dear, new you are get-ting married. Prof. Naseer had come with a mar-riage proposal and here it is…” As if on Cloud-nine, Taranum just took the envelope and galloped to her bedroom. It was a dream come true…, she couldn’t believe every-thing has just worked out so perfectly fine… She opened the envelope and besides some money found a photograph and a letter in it. Naseer looked fairly young in the picture and Taranum thought it might have been taken a few years back, during his young days. With this pic-ture in her hands, she was about to take a flight across the moon with her beau when suddenly she thought of the accompanying letter. With all the jubilation at her command, she started read-ing it “Dear Taranum, Three years back I was transferred here from Mumbai and ever-since I was looking for a girl like you. My wish was granted on the day when you came to me for admission and I was able to help. On the day of picnic, I got to be close with you to know you better. Upon return I met you Dad, and we have since become very good friends. Today we are entering into a relationship. Everybody in the university praises you and I am so impressed that I am about to fulfill a promise I had made with you - that ‘I want to forever keep you in front of me’. Besides you I am also impressed by the gentleness of your Dad. After thinking a great deal, I had proposed something to your Dad and today he gave his nod. From here I am straight-away driving to the airport to receive my son Ta-brez, who is coming from the USA. I have been both parents and friend to Tabrez after his Mom died. I want him to prosper and make a big name. He is a doctor, a cancer specialist, and I have cho-sen you for him. I want you to become my daugh-ter-in-law. We may be no match to your family in wealth and status, but I assure you that you would get unlimited love in my home.

Yours Naseer Ahmed.”

Syed Zeeshan Fazil is a renowned writer and au-thor of several books. The story is an excerpt from his book “STRANGER ON BLACK HIGHWAY” ( A collection of short stories)

COVER STORY 10THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


Back to Village -2 Governance at the Doorstep

The second phase of Government’s flagship ‘Back to Village’ (B2V2) outreach pro-gramme aims to provide governance at the doorsteps of the rural populace and to

enlist community participation commenced across the Jammu and Kashmir.

In a first of its kind, the Government of Jam-mu and Kashmir has embarked on an ambi-tious and extensive programme of reaching out to the people at the grassroots level to create in the rural masses an earnest desire

for decent standard of living. The ‘Back to Village’ programme is aimed to involve the people of the state and government officials in a joint effort to deliver the mission of equitable development. The programme is aimed at energizing Panchayats and directing development efforts in rural areas through community participation. As part of this programme, civil servants will have to reach out to each Panchayat of the State, where they will stay for a specific period to interact and obtain feedback from the grassroots so as to tailor government efforts in improving delivery of village-specific services. The ‘Back to Village’ programme has been conceived with the objective of ensuring that developmental initia-tives are built on the feedback and cooperation of the people, thus being more result oriented with greater probability of success than those which are top down. The programme revolves around the con-cept that while the official machinery has to guide and assist, the primary responsibility to improve local conditions rests with the people themselves. Therefore, they must be encouraged to own a pro-gramme so that benefits are maximized. The life of a person living in a rural area is not cut into segments in the way the Government activities are prone to be. The approach at the village level, therefore, has to be a coordinated, touching all aspects of village life. Such an approach has to be made, not through a multiplicity of departmental officials, but through Panchayats. The second phase of Government’s flag-ship ‘Back to Village’ (B2V2) outreach programme aimed to provide governance at the doorsteps of the rural populace and to enlist community partic-ipation commenced across the Jammu and Kash-mir on Monday. The week-long public outreach campaign would be more intense than the earlier phase as it shall mainly focus on empowering Panchayats, follow up of B2V1, 100 per cent coverage of ben-eficiary oriented schemes and doubling income of rural people by giving more impetus to the rural economy The programme will see more than 5000 gazetted officers and 657 UT and Directorate Level officers visit their assigned Panchayats to receive the first-hand appraisal reports at the grassroots level about the developmental works. The officers shall prepare a report card and critical gap anal-ysis at the end of their 2-day visit to a village on a pre-circulated format. Lieutenant Governor, Advisors, Chief Secretary and other senior officers will be visiting various Halqa Panchayats in both Kashmir and Jammu Divisions between 25 to 30 November. One of the primary objectives of the B2V-2, which represents institutionalization of ‘Back to Village’ programme, is to handhold the Panchayats and to assist them wherever they face

any impediments in using the funds devolved for development based on local priorities to further strengthen grassroots democracy and participato-ry development. The programme will also assess the prog-ress of resolution of priority issues of a Panchayat for which Rs 5 Crore have already been released to each District. Emphasis will also be laid on cre-ating awareness in the Apple Districts of Kashmir Division during the Programme about the Special Market Intervention Price Scheme for procure-ment of Apple crop. Every line department has been assigned a specific role to play during this government ini-tiative and the frontline workers of each depart-ment shall proactively participate in this unique effort to energize Panchayats to realize a total transformation in the rural profile. The week-long activity will primarily witness Government-public interactions, inau-gurations of development works, awareness pro-grammes on welfare schemes and effects of Sin-gle-use plastic, convening of Gram Sabhas, public grievances redressal camps besides seeking public suggestions and feedback. Senior officers of the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir on Monday faced piquant sit-uation at many places during the second phase of Government’s flagship ‘Back to Village’ (B2V2) outreach programme. The ambitious programme was aimed to provide governance at the doorsteps of the rural populace and to enlist community participation.Ironically, at many places common people de-manded action taken report in response to griev-ances highlighted by them during the first phase of

the rural outreach programme. Interacting with the media, several local residents claimed despite listing their problems and discussing the ground situation no follow up action was taken by the various departments on ground zero after the first phase of the programme.Government spokesman claimed, “the week-long public outreach campaign would be more intense than the earlier phase as it shall mainly focus on empowering Panchayats, follow up of B2V1, 100 per cent coverage of beneficiary oriented schemes and doubling income of rural people by giving more impetus to the rural economy”. During this week, more than 5000 ga-zetted officers and 657 UT and Directorate Level officers are scheduled to visit their assigned Pan-chayats to receive the first-hand appraisal reports at the grassroots level about the developmental works. After gathering the feedback from the common masses, the officers have been directed to prepare a report card and critical gap analysis at the end of their 2-day visit to a village on a pre-cir-culated format. Lieutenant Governor, Advisors, Chief Secretary and other senior officers are also sched-uled to visit various Halqa Panchayats in both Kashmir and Jammu Divisions between 25th of November and 30th November, 2019.

FAITH 11THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI

The Kartarpur Corridor is a miracle. This safe passageway between two gurdwaras in the two Panjabs — Dera Baba Nanak in India’s Punjab and Gurdwara Darbar Sahib, also known as Kartarpur Sahib,

in Pakistan’s Panjab — is the political equivalent of a heart bypass. It revives, renews, pulses dormant tissues to life. The opening of such a line of trust across the border by the two countries would have been noteworthy at any time. But the enabling of Indi-an pilgrims to move four kilometres into Pakistan without visas at this time is an almost unbelievable act of faith. India-Pakistan suspicion, invective and belligerence have reached and remain in a crescen-do. Never quiet or at peace, the border seethes with tension today. And the ‘any-minute’ fear of terror-ist attacks has made war a chronic possibility. In such a time, for India and Pakistan to find and lift a seam of trust from the slough of animosity belongs to the category of the miraculous.Who do we need to thank for this? To start with, the then prime ministers of India and Pakistan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, who first proposed, in 1998, and then inked, in 1999, an agreement on the Corridor. Vajpayee is no more and Sharif, a prisoner in Pa-kistan, is fighting for his life today. But their initia-tive has stayed alive, defying deep crises. Neither of them is Sikh, neither dependent on Sikh constitu-encies for power; yet they saw this idea, long moot-ed by devout Sikhs, as being eminently reasonable, eminently apolitical, and wholly unprejudicial to their countries’ respective bilateral standpoints on other contentious issues. In other words, they saw it as a stand-alone felicity. And they set the idea on track. It needs to be noted, however, that this pathbreaking move was presaged by three former prime ministers of India — Rajiv Gandhi, who laid unwavering stress on Saarc summits being held annually; Deve Gowda, who asked his diplomatic officers to develop a culture of dialogue with Pa-kistan; and I.K. Gujral, who moved towards cre-ating an atmosphere for issues-specific multi-level dialogue. Gujral’s role is particularly notable for his policy, rather inaptly called ‘Doctrine’, which recognized that while India could (and according to him, should) dispense with reciprocity in its re-lations with other Saarc neighbours, it cannot do so with Pakistan. Gujral’s position was that with Pakistan direct talks based on complete frankness, on the basis of strict reciprocity, were the only way forward. And in the Saarc summit in Male in 1997, he engaged with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with precisely that, face-to-face. Here were two Panja-bis talking to each other, one imagines in a mix of Panjabi and English, on their nations’ future in peace, possibly in war, or as was even even more likely, in the corrosive limbo of war-mongering and war-mindedness. Several rounds of bilateral discussions followed at the diplomatic level during Gujral’s tenure, leading to the chequered idea of ‘a com-posite dialogue’ and the emergence of eight issues to be discussed within that dialogue-frame, of which the last but not the least important was ‘pro-

motion of friendly exchanges in various fields’. In this lay the seed for the Kartarpur Corridor idea. Mutuality is another form of reciprocity and, in Gujralesque terms, the Kartarpur Corridor is a re-ciprocal ‘positive’. During this birth centenary year of I.K. Gujral, we need to acknowledge his unseen presence in the two gurdwaras and in the Corridor that links them. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also flagged the Kartarpur idea in 2004 in one of his early public speeches made in Punjab. And so when Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood by the Corridor idea and at its effectuation, likened it memorably to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, he was being both historical and contemporary. The Kartarpur Corridor idea has, there-fore, been a constant with India’s leadership. And so also has it been with that of Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan not letting his views on In-dia, so stridently expressed at the United Nations general assembly, come in the way of his commit-ment to the Corridor. But going way beyond prime ministers and governments, overarching bilateral diplomacy, we need to recognize the real ‘maker’ of the Kar-tarpur Corridor. It is none other than Guru Nanak himself. The great preceptor’s spiritual aura, the moral voltage of his personality, is what has really ‘done it’. The extraordinary hold — half a millenni-um after his death — of the first Sikh Guru on the Sikh world is what has made the Corridor possible.The devotion of the Sikhs to their preceptor has overcome the miasma of political suspicion, the risks of terrorism, of subversion, and has so im-pacted the two nation states as to make them cre-ate the Corridor. This propulsion of sheer human nobility is reminiscent of the series of unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of Word War I in the December of 1914 that came to be called the Christmas truce. But even more significantly so since, all going well, this Corridor is not meant to be a seasonal affair but a permanent arrangement.The Sikhs’ adherence to their 10 Gurus, from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, surpasses devotion and amounts to a quiet, deep passion. Nanak’s teaching of a formless Creator, his message for hate-free, greed-free and ego-free living, is not easy to follow but the Sikh community has interi-orized it in its own, very distinctive, ways of which

the langar, the highly democratic sharing of food with those in need, is the most visible expression. The spontaneous langar offered by New Zealand’s Sikh community to the kin of those killed in the Christchurch massacre gave us a moving example of this spirit. In the Kartarpur Corridor, this spirit has found geopolitical expression, creating a channel of trust but also, let us be mindful, a channel of re-sponsibility as well. Enemies of peace, foes of con-cord or, in short, terrorists and extremists of many a stripe will want to subvert the Corridor. There is no dearth of those, at either end of it. They would want to not just make the Corridor untenable but also make all trust between India and Pakistan un-workable. And so, as much as the Corridor needs to be celebrated, it also needs to be insulated — from subversion, manipulation and distortion. It is vital that a confidence-building and trust-main-taining mechanism be set up, involving peoples’ representatives, to act as the Corridor’s keeper. There is one other connected thought for India and Pakistan to share.Taxila’s archaeological sites, also in Pakistan’s Pan-jab, are a place of significance for scholars of an-cient history, including Hindu, Buddhist and Jain history. A system by which bona fide scholarly In-dian interest in visiting Taxila is rendered possible will be a great spin-off from Kartarpur.And then there is the great legacy of Indus Valley Civilization sites in both countries. A grid of safe and easy travel to bona fide students of history and archaeology in both countries needs to be set up, enabling them to visit this common legacy in the other country, not without visas perhaps but with easy-to-get visas but, more significantly, with ex-pert guidance from scholars and archaeologists in a systematic arrangement of academic mutuality. For Pakistani scholars to be able to visit Rakhi-garhi, Lothal, Dholavira et al and for their Indian counterparts to visit Harappa and Mohenjodaro would be an opportunity devoutly to be wished for.Spiritual heritage and civilizational heritage have this in common: they are seams of the timeless in contested times, redeeming the uncompeting past from the conflicted present, liquefying conflict in the vats of knowledge. ( The Telegraph )

Kartarpur Corridor: A Modern MiracleThe enabling of Indian pilgrims to enter Pakistan without visas is an

almost unbelievable act of faith

FEEDBACK 12THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


ANANYA VAJPEYI

When I was first invited to deliver this plenary address [to the An-nual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison] a few months ago, I

construed the topic given to me, “The Artistry of Free Speech in South Asia and South Asian Stud-ies”, to mean that I could take up examples of free speech, dissenting voices and discourses of resis-tance emanating from South Asia in recent years in the face of increasing political authoritarianism. I imagined I would allude to some of my favour-ite artists, writers, journalists and scholars, those who expressed themselves with the greatest artist-ry, with courage and with conviction despite the shrinking space for democratic self-expression, and the disappearance of habits of critical engage-ment and informed appreciation in a wider public.It never occurred to me that “free speech” would ever come to be an empty or nearly-empty set; nor that “artistry” would be reduced to its crudest form as the art of survival, finding ways to merely continue to live and function in our societies in the face of a deadly combination of oppression from the external environment and the failure of inspiration within. I did not foresee the way in which many of us have been gasping for breath this past summer after the elections in India, nor the vast zones of impenetrable silence, of the state of exception to the rule of law, that have descended upon places like Kashmir and Assam in just the last months. I had planned to speak about banned books and cancelled concerts; censored films and exiled painters; brave activists and vicious trolls; indomitable poets and their ruthless assassins; online campaigns and real-life protest demon-strations; innocent prisoners and cruel jailors. I thought I’d broach the institutional and structural crises in the social sciences, humanities and arts, with my focus always on how to beat the odds and carry on as though negotiating an obstacle course.Crisis of freedom It did not strike me that I would need to understand and explain the pall of fear and the ab-ject aphasia that have befallen us on the subconti-nent, particularly in India, where I am from and where I have lived for the most part – conditions that feel unfamiliar and frightening in the world’s largest democracy, with a normally noisy public sphere and a boisterous arts scene. I did not expect to have to talk about our utter inability to respond sensibly to what seems to be happening to our polity, our languages, our me-dia and our consciousness. Such a profound cri-sis of freedom, of speech and of art, I would now reckon, has occurred for the first time in the his-tory of modern India, including even the twinned crises of self and sovereignty swa-raj during the anti-colonial struggle that I tried to delineate at some length in my earlier work. Let me begin with a confession of sorts.

Throughout my life, I have taken my freedom as an Indian, as a citizen of India, for granted. This assumption of a baseline of inalienable liberty has been tempered for sure, with the knowledge of the many ways in which my freedom is both enabled and constrained by my gender, my religion, my caste, my class and so on. Working for so many years on Ambedkar has inevitably qualified my ideas of fundamental freedom, equality and justice forever, given the hierarchical and unequal nature of India’s caste society. I have also grown up learn-ing how fellow-South Asians in other countries, like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal have had much less of a taste of free-dom, democracy and self-rule, and much more visceral experiences of war and of want, relative to us India – or so we were taught to think. As I became a professional scholar of South Asian history, I realised more and more how recent, fragile and contingent an artefact free-dom is in all of our cultures on the subcontinent. I have been facing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Indian freedom in the form of the “problem”, as it is called, of Kashmir, which to me, both as an individual and as a scholar of history, presents a daily challenge to my faith in a certain vaunted, cherished and fiercely defended the idea of India. (Now of course the writing is on the wall, even for those millions of Indians who have been wilfully oblivious of the conflict in Kashmir for the past three decades or seven decades, however you do the math). And lastly, thanks to the vagaries of my own circumstances, I have spent a lot of the past two years living in Istanbul. In Turkey, I realised for the first time how democracy can be hollowed out without diversity; how secularism, if it be-comes fundamentalist, can be as harmful as reli-gious extremism; how recurrent militarism can undermine even the most glorious struggle against empire; what happens to the arts and to academia when there is a severe rupture between the past and the present (as between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic); how a great cosmopol-itan civilisation lasting over millennia can be evis-cerated and ultimately destroyed by contemporary ideologies of majoritarian ethno-nationalism, il-liberal democracy and right-wing populism.INDIAN EXCEPTIONALISMEach day that I spent in Turkey I thought, as an Indian: there but for the grace of Gandhi, Ambed-kar and Nehru goes my country, but we are saved by our liberal Constitution, we are not prone to military dictatorships, we know how to live with difference and we do not tend to purge others from our midst. As a good disciple of Ashis Nan-dy I said to myself that we know how to “host the otherness of the other” in our midst, to be ‘hos-pitable’ to those unlike ourselves. From my desk at a picture-window in Cihangir overlooking the beautiful Bosporus, I kept repeating this mantra of Indian exceptionalism to myself, even though the pile of evidence challenging my intrinsic bias towards India grew a little higher each day.

Meanwhile, friends and colleagues in the Turkish media, journalism, arts and academia seemed to me to be far worse off than we were on the subcontinent. But the gap between them and us was closing fast. Now, the current Turkish offen-sive against the Kurds in Syria has painful echoes of the Indian government’s actions in Kashmir. Levels of violence may be different, the interna-tionalisation of the two scenarios may be different, but the impulse of statist aggression against a mi-nority seeking independence and the precipitation of a civil war-like situation are similar in the Turk-ish / Kurdish and the Indian / Kashmiri cases. Today, after the parliamentary election of May 2019 has delivered its verdict, and two-and-a-half months have passed since the siege of Kashmir began, and Muslims as well as other mi-norities are in no uncertain terms demoted to sec-ond-class citizenship or to outright statelessness under the current regime, I am sure that many of you, Indians and non-Indians alike, South Asia specialists all, share my anxiety and alarm about what is happening in and to India.You might be worrying very concretely about your jobs and fel-lowships, your research visas and OCI cards, your archival access and ethnographic mobility, your book contracts and speaking engagements, your colleagues who are struggling to keep afloat, your relatives whom you can no longer talk to, and your students who have a bleak future. You, like me and many of my friends, might be scrabbling about trying to bone up on your Nazi, Fascist and Soviet history, seeking to learn about intellectuals and artists in other con-texts of totalitarianism and tyranny who got out, couldn’t get out, survived to tell the tale, resisted, compromised, fled or lost their lives. As you do this you might be saying to yourself, this is surely a nightmare, from which we will all wake up tomor-row morning. Such things do not happen in India, nor for that matter in the United States.CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEIn my lecture this afternoon, I would like to pro-pose something like this: it is not sufficient any more to be defiant in the face of censorship. To resort to the methods of civil disobedience, princi-pled non-violence and in whatever updated form, Gandhian satyagraha. (Gandhi is on my mind be-cause it is the 150th anniversary of his birth this month.) To look to the opposition and the courts to deliver us from injustice. To sign petitions and write articles in whatever remains of a free press. To use television and social media as active agents and not just passive victims. It is just not enough.What we need is a much deeper enquiry into free-dom, both political and existential. A more fun-damental exploration of the purposes and engines of art in our time. And more than anything, a re-configuration of language such that we may speak of what is unspeakable. Towards these admitted-ly daunting ends, based on the little that I know about the past, I will suggest a few preliminary steps. As I was pondering how to address

The Artistry of Free Speech in South Asia: Politics is

Inescapable But It Isn’t The End-All of Art

It is possible to be an artist, an intellectual, in a mode that is not necessarily or overtly oppositional and combative.

FEEDBACK 13THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


such profound matters as the definition of free-dom, the purposes of art, and the potentialities of language, it struck me that perhaps the one phenomenon in India that has been markedly on the rise in the past five years, and that causes the greatest disquiet to those of us who are con-cerned about the moral health of our polity, i.e., lynching, would allow me to touch on all three questions – of freedom, art and language – at one site. It’s distressing, to say the least, to hear about the lynching of ordinary Indians day af-ter day, mostly men, mostly Muslims and Dal-its, invariably in no position to defend them-selves against mob violence. It is a measure of how far we have fallen that we cannot begin to think about more abstract questions of creativity, imagination and form without first confronting a type of violence that is so gruesome as to destroy the bodily integrity of the victim, traumatise the community to which that victim belongs, and severely impair the protocols of coexistence be-tween different communities within our society.TWO DIMENSIONSLynching in the shadow of the Hindu Right has principally two dimensions: that of religion, so that its targets are often Muslims; and that of caste, so that its targets are equally likely to be Dalits. It is often but not always associated with the politics of cow and beef, which again takes us back to non-Hindu and / or low-caste com-munities who are targeted. That both aggressors and victims are male suggests that we have to distinguish lynching from a proximate phenom-enon like rape or gang-rape, where victims are overwhelmingly female and perpetrators can belong to any community, not just the majority community. Lynching in India today is meant to be theatrical and dramatic; it is a spectator sport, a contact sport, a blood sport, but also in this era, a cyber sport, a game played in virtual reality and relayed online; it is staged in order to be circulat-ed through WhatsApp, Twitter, and other social media. Note by the way that the particular fea-ture of lynching that would be familiar to Amer-icans – to hang the victim from a tree until his or her neck snaps – is not the defining or necessary form that this act takes in the present-day Indian context. The gruesome character of this violence (of lynching) is not mitigated or normalised by its repetition. Rather, it becomes ever more grue-some the more often it occurs. We are shocked by it not just the first time but each time, because it reminds us of our creaturely existence, our “bare life”, as it were, our vulnerability as bearers of bodies when the vestments of human rights, political safeguards and social relations are torn away, leaving us exposed to injury and annihila-tion at the hands of others. I am sorry that we have to go to the point of the utter breakdown of all self-expression in order to begin to find our way once more, back to the place of freedom of expression. There’s been a discussion just in the past few days in the Indian public sphere, prompted by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mo-han Bhagwat’s remark that there is no word for lynching in Indian languages, and Home Minis-ter Amit Shah’s remark, that “human rights” need to be redefined in an Indian context, where we see an attempt to hide the realities of majoritar-ian mob violence behind the fig leaf of cultural difference: White people lynch black people, but Hindus do not do the same thing to Muslims, be-cause Hindus have no word for “lynching”. Besides, Indians shouldn’t really expect “human rights” any way, given the Western ori-gin of that idea and the practices associated with it. As we decolonise, let us reject the colonial construct and Western import of “human rights” as well. (Note how easily this sort of argument infects the discourse of women’s rights and femi-nism as well). Meanwhile cow protection, for us pious, vegetarian, Hindus, is our dharmic duty. Mus-lims, who might work in the meat industry, and have the sanction of Islam to consume beef, and

Dalits who work in the leather industry and also consume beef as a part of their diet, will not be allowed recourse to their fundamental rights as Indian citizens, that would automatically guar-antee them protection and redress in the event of violence directed at them on the basis of their religious or caste identity.COUNTING NON-CIT-IZENSIt is to this end that biopolitical structures of mass enumeration, classification, surveillance and control, like the Universal Identification System “Aadhar” and the National Register of Citizens, have been put in to place by successive Bhara-tiya Janata Party governments. These are de-signed as much to count citizens as to count out non-citizens; to exclude as to include. In Assam but also in other states where there are signifi-cant non-Hindu populations, whether Muslim, Christian or tribal, the Home Minister has made it clear that their status as citizens is dubious and subject to revision or annulment. Only Hindus, and other “Indic” groups like Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, are to be regarded as uncontroversial for the purported coincidence of their historical origins, community identity and citizenship sta-tus. At one level, citizenship resides in and flows from the Constitution of India. But it is also the case that for millions of Indians, their citizen-ship originates in historical events of extraordi-nary violence and extended duration: Partition, migration, population transfer, the integration of princely states, the linguistic reorganisation of states – processes that begin the mid-1940s and extend not just into the 1970s with the creation of Bangladesh, but arguably, to the present, keeping in mind recent developments from say Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to Jammu and Kashmir.Now we arrive at a juncture where, on the one hand, a Muslim or a Dalit can be lynched at any moment at any location, and on the other hand, the Indian state systematically and across par-ty-lines and administrations conducts extended counter-insurgency operations against a range of populations, from Kashmiris in the Valley to tribals in Chattisgarh to separatist groups in Na-galand and Manipur. Going further than previous adminis-trations, as is their wont, the Hindu supremacists currently in power propose to incarcerate new-ly-defined “non-citizens”, “illegal immigrants” and “stateless persons” in massive detention camps – not somewhere hidden and out of the way, mind you, say in the distant eastern high-lands of Assam, but really just outside Mumbai. At its most capacious, a zone of exception to the rule of law, of the suspension of democrat-ic rights, of a state of emergency indefinite in its temporal extension, need not look like a camp at all – it could encompass 8 million Kashmiris in-side their homes, in their villages and towns, for 75 days and counting, for example.PROTO-FASCIST PROCLIVITIESOf course, pesky garden variety “anti-nationals” found anywhere and everywhere in India (espe-cially in universities – and there are many such in this very room) are invited to “go back to Pa-kistan”, or else can always be sent off to regular jails, and denied even basic habeas corpus rights. Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde, Vernon Gonsalves and many more find themselves banned from the public sphere, abandoned by the criminal justice system, and left without legal redress. When Perry Anderson had pointed out the authoritarian, indeed proto-Fascist procliv-ities on the Indian state and the Indian project of nation-building back in 2012, many of us, not least myself, took exception to his extremely critical, even judgmental reading of the history of modern India. I personally thought it a mis-reading coming from an embittered left perspec-tive. Alas it has taken just five years for the Hindu Right to not just uncover but also to legitimate and mainstream these dark tendencies repressed by the liberal, secular and democratic ideals of India’s Constitution. Today we travel with Jean Améry, Theo-dor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Paul Célan, Sim-

one Weil and WG Sebald, asking if literature is still possible and art still makes sense; wondering how the abject negation of human dignity may be reconciled with any expression of human creativ-ity; perplexed at how the liberation of the self can occur through the annihilation of the other. BALANCING ART AND FREEDOMTo close where I began, in Istanbul, as luck would have it, my husband and I rented an apartment one floor down from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. In talking with him, browsing his mas-sive library, hanging about in his writing space, admiring his photographs and visiting his muse-um, learning the intricacies of his literary prac-tice, making our acquaintance with his security detail in the building, and having some glimpse, as neighbours and younger friends whom he liked to indulge, of his everyday life, we came to see how the balance between art and freedom, criticism and constraint, plays out in Turkey dif-ferently from India. In the same vicinity lived the legend-ary photographer, originally from Armenia, now deceased, Ara Güler, whom we saw on occasion around the neighbourhood just before he passed away, and the film-maker Nuri Ceylan, whose cinematic oeuvre we became addicted to though we hesitated like teenagers to go up and talk to him in the corner café. What I learnt from these encounters with the living masters of Turkish life, art and letters – however much I was reliant on transla-tion and interpretation, and whatever nuances I undoubtedly missed because of being an outsider to the culture – was that there are ways to grasp freedom and make it one’s own, to express one-self freely and surprisingly – it is possible to be an artist, be an intellectual, be a thinking, feel-ing and moral human being in a mode that is not necessarily or overtly oppositional and combat-ive. When Peter Handke won his Nobel Prize for Literature this year, I couldn’t help but contrast his defence of the Serbian genocide against Bosnians during the Balkan wars of the 1990s with Orhan Pamuk’s open criticism and condemnation of the Turkish genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century. (Inciden-tally, I myself attended some sessions of the tri-al of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague in 2004, the only time I have been in a room as a mass-murderer, despite living in Delhi for the past many years – an experience I shall never forget.) Politics is inescapable but politics is not the be-all and end-all of art. Had that been the case, a Pamuk and a Ceylan would be in jail or dead, or at the very least they would be dimin-ished in mind and spirit, given the political cir-cumstances in their country now and for the past many decades. Instead they have found a modus vivendi, but not just that, they have found that most precious of gifts, inspiration. Seeing this at close quarters but without the preconceptions and baggage that I bring to reading artefacts in a context of cultural politics in my own country, I found to be a deeply mov-ing and enlightening experience. It really forced me to think again what it is that we do when we write, when we sing, when we paint, when we take a photograph or make a film. What do we do for ourselves and what do we do for the society in which we live. I am not very articulate about it yet, I fear, but I think I learnt something new.

(The Scroll)

Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Repub-lic: The Political Foundations of Modern India. This is a slightly edited version of a speech Ananya Vajpeyi made at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on October 19.

BOOK REVIEW 14THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


Birds of Different Feathers

Poetry is a voice, a charming accent and the poet is a celestial creature. His thought may come out as coarse, but he knows the attire he has to wrap it. The silken thread that designs the gown of a

poem is no way devised in the laboratory of rea-son, but in a little hut enlightened by emotions. Hence, poetry must be felt. Prose poetry has be-come a trend in this era where pure poetry has turn out to be thin for reasons many. If we anal-yse poetry, two sections are noticeable: Open Po-etic Form and Close Poetic Form. OPF has been approved by almost all the English poets of this era for the raison d’être that it takes along prose which offers a genuine free-dom to the poet to compose his verses. And second that it doesn’t entail the neces-sities of CPF which is truly based on techniques. Liber-ation from the clutches of set rules, prose poetry has turned out to be most com-mon form. Birds of Different Feather by Dr. Koshy AV is an anthology framing an interesting theme Dr. Koshy AV is a Associate Professor in the English Department of Jazan University, Saudi Arabia and runs several lit-erary groups under the title The Significant League. Dr. Koshy seems too much fas-cinated by birds, hence very rightly OPF best suits the book for the reason birds sing in wide-ranging tunes for the diverse populace. These flying machines are free to sing, free to move and free to feel, therefore the originality of their nat-ural instincts in the poems have been well preserved that vividly confirms that the author has not distorted the voice of birds by opting CPF. The move is apprecia-ble. The book is published by Authors Press under ISBN 978-93-88008-41-9. The book covers a wide range of harmoniously selected poems but the un-derlying current somehow is similar at least in texture. On the tree of Dr. Koshy’s world one can find The Cuckoo and the poet sharing the experience of their journeys like laying the eggs in the nests of other species and sharing a poetic plight with the contemporary world that has lost the rhythm of merriment. On a limb The Black Drango along with Feathered Serpent deity of ancient Meso-america are revealing the secret of Krishna as rain cloud to take the poet back to his past when he has experienced a newly born Quetzalcoatl. A fas-cinating image of The Crow despite its being la-beled as scavenger, Dr. Koshy has brought at fore very sanguine portrait of otherwise black crow by signifying a striking visual imagery to appreci-

ate the Creator for administrating intelligence as bright spark in its eye. On the highest branch of Dr. Koshy’s tree perches The Bird of Death pass-ing on the very intense message that pride hath a fall and that before one turns dust one has to raise someone from it. The Eagle of Dr. Koshy seems too much favouring the wind to explore the peak of excellence to leave behind the sick mind of a man that tosses him down from the royal status. Black Swan’s imaginations suffer when in realistic world; the bird was only lured to materialize the projection of its mind but the insensitivity in the world around turns the bird only what the nature finds the best in it. Raven on the tree of Dr. Koshy

is not the kind of Raven what the bards have set up as symbol of peculiarity, but a powerful tool to reveal the secret of perching. A poem Today, the Birds are Silent has taken us into the cosmos where barbed wire went deep into the bird’s breast revealing the political scenario we are living in, wherein, in the disguise of security human blood seems useless and thin. Weather it is The Phoe-nix, Swan, Sparrow or Nightingale, the author has brilliantly used the imagery to carry us into his own world where his imaginations are hatched to the extent of promoting his pulsating experience. Dr. Koshy has emerged as a serious bird watcher

from the balcony of his own house where poetry and prose serve his pen to diffuse whatever he ob-serves into the literary society. There are some poems where CPF has been employed like Sonnet for the Self and Hai-ku thus making this book an amalgamation of both poetic forms, apart from these poems, a prose Outside my House is a Guava Tree makes it a wonderful read. Rich Imagery, apt phrases, flow and delicacy has turned these little poems an authoritative contribution for poetry lovers. The ease with which these verses have been woven re-quires great skill of which the poet has not let us down. This uniqueness has perhaps been injected

into verses by making it very close to prose. Style and diction in the poems have added a typical Dr.Koshy’s distinctiveness, line break has judicious been used. Metaphors are melodious, ver-sification varies and brevity has been employed to captivate the attention of the reader. Per-sonification and alliterations besides shorter syllables have turned these bird songs majes-tic. On one hand the freedom of thought is well maintained not to let go the flow of imag-inations but on the other hand brevity has been taken care of. It would have been a regal song book had the rhyme scheme been thought of to represent these birds in the best of their form, but Dr. Koshy has moved like a wind to carry these birds out of cages for some other rea-son. I wish the bard may in future find more such birds to broaden our horizon. Let these birds sing, let these songs touch the profundity of our pre-oc-cupied ears and let the feathers sustain the flight to beat the hunter’s tool. Dr.Koshy’s voice has initiated many fallen angels who in despondency have lost sensitivities owing to invasion of machines and mechanized might. Let the isolated frames read the birds and listen to their romantic rituals of which the author is advocating in this col-lection.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mushtaq Barq is a translator of the Book “Verses of Wahab Khar” .His works are published in various publications.

POETIC EXPRESSION 15THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


I don’t believe in love, nor it’s healing power

I never preferred the thought of being chained

To a thought or an existenceI’m cold and tired. Scarred

and woundedMy heart bleeds everyday.

It craves for lifeI wear a mask of hatred,

of pain and angerBut beneath my demeanour

lies the other meAn incurable romantic at war

with the infiniteA reckless lover and a careless poet

Who breathes every time when he seesThe love in him reflected in others eyes

Searching for a gleam of their own.I yearn for the disease and

not the cureI crave for the love that’ll

sound me for lifeI want to be shunned and

cursed foreverI want my love to soar the skies

To discover those forbidden galaxiesI want my love to be loved in return

By the devil who’ll be just as same as me

Who’ll kiss me at the hour of duskWhen the universe will lay

in total darknessI want him to hold my hands,

look into my eyesAnd be my damned love

With each passing breath, I saw my life

slip awayWith each passing mo-

ment, I saw our fear grow

The oppressors had grown almightyThe oppressed silent

My land was becoming an empty vesselAnd my people were drying out

But in a desperate clench of your fingers

I found hope to escape the ghoulsThis country of ghosts was no

longer my homeI ran and ran as time stood still

Hovering above me like a giant DragonMocking my fear, disapproving

my loyaltyI ran and reached the blood red sea

I looked afar and saw him standing there

Moses smiled and came to my aidHe hit the waters and the

mighty partedI took a breath and ran and ran

Little realizing that I left something behind

I had your clench but not your handThe waters regrouped and

I looked for youYou looked at me your face

showed painIt revealed horror

My shadow stood beside youStill holding your hand

I wanted to wait, I waited to tellI saw my shadow whisper in your ears

You shook your head and turned around

My shadow gave me an evil smileThen, in the middle of nowhere

I was left all alone.

SYED NOWREEN QADRI

Excerpts from her poetry collection ”Silhouettes”

ADVERTISEMENT 16THURSDAY 28-NOVEMBER-2019


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