WHERE WILL MR. MODI TAKE US FROM HERE?

   For me, the defining metaphor of the 2019 elections is the 250000+ votes victory of a terror accused ( who also described the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi as a patriot) over a two time Chief Minister with forty years of political experience. If this is the extent and nature of India's transformation from a compassionate society to a brutalised one, then it's time we stopped blaming Rahul Gandhi. He never stood a chance, for the India he was addressing in his campaign speeches- about jobs, farmers, adivasis, religious divisions- no longer exists. Mr. Modi has created a new India in just five years.

  No right thinking person will deny that  Mr. Modi initiated a number of economic and welfare measures; but equally, they remain at best a mixed bag for the moment: GDP growth is below 7%, private investment is at an all time low, MSMEs and the informal sector have yet to recover fully from demonetisation and GST. unemployment continues to climb, farmer distress is very real. Welfare measures like the Ujjwala yojana, free toilets, household electrification have yet to bite, encountering many kinks that have yet to be ironed out. There is a palpable insecurity among the minorities. One would expect that a mixed bag would result in a mixed result, albeit tilted in favour of the BJP. That it has instead delivered such a massive sweep for Mr. Modi and the BJP indicates that the former has offered to the people a nostrum that overrides and discounts these concerns, makes them forget about their distress. In 2014 he had done the same thing and had packaged it as Hope, but this time he has packaged the placebo differently- it now comes in the form of a cultural nationalism, an assertion of a new Indian identity. If you can't give them bread, at least give them a sense of pride.

  The Modi- Shah duo have single handedly replaced the idea/ideology of a humane, plural, tolerant India with an assertive, Hindu dominated, impatient, proud India which is prepared to wait another five  years for the fruits of development to trickle down to it. It has worked beautifully: the BJP has won 303 seats out of 542, 31 more than last time; its vote share has gone up by almost 10%, it has made 17 states " congress mukt" and in all probability driven Mr. Rahul Gandhi into permanent retirement. But there is a catch to this New India- it has no place for minorities, for dissent, for consensus, for independent institutions, for the impartial rule of law, for any ideology other than the BJP's. It is an India which has given unprecedented power to one individual and has now been asked to identify itself with just this one Great Leader: " India is Indira and Indira is India" was just a slogan, but "India is Modi and Modi is India" is a reality. It is dangerous to identify a country with just one man, for if he fails then where do we turn? Every alternative support structure would have been destroyed - ideologies, leaders, institutions- and the country would have only chaos to fall back on. 

  Mr. Modi is here for the next five years. He, however, now stands at a crossroad and has to choose between two paths before him: one, the high road, leads to economic development and the lifting of 200 million people out of poverty and a subsistence existence, the consolidation of health, education and agriculture, the strengthening of institutions, the assurance that all sections and communities form part of this new India, the eradication of all classes and castes, an acceptance of Kashmiris( and not just the real estate of Kashmir) as part of India. The other, the low road, leads to an aggressive assertion of a nation postulated on only one religion and ideology, a narrow concept of what constitutes nationalism, the equation of all dissent with sedition, a majoritarian democracy that denies any space to the opposition, the steam rollering of all Kashmiri sentiments as anti-national, the use of official and public institutions to further the ruling party's political agenda, the equation of a political party with not only the government but with the country, the putting into practice Savarkar's dictum: "Hinduise all politics, militarise all Hindudom."

  There is a very real possibility that Mr. Modi may choose the latter path because it has been carved out by the organisation that he grew up in; it is also the path he has been treading on these last five years and he may well decide that, since it has worked so well so far and has given him a renewed mandate, it is the right road to follow. As the saying goes: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But this would be a mistake, for it is not the road the people of this country have given him the keys to, even though they may have temporarily bought into his heady concoction of cultural majoritarianism and masculine militarism. Cultural redefinition without economic development is not what they have voted for. They would want him to follow the high road to economic prosperity and social harmony, to lead them to a new India shorn of all the ideological and political baggage of the last seventy years, which is what he has promised them.  He alone can make the choice whether he chooses to be a Moses or a Pied Piper.

  He must choose wisely, for there will be no third chance for him and no second chance for India. 

CONFESSIONS OF A BOOKWORM.

   Hazaribagh in Bihar in the early 1960s. I was ten when I first got to know Dr. Binoy Chatterjee: I don't know how old he was, but he looked pretty old to me because when you are ten everyone beyond forty looks like he is a centenarian. Dr. Chatterjee was our family doctor (he even treated our pet bull-terrier), a homeopath, and I don't think he charged us even a penny for those white pills he handed out. He was a big, burly man but I think he had some problems with his feet because they were always heavily bandaged and he never stepped out of his house. Why do I remember him after almost 60 years? Because he introduced me to the wonders of the English language and the habit of reading.

  I was studying in St. Xavier's, Hazaribagh, and as you can imagine, we were given a constant overdose of the classics and Wren and Martin and Palgrave there. These did not, however, excite Dr. Chatterjee much. "Abhoy," he used to counsel me in that rolling Bengali accent which in later days Mamata Banerjee transformed into a rolling-pin, "classical literature is useful, but it puts the English language into a strait-jacket. Na, baba, it makes it too serious. Language must be fun, you should be able to play with it like a puppy with a ball; it should be capable of many meanings, like the fleeting glance of a beautiful woman." I saw what he meant, vaguely; I had a puppy at home and every woman looked beautiful to me, but each in a different way. And so the good doctor took it upon himself to initiate me into the unfettered world of an English language that could convey the joy of living, and not just its grim tragedies.

  Leave the classics in school, he told me sternly, and plied me instead with Mark Twain, Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde, James Hadley Chase, Perry Mason, Bennet Cerf, JJ Hunter, Jim Corbet, Max Brand, Billy Bunter, Zane Grey, Manohar Malgaonkar, Alistair Maclean, Spike Milligan, Richard Gordon  (the Doctor series), even the first edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam! He had the most wonderful collection of books, all carefully packed in cartons, catalogued and indexed. On top of his list was P.G.Wodehouse- Dr. Chatterjee considered him the greatest exponent of the living English language. There were many others whose names are now lost in the mists of time. The prescription was simple: one's reading must be eclectic, every genre is as important as the next, if reading is not fun then it's a waste of time. And then there were the magazines: back issues of Punch, Reader's Digest, Imprint and a glossy precursor of the National Geographic whose name I now cannot recall. The good Jesuit fathers at school would have been horrified to see my weekly reading list. And I didn't have to buy a single book: Dr. Chatterjee had trunk loads of these books and disbursed them to me lovingly, after conducting a short viva voce on each book returned by me!

   The good doctor's bug made me a bookworm for life. My family moved to Calcutta, where my grandfather had two bookshops in New Market and one in the Grand Hotel. I soon struck a Trumpian deal with him: during my school/college holidays I would hang out at the shops, help in selling the books(for which I received a commission of four annas per book), and spend the rest of the time devouring as many more as I could. I could never afford to buy a new book, of course, having started life on a pocket money of five rupees a month, which subsequent inflation took to twenty five in my college days. So one scoured College Street in Calcutta, Navin Market in Kanpur and the Red Fort/ Chor Bazaar markets in Delhi in later life for second hand books. I still have them- handsome, leather bound books picked up for as little as eight annas in those pre-globalisation days. Till today I cannot buy a book at its printed price- it has to be either a discounted Amazon one, or a Book Fair offering, or a gift!  Old habits, like old Gods, die hard.

   During this journey from Mulk Raj Anand to Bill Bryson, however, I have picked up quite a few quirks and oddities of behaviour. During my younger days I was not beyond filching a book or two from a bookshop when in a severe state of penury, which was most of the time; the SOP was quite simple, really: walk in with three books and walk out with four, the desired title sandwiched between the others. Fortunately, this phase didn't last long, thus preventing me from becoming the head librarian in Tihar jail. I don't like people borrowing books from me: I consider it an invasion of my private space and akin to borrowing someone's girl friend. I hoard newly bought books and defer reading them for as long as I can. It's like these tomes are my capital, a kind of fixed deposit, and reading them would amount to breaking the FD and depleting this precious stock. So at any given time I always have ten or fifteen unread books on my shelves and feel the richer for it.

   My sons have strenuously tried to introduce me to Kindle and digital reading, without success. How does one explain to them that a book is a living entity and not a jumble of algorithms? That it must feel good to the touch; smell of paper, ink and time; fondly remind one of where and when it was bought (or filched); enable one to make notes on the margin? How does one convey the pleasure of physical possession, or the occasional lambent brushing of fingers over the titles on the bookshelf like caressing a woman's tresses? It's a difficult feeling to convey, but I think Jawaharlal Nehru came closest to it, though in an entirely different context; it bears repeating. At a formal dinner once, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten were having tandoori chicken. Nehru was eating in the Indian style, with his fingers, but Mountbatten was making heavy weather of it with knife and fork. Panditji observed the struggle for some time, could contain himself no longer and told the Viceroy: "My lord, you should use your fingers. Eating tandoori chicken with a knife and fork is like making love to a beautiful woman through an interpreter, you know!"  That is exactly what Kindle does to reading: it can make you a promiscuous reader but not a faithful or satiated one.

  Having bared my bookworm heart, however, I am now confronted with a problem as I revel in the idyllic ambience of my village these days. I have just acquired my latest tome, Ram Chandra Guha's latest opus: GANDHI: THE YEARS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (1914-1948). It's at no.16 of my wait listed books, and in the normal course its turn for reading should come in 2020 or 2021, about the time when Rahul Gandhi's turn for Prime Ministership should be manifesting itself. But it is all of 1129 pages and weighs about four kgs. If I wait too long I may be too weak to lift it or the Grim Reaper may knock on my doors before I finish it. I have seriously considered doing a Chetan Bhagat on it, i.e. read the first and last pages only, and instantly get the gist of all that lies in-between. But that would be worse than using an interpreter- it would be like employing a stenographer: dots and dashes can never convey the beauty of a book, or of a woman, can they? So I think I'll just give it away to Arnab Goswami- it's about time he learnt something about someone other than Mr. Modi, anyway. It will fill the yawning gaps in his education about India, but best of all it would have made Dr. Chatterjee happy: he loved to show the light to Philistines.

  

TAKE A BOW, GENTLEMEN, YOU HAVE HIT ROCK BOTTOM.

   Even by the standards of our rapidly plummeting polity and social discourse the events of the last week have shocked all right ( and left) thinking people. We have known for some time that scatology is the only subject our politicians excel at, that the judiciary is headed only one way- downhill- and that our public institutions are increasingly headed by doormats who perform precisely that simple function- allow their masters to clean their feet on them and walk all over them. But last week we learnt that there are further depths to be plumbed.

   Our revered Prime Minister, who has been in this constant Atilla-the-Hun mode since he took office, has finally proved that Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar was not far off the track when he had used the "N" word for him a couple of years ago. If language is the window to a man's soul then what Mr. Modi's language reveals is the utter heart of darkness: a bitter, malicious, vindictive, egoistical, narcissistic man who has only contempt for the living and damnation for the dead. Only such a man would have used the words he did for Rajiv Gandhi, mocking his death: " when Rajiv Gandhi died he was " Bhrashtachari no. 1." Of course, we should have expected nothing better from a man who spews hatred and invective as naturally as a spitting cobra spews venom. In the past he has referred to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi as a widow who ( impliedly) benefits from a state pension and as a Jersey cow, and to Sunanda Pushkar as a " fifty crore rupee girlfriend." Nothing is too crass, or obscene, or base for his tongue. He constantly derides the benefits of education ( " hard work" vs " Harvard" jibe), but just compare a speech of Mr. Modi with one by the man he has a pathological hatred of, Jawaharlal Nehru, and one can see what Mr. Modi has missed. The vicious manner in which he has of late been vilifying an ex- Prime Minister who died 28 years ago may show his desperation, but it also reveals that he is perhaps also delusional and has lost touch with reality. He has robbed the office of Prime Minister of all dignity and gravitas.

   Can the Election Commission of India crumble any further? is the question being asked this week. After sitting ( no doubt paralysed with fear) over election related complaints against Mr. Modi and Mr. Amit Shah for weeks, it has now absolved the former of any culpability in all the nine complaints against him, and Mr. Shah of those against him, for good measure. This is the final imprimatur of its partisanship and impotency. This is a Commission that finds a reference to a woman's underwear a bigger violation than the categorisation of a murdered Prime Minister as India's most corrupt man, even though he had been acquitted by both a High Court and the Supreme Court! Did Mr. Seshan and Mr. Lyngdoh labour so bravely so that the pygmies who succeeded them could drive this once great institution to the ground? Only Mr. Ashok Lavasa, according to some media reports, had the guts to recommend that the these complaints were justified and that FIRs should be registered against both. Mr. Shah and Modi . Mr. Lavasa holds out hope that when the real acche din return ( as they must) the institution can be revived and released from the clutches of time servers.

   The biggest scandal of the past week, however, has to be the murky goings on in the Supreme Court and its upending of all canons of justice and fair play in the " in-house" inquiry" into the sexual molestation charges against the CJI. The three judge panel has denied every legal right to the complainant, proceeded exparte against her, followed no procedure known to law, and hastily issued a report that raises more questions than it answers. It has taken the extraordinarily perverse decision to give a copy of its inquiry report to the accused( the CJI) but refused to furnish it to the complainant! The refusal to make it public, or to state the reasons for its finding exonerating the CJI of all charges, cannot but raise awkward suspicions and questions: Why did the 3 member panel conduct an "informal inquiry" instead of adopting the process laid down in POSH Act or the Vishakha judgement or even the ICC guidelines? Why did it refuse requests by eminent jurists( including Justice Chandrachud and even the Attorney General) to coopt an external member to the panel ? Did it examine the evidence ( thirty pieces of documentary evidence were submitted by the complainant, according to Mr. Prashant Bhushan in an interview to the QUINT) and the witnesses cited by her? Why did it not allow the complainant to cross-examine/ confront the CJI ? Did it examine the trail of persecution of the complainant and her family by the Court and the police after the incident? Did it look into the procedure followed by the court Registry while imposing the unusually disproportionate penalty of dismissal on her for availing just a half day's casual leave? Why were the enquiry proceedings not video-graphed? Why was she not given a copy of her statements to the committee? Civil society is by no means endorsing the veracity of the charges against the CJI: it is questioning the processes followed by the Court to inquire into them.

   More questions and misgivings will inevitably emerge with the passage of time, protests have already broken out across the country including Delhi, Kolkatta, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Mumbai, politicians too will soon jump into the fray once election fever has abated. The Supreme Court cannot stifle these voices by imposing Section 144 CRPC and forcibly detaining those who protest its suspect conduct, as it did on the 7th of this month. It has to come clean with the facts and the strange processes it appears to have followed in this modern version of the Spanish Inquisition, it has to break the peculiar vow of Omerta its judges have taken to protect one of their own. Opacity cannot be a defence. A court's best defence is its reputation for fair play and its credibility; if it has to be protected by the police and the power of contempt instead, then its days are numbered. Judges do not define a court, the universal principles of justice, fair play and transparency do so; silence and opacity do not build judicial reputations, courage and conviction do. How our Supreme Court will respond to this existential challenge will determine whether it survives as a beacon of hope in these dark times or sinks into the morass which has already engulfed all our other public institutions. It has dug itself into a hole and should now stop digging any further.

   It has been a bad week for all of us. How much further can we sink as a country?

NIGHT BUS TO MANDI.

   Most people would would be surprised to learn that Himachal's most iconic symbols are neither Preity Zingta nor Kangana Ranaut, it is the HRTC (Himachal Road Transport Corporation) bus- green and white in colour when the money for a paint job is available, a muddy ochre  when it is not; battered and dented, baskets of fruits , vegetables and a few drunken Rohru types perched on the roof; a goat or two ruminating on the back seats. Nothing represents Himachal better than a fully loaded HRTC bus, clawing its suicidal way up mountain roads that have no reason to be there, one rear wheel on the road, the other off it, mocking the sheer abyss below it. This humble bus has kept the state connected since long before the roads were taken over by the private cars, SUVs and taxis; it has been the lifeline for Himachal's commerce, tourism, agriculture, and has given the state a sense of collective identity.

   Its drivers are iconic figures themselves, role models for every village youth and even Mr. Modi's chaiwallahs, pakoda wallahs and chowkidars have not been able to displace them. They are the counterparts of the gunslingers of the American wild west- a rough breed with their own distinct language and culture, risking their lives daily on roads that defy the accepted laws of gravity, physics and engineering. Every second rural teen aspires to become an HRTC driver. On rural routes, where the buses have to park at night at the terminal point of their route, villagers vie with each other to offer board and lodging (free of course) to the driver, for he is their vital life line to the modern world and markets outside.  Relatively well travelled and widely respected, he is also a potent opinion maker, especially when it comes to elections!

   My first experience with the HRTC occured in 1977 when I had to take my brand new bride to Mandi where I was undergoing my IAS training. In those pre-Gadkari days there were only two services to Mandi, one during the day and one overnight. On a cold February night, therefore, Neerja and I boarded the night bus to Mandi at Kashmiri Gate (an ordinary one, there were no AC or deluxe buses then). As an IAS probationer I was allotted the favoured seats just behind the driver. The bus was overcrowded and smelt of Himachal- garlic, angoori, sheep (everybody was wearing the "pattu" coats) and the vapours released by sturdy tribals who had dined well, if not wisely. Fresh out of Lady Shri Ram, Neerja was adorned in tight jeans, jacket and boots; the driver took an instant liking to her and invited her to sit next to him on the hot engine cover. She declined, not wishing to become the toast of the evening. The journey took all of ten bone-breaking hours, we lost most of our luggage (kept on the roof) on the steep climb from Kiratpur to Swarghat. and the bus broke down twice, coincidentally at "desi sharab ka thekas" where the driver would disappear for half an hour and reappear saying he had fixed the fuel pipe! I am happy to report that our marriage survived this first test, and every trial and travail since then has been a cakewalk in comparison.

   In subsequent years one got to travel quite a lot in HRTC buses, because back then it was the fortunate SDM (Sub-divisional Magistrate) who got a Jeep to himself. I as SDM Chamba had to share one with the SDM Dalhousie, my good friend C. Balakrishnan, who in later years managed the impossible feat of retiring as Secretary Coal in the central government without getting charge-sheeted or imprisoned. I toured extensively by bus in Churah, Tissa, Salooni and Bharmour, some of the most undeveloped areas of the state, and developed a healthy respect for HRTC and its staff.

   In the late eighties I was appointed as Managing Director of this creaking behemoth, with 1200 buses and 7000 staff. And here I learnt of some endearing tricks they kept up their sleeve. Leaking of revenues (pocketing the fare instead of issuing tickets) is an existential problem for all state transport undertakings. We used to set up "nakas" everywhere at all hours of the day and night to nab the rascals but rarely succeeded in netting anyone after the first catch. I soon discovered that these chaps had perfected a wireless form of communicating with other buses to warn them of the checkpoints. Remember, this was decades before the advent of the cell phone. They had a system of coded signals which was flashed to all other buses "en passant", as it were, warning them of the impending check post. We rarely caught any fish after the first one.

   There were no private buses in those pre- liberalisation days and HRTC functioned as a monopoly. This gave their unions enormous power, and they flexed their muscles every six months by going on a strike just for the heck of it. The officers were accustomed to the tried and tested SOP- we were all locked up in our rooms in the head office, sans food or water, gheraoed in proper Labour Day style till we signed on the dotted line. I decided to develop an SOP of my own the day before the next strike. I rang up an old friend, AK Puri who was the DIG (Police) Shimla,  reminded him of our good old days in Bilaspur (AK was the Superintendent of Police there when I was the Deputy Commissioner), and expressed the hope that he would like to see me in one piece after the next day's strike. AK responded like a champion : the next day the HRTC office was flooded with more policemen than are currently on election duty in West Bengal. The gherao was rendered "non est", the unions decided they didn't have a grievance after all, and I had no more strikes for the duration of my tenure- cut short, sadly, by a Minister who was miffed by the fact that I didn't see (say?) "Aye to Aye" with him!

   There were no hard feelings, however. Almost twenty years later a tree fell on me while I was taking my dog for a walk in a snowstorm. I busted three spinal vertebras, two ribs and punctured a lung and spleen for good measure. I was laid up in hospital for three months and the doctors told me I would probably never walk again without crutches. While I was absorbing all this a group of HRTC drivers came to see me. They told me of a "vaid" in Mandi who fixed broken bones (even vertebras) with a concoction made out of herbs and roots which had to be taken four times a day with ghee and honey. They assured me that it would have me on my feet again in two months. On my expressing some well founded scepticism they told me something which made a lot of sense.

" Look, sir, we are breaking our bones all the time in some bus accident or the other. We don't go to any hospital, we go to this vaid, and he has cured each and every one of us. We all speak from personal experience. Please give him a try- you are already flat on your back, you can't get any lower than that, can you?"

Since this rhetorical question was one which even Mr. Subramaniam Swamy would have found difficult to answer, I agreed. Every week one of these good samaritans would bring me a fresh batch of the unctuous, foul smelling concoction, with some of the precious "shilajit" as an added kick. I banished the doctors and surgeons to their autopsy rooms and within three months I was playing golf again, even though my swing is not what it used to be- earlier I used to move the ball, now I move more of terra firma. A couple of years later I retired from service with most of my spine intact, no mean achievement for a bureaucrat, if I say so myself ! All because of a bunch of ne'er do wells who remembered an MD who had out-smarted them at their own game twenty years ago.

   It's been a long association with HRTC and I've gained more from it than I have given. And it all started with a night bus for Mandi forty two years ago.