THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE MAY HAVE SHIFTED OVER INDIA

    The Bermuda Triangle is an area over the north-western part of the Atlantic ocean where there have been persistent reports of ships and planes simply disappearing without a trace. The phenomenon has baffled oceanographers and scientists for decades and no plausible explanation has been offered so far by science. Answers range from a magnetic black hole, vagaries of the Gulf Stream current, sudden storms, aliens and "oceanic flatulence" caused by methane gases rising from the sea bed.

   There are reasons now to believe that the Bermuda Triangle may have shifted its location and is now lying over the Indian sub-continent; it may soon be christened the Baroda Triangle. The reason for this is the fact that  similar disappearances have now started taking place in the Indian land mass,  not of ships and planes, however, but of ideas, history and facts.

   It started with the disappearance of a university degree of a certain individual: nobody knows if it even exists. Strenuous efforts have made to recover it, but all evidence of it has been atomised, and we can only speculate where it lies, like the MH 370 plane. It is also dangerous to look for it. Next were public funds, tens of thousands of crores of public money simply disappeared (and continue to disappear); it is believed that they may have been teleported to other parts of the Atlantic like Cayman Islands and Saint Kitts, but no one can be sure because no one has actually seen this moolah. The people who had taken this money have also disappeared and cannot be located. More moneys have simply vanished in funds like the Electoral bonds or the PM CARES fund, or what are called NPAs, and no one has a clue about what happened to them. All information about them has also gone into a black hole called RTI (Right to Information) Act from which light stopped emerging a few years back. It's the same with another collapsed star, the ECI (Election Commission of India), which has also stopped emitting any light and prefers to cloak itself in total darkness, like a dwarf star.

  Criminals and mass murderers also seem to be disappearing into thin air, along with the concept of justice which in any case was tenuous at the best of times. The Hashimpura massacre of 79 Muslims in Meerut district in 1987 by the police is a case in point. After 36 years and 900 hearings all 39 accused have been acquitted earlier this month. In another mysterious disappearance of criminals all 68 accused in the murder of 11 Muslims in Naroda Patiya, Gujarat, in February of 2002 were acquitted by a judge on the 20th of this month. So who killed them- aliens? Flatulence? Magnetism? We'll never know, because the Baroda triangle doesn't give up its secrets easily.

   More than 12,00,000 HNI (High Networth Individualas) have disappeared from India in the last few years, taking their wealth with them, without any explanation by the government. 650000 hectares of forest land have dematerialised in the last five years. Thousands of voters regularly vanish from voters' lists, presumably because they might have voted against the powers that be. Whatever little information used to emerge from the stygian portals of power about the environmental impacts of big projects has also now disappeared: the central government last week ordered that the web portal PARIVESH which used to post such information shall no longer do so. Reason? This is confidential data and can now be accessed only through RTI applications, which, as we know by now, are thrown into dustbins as fast as they are filed.

   The latest to disappear into the ether are huge slices of Indian history and science. The Mughals have suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, as have documented facts relating to the antipathy of the right wing to Mahatma Gandhi, the banning of the RSS, the 2002 carnage in Gujarat, the Industrial Revolution, the Emergency, the Naxalite movement, popular struggles and movements, references to the caste system and untouchables. Science has not been spared by these mysterious forces either- Darwin's theory of Evolution has been sucked into oblivion, as have issues of the environment, including global warming. Will Newton and Einstein be the next to go, or will it be Orwell and Huxley, or Shakespeare and Steinbeck, or Omar Khayam and Khalil Gibran ?

   It's the same with the many promises the BJP had made to come to power in 2014- 20 million new jobs every year, Rupees 15,00,000 in every bank account, a US$ 5 trillion economy by 2024, doubling of farmers' income by 2022, cooperative federalism, a Congress "mukt" Bharat. These too have all evaporated into thin air, and even though millions of voters are scurrying around looking for them, all they have found so far is a big "jumla". Of the real thing, there is no sign.

   The Orient has always been a mysterious place, after all.

POSTSCRIPT: The BJP may be a lot of bad things, but it is not stupid. He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. This at least is one part of "entire political science" Mr. Modi has learnt well, whether or not he has a degree.

   

THE ATIQ AHMED MURDER SHOWS WE CANNOT BEAR THE PAIN OF BEING A MAN

   There are rare occasions in a country's history when one event, one freeze-frame moment in time, encapsulates and captures its "weltanschauung" and prevailing state of affairs. Two recent examples in recent times are the protests by women in Iran against the mullahs' hijab diktat, and the citizens' movement in Israel for the rolling back of Netanyahu's judicial "reforms". Both depict a citizenry which values its rights and is willing to stand up for it. India's moment came last week with the two minute video of the murder of Atiq Ahmed, but, unlike the inspiring events in Israel or Iran, this can only generate despair and a grim foreboding in all sane persons, who appear to be in an overwhelming minority these days.                .

  This is not about Atiq or his brother Ashraf, known and convicted criminals who probably deserved to die- but at the hands of the law, not in the custody of those whom the law enjoined should have protected them, not by three front men probably working at the behest of more powerful and sinister forces whose names too shall be dedacted like most inconvenient facts are these days. This is about what the murders, and the subsequent reactions, tell us about India in 2023- its criminal justice system, media, police, politics and, most disturbing of all, its increasingly brutalised society.

  Atiq Ahmed may have died on the 15th of this month, but his death warrant was signed and sealed on the 28th of February when the Supreme Court dismissed his plea for the Court's protection, reposing full faith in the ability of the UP police- the same police which has killed 183 persons and injured hundreds more in "encounters" since 2017, uses bulldozers and not the courts to mete out instant justice, which had "encountered" Vikas Dube in very similar circumstances just a couple of years back. The Court's faith in the state would be touching were it not for the fact that it is slowly becoming irrelevant to the legal system in this country, but doesn't seem to realise it.

  The Apex court is losing control of the justice system to the executive because it is hesitant to stand up to the executive in seminal matters. It is in danger of losing its primary job of being the custodian of the country's Constitution, which is being increasingly interpreted or by-passed or ignored, by the government and its agencies. It has failed to decide on cases which are vital for the survival of democracy and the rule of law- Article 370, reorganisation of Kashmir, Citizen Amendment Act, the challenges to the use of EVMs and the mandatory counting of VVPATs, the Electoral Bonds. It has not punished any official for violating its rulings, or politician for proven hate speech, or the police for delaying investigations into cases against ruling party workers and even legislators. It is unable to even ensure that its own recommendations for judgeship are respected by the government, or that Ministers who threaten retired judges are brought to book. Maharashtra continues to be in a limbo as hearings in the Court grind on interminably. Where is the urgency to decide these issues, even as another nail is hammered into the coffin of democracy each passing day by a government hell bent on a Hindu Rashtra? It is this reluctance to confront a rampaging government which emboldens the executive to take the law into its own hands and permit the Atiq Ahmed kind of "justice" with impunity. The endemic delays in deciding important cases ensures that illegalities become fait accompli with the efflux of time and are then difficult to reverse. The day is not far off when the Supreme Court and High Courts may become as redundant as the NHRC or the RTI Commission or the Lokayukts, if they do not start asserting their constitutional powers. Following on the heels of "Congress mukt Bharat" we may soon have a "Kanoon mukt Bharat".

  It has been reported that the three killers of Atiq Ahmed and his brother had come posing as media persons. I find this an entirely appropriate symbolism, because the media in today's India is murdering the spirit of democracy and the rule of law every day. Not only does it amplify the government's propaganda shamelessly, it also spreads hatred and fake news, something which the Supreme Court has noted (but not firmly acted upon). It no longer raises issues that matter to the people, asks questions of the executive or holds the government accountable, something which sections of it did even during the Emergency. It has, for example, completely blanked out reportage on Satyapal Malik's explosive interview with Karan Thapar on Pulwama, and focuses exclusively on Atiq Ahmed's criminality (which no one contests) rather than on the lapses and potential conspiracy which led to his murder and how it reflects on the Chief Minister's claims on law and order in his state. It had earlier similarly ignored Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra and the Adani exposure. By throwing a mantle of silence and self-censoring news over the government's doings it is betraying its mandate and duty to the citizens, and is hugely complicit in the autocratisation of the nation.

  Finally, the response to the Prayagraj murders show how brutalised, bigoted and blood- thirsty our society has become. It is almost as if we have embraced a death wish, and like lemmings are hurtling towards a cliff. No sane democracy would have demonstrated the putrid reaction Indian society did to these murders: Ministers hailing the deliverance of "divine justice", Whatsapp groups and Twitterati exulting at the death of a "Mafia don", celebrations across RWAs and India's vaunted and vacuous middle-class strata. There were no such exuberant celebrations when Vikas Dube was killed a couple of years back. And thereby hangs the real explanation for our brutalisation.

  Dube belonged to the majority community while Atiq was a Muslim. The tragedy of Indian society today is that we view everything through the prism of religion- history, education, laws and justice, historical personalities, language, the arts and, increasingly, even the Constitution. Anything associated with the "other" religion or community is, by definition, evil and has to be cast out, erased, redacted, condemned by any means, fair or foul. There can be no legal restrictions on this newly acquired and God-given right of the majority community. And in order to exercise this "right to hate" we are more than willing to support a government that looks benevolently at this selective violence and bigotry, even if it means we live without jobs, food, healthcare, meaningful education or freedom. We have become like beasts who will give up everything of value to satisfy their basest appetites. Why?

  Perhaps Samuel Johnson had the answer when he said: "He who makes himself a beast gets rid of the pain of being a man." I think what Johnson is saying here is that it is not easy being a man, in the image of God. For that we have to be tolerant, empathetic, supportive of the weak, compassionate, imbued with a basic morality, free of hatred and prejudices, shun violence, respect others, display courage of convictions. Being a man involves some sacrifices and some pain. It's so much easier to throw off these shackles, revert to the slime we crawled out of millions of years ago, and become a beast. The French have a very apt phrase for this unholy craving- "nostalgie de la boue" or a yearning for the mud. Therefore, we may  well ask, in the words of WB Yeats:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,                                                                                      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I suspect we may not have to wait long for an answer.  

    

AIR TRAVEL-- HOW NOT TO REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING, IN TWO EASY STEPS

    Pardon me if I'm sounding like a latter day Cassandra wrapped in a wet towel, but my heart does not leap up in joy, unlike the poet's, on learning that both Air-India and Indigo have ordered 500 additional planes each for their fleet. Nor did said heart do a backflip when the Civil Aviation Minister announced, at a rally presided over by the Prime Minister last week, that the number of airports would be doubled in the next ten years. Even if we discount some of this as hyperbole attributable to his Chief Ministerial ambitions in MP, even then that's a lot of new airports- about 200, I believe.

   It's a recipe for environmental disaster. The United Nations Secretary-General has just released the latest IPCC report, which has warned us that the global warming threshold of 1.5* Celsius will be crossed in 1935 because emissions, instead of declining to 1990 levels as targeted, are actually going UP every year. The reason we are headed for this environmental apocalypse, in spite of technological innovations ( renewables, EVs, plant based meat, plastic substitutes etc.) is simple: we are just not willing to change our life styles to a more sustainable model. For the vast majority of mankind it is business as usual; we continue as before in what we eat, how we travel, how we over exploit finite natural resources like water and trees, how we build, how we consume power. For an increasingly purblind homo sapiens comfort and convenience are more important than the future of the planet. Flying is one dimension of this stupidity.

   The number of air travelers will double to 8.2 billion by 2036; 75% of them travel for pleasure and don't need to go by plane. Aviation spews about 1.50 billion tonnes of GHGs into the atmosphere every year and is the most polluting form of travel. Below is the table for emissions by various modes of travel per passenger kilometer:

Plane   154 gms

            [For one business class passenger it is 462 gms, and 616 gms for a first class one]

Car       171 gms for one passenger/car

             43 gms if 4 passengers

Bus      104 gms

Rail      41 gms

   Add to this dismal scenario the environmental and social costs of building airports- thousands of hectares of usually prime land concretised for each airport,  thousands of families displaced and pushed into penury,  millions of trees felled,  hundreds of megawatts of additional power needed to operate the airports. To take just one example closest to where I live, the new Jewar airport coming up in Noida: when all four phases are complete, a total of 4752 hectares of land would be acquired; 19961 families (37025 individuals) would be displaced in just the first two of four phases. All this so that 4 million passengers can take off and land here every year- that's about 20000 flights. This is in addition to the 60 million well heeled chaps doing the same at the Indira Gandhi airport every year.

   An even more harebrained example is from my own state of Himachal where an obdurate government is hell-bent on building a so-called "international" airport in Mandi which no one wants. It will destroy 237 hectares of irrigated, multi-cropped farmland and forests, uproot a population of 12000, mainly Dalits and OBCs, seriously dent the state's food growing capacity, and in no way help the tourism sector (which is the specious justification for it). The state's three existing airports are dismal failures, functioning well below 50% of their designed capacity, and yet the govt. is ready to splurge Rs. 5000 crores on the project, even though it does not have the money to pay Dearness Allowance to its employees.

   And we want to reduce global warming?

   Aviation is one of the biggest force multipliers of inequity- economic, environmental, social- especially in a backward country like ours. It is an elitist sector because it serves not even 1% of the population whereas the costs are borne by farmers, landless labourers, villagers and the other 99% of the population. It is also not an essential service within a country because alternatives are available which are far less damaging to the environment. I refer here especially to the railways.

   I have never been able to understand why people fly on short-haul routes (3 to 4 hours) instead of taking a train or going by car. Take for example a route I am familiar with, Delhi-Chandigarh. It takes four hours by train and five by road. In contrast, a flyer will take the same time, if not more, house to house if one factors in the drive to and from the city to the airport at both ends, the need to report at least 90 minutes before departure, the actual flying time, and the time taken to deplane and collect one's baggage; it is also costlier by a multiple of at least three. So why do people fly on short-haul ? Elitism? Snobbishness? Pure habit? You tell me, because I can't figure it out.

   This is where the govt. comes in, or should come in, if it was not so mesmerised by big ticket projects and the prospect of bountiful payola from contractors. It should discourage, as a policy, short-haul flights and simultaneously expand on a war footing the rail network and services. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should give up its love affair with expressways (at the risk of disappointing Mr. Gadkari) and spend the same money on new high speed rail tracks and rakes so that it could operate more trains. It is in this context that one has to commend the emphasis imparted to the new series of Vande Bharat trains, of which there are now 14. They match the planes for comfort, catering, snob value and total journey time and are far cheaper. The environmental benefits are even more telling: one Vande Bharat can carry the same number of passengers as 11 short-haul flights. If we extrapolate from the table in para 3 above, this means that every 300 km run of a Vande Bharat saves 75 tonnes of CO2 and other emissions as compared to corresponding number of flights for the same number of passengers.

   While we are busy redacting the Moghuls and making blood money off Ukraine, other countries are beginning to realise the immense contribution of aviation to global warming, and are beginning to take steps to regulate its expansion. The U.K. has finally given up plans to build a third runway at Heathrow, in deference to the protests of its citizens. ( Incidentally, the Jewar airport will have five runways !). The Dutch govt. has decided to reduce flights to and from the Schiphol airport by 50000 per annum- from 500,000 to 450,000. ( The matter is in the courts but the govt. is determined to push it through).

  Sweden has spawned a citizens' movement in 2019 called "We Stay on the Ground" which asks people to pledge not to fly. Tens of thousands of pledges have been obtained so far and a new word has been coined to convey flight shaming- "flygskam". People are responding positively- the number of flyers came down by 3.7% in the first year itself and train travel has increased by 30%. So far eight countries have joined this movement- U.K, USA, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany. It is no coincidence that these countries feature at the top in the list of happiest countries in the world. They value their natural environment and health, add a price to it and are prepared to pay the price.

   Unlike us, the Indian elite, who think that Mr. Modi and Baba Ramdev have instant solutions to all the problems of the planet, and we can continue with our ecocidal life styles for ever. We do not for even a moment think of the massive inequity and injustice inherent in this life style. Consider this: every time you take a business class flight from Delhi to Mumbai to attend an Ambani wedding (or whatever) you are adding as much GHG emissions to the atmosphere in two hours as the average Indian does in 6 months ! 

   Will Niti Ayog do the maths and stop harping on that old chestnut of "historical injustice" by the West to justify policies that encourage more emissions ? We missed the industrial revolution bus long ago, and should stop cutting off our nose to spite someone else's face. Mr. Modi and his team should take time off from tiger safaris and consider some hard decisions. Like banning private jets altogether, impose a moratorium on new short-haul flights, stop building new airports unless they are needed for strategic reasons, impose a hefty carbon tax on air tickets, ask airlines to stop their frequent flyer programmes as they only incentivise more air travel, stop dishing out those dozens of free air-tickets to MPs and MLAs, make it mandatory for govt. employees to travel by train instead of by air. That would be a start. The meek may or may not inherit the world but the rich certainly don't own it. 

   

"A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME......." REALLY ?

    William Shakespeare (aka William Sexpeare in Waste Bengal) had got most things right, especially when it came to portraying the seven deadly sins, as per their revised version in India's Amritkaal. Whether it was "honour killing" in Othello or "love jihad" (by Romeo, naturally, trying to entice a Capulet to become a Montague) in Romeo and Juliet, or outstanding EMIs in Merchant of Venice, he plumbed the depths of human emotions like a porpoise. But in one instance at least he had a mixed bag; it was when he waxed eloquent about the importance or otherwise of names. Remember Juliet's words?                                                                  "What's in a name? That which we call a rose                                                                                                By any other name would smell just as sweet..."                                                                             Methinks the wily old bard was trying to say that names are not important, that if Romeo was called, say, Ronaldo he would be just as handsome and score just as well (with the ladies, of course). True, but then Sexpeare had not (unlike Orwell or Huxley) anticipated the Hindu rashtra of 450 years later where names determine history and geography, where it is the lotus, and not the rose, which is the flower of choice and where a name can determine whether you smell of roses or dead fish. Or whether you are  alive or dead, in fact.                                                                                                                                                                 Names in India are important. Take, for example, that one name which you utter today only at your peril- M***. It's a deified appellation nowadays, which you cannot take in vain, or even in jest; the punishment for doing so is two years in prison. In fact, you cannot even refer to this name's progenitor without being hauled to a far away police station, as a Congress spokesperson found out recently. We are told that there are about 800,000 similarly named worthies (may their tribe increase below replacement rate), give or take a couple on enforced sojourn in other countries, but only one of them actually matters. The name is well on its way to replacing other names like Nehru, Gandhi, Patel and Ambedkar, on the principle that, if you cannot match their accomplishments then you should ensure that their names should be interred along with their bones. Somewhat like the cuckoo's nesting strategy.

   There are two ways of making history: the first is to do something by which posterity will remember you. If one can't do that, then adopt the second way- rewrite history by changing the names inscribed in history. It's far easier to do, requires no effort but the scratch of a pen on paper, and lo!- that past accomplishment of someone else becomes yours for ever! This can apply to stadiums, thoroughfares, buildings, monuments, universities, temples, even cities. We seem to be doing this on a war footing these days, though the Supreme Court appears to have applied the brakes on this noble endeavour in a recent case, observing that the country cannot be held a prisoner to the past.

   But there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the govt. has now decided that if it can't replace or rewrite something, then it will simply expunge, erase or redact it. A pilot project for this was first launched in the Rafale case with the blessings of the then CJI, where the pesky pricing details in the CAG report were redacted. This was then repeated in Parliament by expunging most of Rahul Gandhi's speech so that posterity would never know who was in bed with Mr. Adani when his fortune was reaching orgasmic heights. Then came the Gujarat High Court (where else?) order effectively redacting the Prime Minister's graduation degree, leaving us wondering whether his extraordinary talents were acquired in a university or a railway station. And now, of course, the NCERT has taken upon itself to rewrite entire Indian history, erasing such irritating passages as the RSS's antipathy to Mahatma Gandhi, the result of the battle at Haldighati, the 2002 killings in Gujarat, even any reference to the Moghuls. This last bit is particularly intriguing, for if the Moghuls do not feature in our history then one will be left wondering : who did the Rajputs and the Marathas fight against ? And who built the Taj Mahal, or the Red Fort, or the Agra Fort or the Jama Masjid? And wherefrom came the biryani our politicians regularly gorge on? Perhaps these confusing questions will be answered soon, along with other mysteries like who is occupying 1000 sq. kms of our area in Ladakh, or which country accounts for US$ 120 billion of our imports? Just asking, since the name China also cannot be mentioned.                                                                                                                                             And while we are on the subject of names, perhaps we can be excused for asking our wolf-warrior EAM, Mr. Jaishankar, what is his definition of the word "war" since he refuses to use it in the Ukraine context for fear of jeopardizing those cheap Russian oil supplies?  He has stuck to his stand (if such a posture can be called a stand) that what is transpiring in Ukraine is not a war but a "crisis." Another instance of name-o-phobia. For to me it appears that when two nations have been fighting each other for more than a year, when lakhs of people have been killed on both sides, when thousands of tons of munitions are fired every day, when one country is systematically destroying the other nation's civilian infrastructure, when 5 million people have been turned into refugees- surely, that has to be a war, right? Or is he suggesting that we rename all the wars in the sorry history of this planet as "crises"? Eg: Indo-China crisis of 1962 ( that will involve naming China, which is a no-no by itself !), the First World Crisis (1914-18), the Second World Crisis (1939-45), the Vietnam Crisis ? Our Minister must be a pretty bloodthirsty sort of chap if he wants some more ingredients in a conflict before he condescends to term it a war. Or maybe he thinks the world will be a much happier place if the word "war" is redacted altogether?                                                                                               Unfortunately for us, however, two can play at this name game. Just this week China has renamed eleven villages in Arunachal Pradesh, giving them Chinese names to bolster its claim that the state is part of China. As someone said, if NCERT can re-write past history the PLA can re-write current history. Ah! The perils of Vishwaguru teaching the wrong lessons to the world. Perhaps it's time, as the Walrus would have said, for NCERT to take another look at Shakespeare: replace the rose with the lotus, and hope that it continues to smell as sweet........