After 35 years as a journalist, editor and manager in BBC News, I can now write much more freely - I am attaching below links to my journalism, and in some cases the pieces as submitted as well. I have also on a separate page listed all my academic and more substantial writing throughout my career.
The Hindu: "We'll Never be Young Again"
A review of Annie Ernaux's unconventional memoir The Years (19 May 2019)
https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/well-never-be-young-again/article27176190.ece
https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/well-never-be-young-again/article27176190.ece
The Hindu: Reading Under the Sheets - books to lift the spirits
A piece for The Hindu's Sunday literary section on reading for politically turbulent times (28 April 2019)
https://www.thehindu.com/books/reading-under-the-sheets-books-to-lift-the-spirit/article26943038.ece?homepage=true
https://www.thehindu.com/books/reading-under-the-sheets-books-to-lift-the-spirit/article26943038.ece?homepage=true
The Wire: The Magical Story of a Book Cover Inspired by Indian Women
Cyril Satorsky on the inspiration for his cover design for The Householder - reposted from my website (4 April 2019)
https://thewire.in/the-arts/the-magical-story-of-a-book-cover-inspired-by-three-indian-women
https://thewire.in/the-arts/the-magical-story-of-a-book-cover-inspired-by-three-indian-women
Asia Dialogue: Kashmir, the issue that doesn't feature in Indian elections
As India's election campaign gets into its stride, how will the Kashmir issue feature in the campaign? (19 March 2019)
theasiadialogue.com/2019/03/19/kashmir-the-issue-that-doesnt-normally-feature-in-indian-elections/
theasiadialogue.com/2019/03/19/kashmir-the-issue-that-doesnt-normally-feature-in-indian-elections/
BBC News: The English Woman who Fought for India's Freedom
A piece about Freda Bedi - the subject of my biography (7 March 2019) - 260,000+ views
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46943612
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46943612
The Hindu: United Colours of Freda
An article linked to the publication of The Lives of Freda, my biography of Freda Bedi (17 February 2019)
https://www.thehindu.com/society/history-and-culture/united-colours-of-freda-bedi/article26280964.ece
https://www.thehindu.com/society/history-and-culture/united-colours-of-freda-bedi/article26280964.ece
Rising Kashmir: Freda Bedi, the English woman who wore a burka
A profile of Freda Bedi's engagement with Kashmir ahead of the publication of my biography of her (19 January 2019)
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/freda-bedi-the-english-woman-who-wore-a-burka-in-support-of-quit-kashmir-342102.html
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/freda-bedi-the-english-woman-who-wore-a-burka-in-support-of-quit-kashmir-342102.html
Asia Dialogue: How far can Momentum take Rahul Gandhi's Congress?
A look forward to India's election year in the light of the Congress' party's unusally strong performance in state elections in December (16 January 2019)
http://theasiadialogue.com/2019/01/16/how-far-can-momentum-take-rahul-gandhis-congress/
http://theasiadialogue.com/2019/01/16/how-far-can-momentum-take-rahul-gandhis-congress/
BBC News: The Forgotten English Poet Buried in India
An online piece about the poet Violet Nicolson, who wrote as Laurence Hope, based on the FOOC piece below (11 November 2018)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-46069119 - 160,000+ views
The article was reposted by The Wire: thewire.in/the-arts/violet-nicolson-the-forgotten-english-poet-buried-in-india
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-46069119 - 160,000+ views
The article was reposted by The Wire: thewire.in/the-arts/violet-nicolson-the-forgotten-english-poet-buried-in-india
The Wire: "I'm British and I'm Indian - But don't call me European"
An article about ethnic minorities and Brexit, and especially the support for leaving the EU from a significant number of middle class British Indians (3 November 2018)
https://thewire.in/world/british-indians-uk-brexit
https://thewire.in/world/british-indians-uk-brexit
From Our Own Correspondent: Epitaph to Empire
Grubbing around in graveyards in Chennai delivered another piece for the BBC radio programme 'From Our Own Correspondent' - about the Edwardian-era poet Violet Nicolson, aka Laurence Hope (1 November 2018)
IN: Some of the most extraordinary sights in India are the old, overgrown colonial graveyards where generations of Britons who went out to serve the Empire were laid to rest. In one such burial ground in the southern city of Chennai – Madras, as it was once known - Andrew Whitehead came across the grave of a woman whose story throws an unusual light on the lives of the British in India:
St Mary’s is proud to proclaim itself the oldest Anglican church east of Suez. It stands inside a vast fort, built by the British three-hundred-and-seventy years ago to keep out marauders, among whom the most troublesome, as so often, were the French. In a remarkable thread of historical continuity, Fort St George remains the seat of government of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and its seventy million people. A couple of minutes stroll from St Mary’s and you’re at the chief minister’s office and the state assembly building.
The church still attracts a respectable Sunday congregation; its monuments and memorials delineate Britain’s early, stumbling, not always gentle, encounter with India. The surrounding graveyard quickly became full – the lifespan of Britons in India back then was short. St Mary’s was allocated an overspill burial ground on a desolate spot a couple of miles away called the Island.
It’s there still, sprawling, unkempt, a blasted elegy for Empire – a caretaker does his best to keep the dereliction at bay, but it’s a losing battle. Obelisks, crosses and funeral statuary peep out from the dense undergrowth. Stray dogs howl with anger when disturbed. No one goes there except –tell-tale signs suggest – to gamble, defecate, drink … and have sex.
At the far end of the grounds, just as you wonder whether you dare venture any further, there are two neat, well-tended, fenced-off plots of Commonwealth war graves. And close by, in a no man’s land between the manicured rows of war dead and the tangled mayhem all around, I came across a grave I was looking out for – a small, modest plaque in memory of General Malcolm Nicolson and his wife Adela Florence, who both died in what was then Madras in 1904.
She was one of the most popular poets of the Edwardian era – she wrote of love, longing, suffering and death; and above all of India, with which she had a profound affinity. She at first made out that her poems were translations from Indian languages – and she used a man’s name, Laurence Hope. Some verses of hers, set to music, you may know: ‘Pale hands I loved, Beside the Shalimar’. I remember my father singing those lines to himself. It includes a couplet, addressed to those pale hands:
I would rather have felt you round my throat
Crushing out life; than waving me farewell!
The poem is called ‘Kashmiri Song’ – Kashmiris are often described as fair-skinned. There is an ambiguity, perhaps deliberate, about the gender and racial identity of narrator and lover. Some of her poems are deeply transgressive: addressing not just gender and race, but betrayal, harm and the erotic, in ways which we rarely associate with that apparently strait-laced era. Whether this was fantasy, exotic fable, or based in part on experience, we just don’t know.
The story of her death is disturbing. Her husband was much older; he needed a prostate operation; it went wrong; the Madras nursing home had run out of oxygen. A few weeks later, his widow – thirty-nine years old and with a four year-old son in the care of relatives in England – took her own life.
Gossip travels fast, and the word went out that this poet - so knowledgeable about Indian customs and lore – had committed sati … an ancient, and long-outlawed, custom of a wife taking her own life when her husband loses his.
Adela’s sister was also a writer – using the pen name Victoria Cross, she wrote racy novels; her most popular is said to have sold six-million copies. Set in India, it’s about a genteel young English woman who takes her Indian servant as her lover and won’t give him up even when she gets engaged to an eligible, English, colonial administrator. Her lover dies, but she discovers she is expecting his child. She marries her English fiancé and they move away; when the baby is born, she realises that her husband can never abide this living reminder of her Indian lover, so … she suffocates the child.
It’s fiction of course. But it does make you pause. The novel violates so much of what's expected of a refined English woman in India at this time. You wonder whose anxieties are being expressed in this tangled storyline - and what its emphatic commercial success says about its readership: that they liked to be shocked and appalled, or in some vicarious manner wanted to share in the thrill, and agony, of a woman who breaks the rules.
The writings of both sisters challenge some of the conventional assumptions about Empire - about the attitudes and experiences of those Britons who made their lives in India. Colonial graveyards such as St Mary’s are often among the most potent epitaphs of an enterprise which by-and-large history does not judge kindly. But delve deeper beneath that dense mat of vegetation, and it’s extraordinary what you can find.
The church still attracts a respectable Sunday congregation; its monuments and memorials delineate Britain’s early, stumbling, not always gentle, encounter with India. The surrounding graveyard quickly became full – the lifespan of Britons in India back then was short. St Mary’s was allocated an overspill burial ground on a desolate spot a couple of miles away called the Island.
It’s there still, sprawling, unkempt, a blasted elegy for Empire – a caretaker does his best to keep the dereliction at bay, but it’s a losing battle. Obelisks, crosses and funeral statuary peep out from the dense undergrowth. Stray dogs howl with anger when disturbed. No one goes there except –tell-tale signs suggest – to gamble, defecate, drink … and have sex.
At the far end of the grounds, just as you wonder whether you dare venture any further, there are two neat, well-tended, fenced-off plots of Commonwealth war graves. And close by, in a no man’s land between the manicured rows of war dead and the tangled mayhem all around, I came across a grave I was looking out for – a small, modest plaque in memory of General Malcolm Nicolson and his wife Adela Florence, who both died in what was then Madras in 1904.
She was one of the most popular poets of the Edwardian era – she wrote of love, longing, suffering and death; and above all of India, with which she had a profound affinity. She at first made out that her poems were translations from Indian languages – and she used a man’s name, Laurence Hope. Some verses of hers, set to music, you may know: ‘Pale hands I loved, Beside the Shalimar’. I remember my father singing those lines to himself. It includes a couplet, addressed to those pale hands:
I would rather have felt you round my throat
Crushing out life; than waving me farewell!
The poem is called ‘Kashmiri Song’ – Kashmiris are often described as fair-skinned. There is an ambiguity, perhaps deliberate, about the gender and racial identity of narrator and lover. Some of her poems are deeply transgressive: addressing not just gender and race, but betrayal, harm and the erotic, in ways which we rarely associate with that apparently strait-laced era. Whether this was fantasy, exotic fable, or based in part on experience, we just don’t know.
The story of her death is disturbing. Her husband was much older; he needed a prostate operation; it went wrong; the Madras nursing home had run out of oxygen. A few weeks later, his widow – thirty-nine years old and with a four year-old son in the care of relatives in England – took her own life.
Gossip travels fast, and the word went out that this poet - so knowledgeable about Indian customs and lore – had committed sati … an ancient, and long-outlawed, custom of a wife taking her own life when her husband loses his.
Adela’s sister was also a writer – using the pen name Victoria Cross, she wrote racy novels; her most popular is said to have sold six-million copies. Set in India, it’s about a genteel young English woman who takes her Indian servant as her lover and won’t give him up even when she gets engaged to an eligible, English, colonial administrator. Her lover dies, but she discovers she is expecting his child. She marries her English fiancé and they move away; when the baby is born, she realises that her husband can never abide this living reminder of her Indian lover, so … she suffocates the child.
It’s fiction of course. But it does make you pause. The novel violates so much of what's expected of a refined English woman in India at this time. You wonder whose anxieties are being expressed in this tangled storyline - and what its emphatic commercial success says about its readership: that they liked to be shocked and appalled, or in some vicarious manner wanted to share in the thrill, and agony, of a woman who breaks the rules.
The writings of both sisters challenge some of the conventional assumptions about Empire - about the attitudes and experiences of those Britons who made their lives in India. Colonial graveyards such as St Mary’s are often among the most potent epitaphs of an enterprise which by-and-large history does not judge kindly. But delve deeper beneath that dense mat of vegetation, and it’s extraordinary what you can find.
From Our Own Correspondent: Korean expats in Chennai
A piece for BBC radio's From Our Own Correspondent on what's now the largest ex-pat community in Chennai (20 October 2018)
Andrew Whitehead [a former BBC India correspondent] spends time every year in Chennai, the port city once known as Madras. Recently he came across a newly-established community which now describes itself as the most numerous expatriate group in this corner of South India:
Sriperumbudur is not the sort of spot you expect to be served kimchi, a Korean dish of fermented cabbage which is a world away from the Tamil staples of dosas and iddlis. It’s a sleepy, non-descript town where cows and goats mosey among the vegetable stalls. If the rest of India has heard of the place, it’s because Sriperumbudur is where Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former prime minister, was blown-up by a woman suicide bomber. An impressive memorial park, whose main feature is an unsettling mural depicting the moment the explosives detonated, attracts a steady stream of visitors.
The town is an hour out of Chennai on the main road to Bengaluru - Madras and Bangalore, as South India’s principal cities were still known when Rajiv Gandhi made his ill-fated campaign stop. Not many visitors to his memorial bother to come in to the town centre. Perhaps they should. Slightly hidden on a driveway off Gandhi Road is an elegant, newly-built hotel. “Can I have lunch here?” - I asked the receptionist. “Sorry”, he replied. “But you have a restaurant – isn’t it open?” “Yes, it’s open - but, you see, we only serve Korean food”.
Having reassured him that that would do just fine, I was shown into a small, functional eating room. Most of the tables were taken by clusters of blue-shirted young and middle aged men, interspersed – this was a Saturday – with a few family groups. A Korean TV channel was playing. As far as I could tell, I was the only non-Korean there. I wasn’t familiar with the cuisine but the waitress - Korean of course –patiently guided me through the menu and I ate splendidly.
The Kyung Joo hotel – Hotel Crystal Towers according to its English language signboard – has been open for seven years. Ninety per cent of its customers are Korean. Most work at or have links with the massive Hyundai car plant on the outskirts of town. This opened in 1999, eight years after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination; the South Korea-based multinational is now India’s second biggest car maker. One-in-six of all new cars sold in India are made here. Buoyed by Hyundai’s success, Samsung and many other Korean businesses have set up shop in South India.
The Korean presence is discreet. But travel along the national highway, you can spot shops with signs in distinctive Korean characters. In Chennai, the South Korean consulate takes up an entire floor in a high-rise office block in one of the smarter parts of the city. The consul-general says there are now five-thousand Koreans and three-hundred Korean firms in and around Chennai – the largest ex-patriate community in the area. From my city centre flat, a Korean restaurant, Korean hotel, Korean bakery and Korean café and gift shop are all within walking distance.
At first, I suspect, the Koreans coming to work here for a year or two counted down the days until their return home. There’s still not a lot of mingling between Koreans and local Madrasis, but a centre has been established - with support from South Korea-based business houses - to encourage dialogue between the cultures. You can take lessons in the Korean language, join a Korean dance troupe – and if you are Korean, there are courses in Tamil cuisine and Indian spirituality as well as treks and fishing outings.
Once, the port of Madras was an important trading post with links to South-East and East Asia. Between the world wars, the sea lanes east across the Bay of Bengal were among the world’s busiest migration routes. If you look hard, you can still find an imprint of that – in Chennai’s ‘Burma’ market, in the small Chinese community, particularly prominent among the city’s private dentists. The Korean presence is, in a way, a rekindling of those pan-Asian ties.
But things aren’t always as they seem. Having decided I quite like Korean food, I called in on my local restaurant – take it from me, the soft-shell crab is wonderful. The Korean proprietor told me she’d been based in Chennai for eleven years – though she’s picked up little Tamil or indeed English.
I asked the waiting staff how long they had been in India. They smiled awkwardly. They weren’t Korean at all, but from the remoter corners of India’s north-east –Mizoram, Meghalaya and Nagaland - where many people look more East Asian than South Asian. And the kitchen staff – are they also from the north east, I asked? Oh no – not at all, I was told; they’re from Nepal.
Korean food, cooked by Nepalis, and served by north-easterners, in south India. How’s that for cultural crossover?
Sriperumbudur is not the sort of spot you expect to be served kimchi, a Korean dish of fermented cabbage which is a world away from the Tamil staples of dosas and iddlis. It’s a sleepy, non-descript town where cows and goats mosey among the vegetable stalls. If the rest of India has heard of the place, it’s because Sriperumbudur is where Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former prime minister, was blown-up by a woman suicide bomber. An impressive memorial park, whose main feature is an unsettling mural depicting the moment the explosives detonated, attracts a steady stream of visitors.
The town is an hour out of Chennai on the main road to Bengaluru - Madras and Bangalore, as South India’s principal cities were still known when Rajiv Gandhi made his ill-fated campaign stop. Not many visitors to his memorial bother to come in to the town centre. Perhaps they should. Slightly hidden on a driveway off Gandhi Road is an elegant, newly-built hotel. “Can I have lunch here?” - I asked the receptionist. “Sorry”, he replied. “But you have a restaurant – isn’t it open?” “Yes, it’s open - but, you see, we only serve Korean food”.
Having reassured him that that would do just fine, I was shown into a small, functional eating room. Most of the tables were taken by clusters of blue-shirted young and middle aged men, interspersed – this was a Saturday – with a few family groups. A Korean TV channel was playing. As far as I could tell, I was the only non-Korean there. I wasn’t familiar with the cuisine but the waitress - Korean of course –patiently guided me through the menu and I ate splendidly.
The Kyung Joo hotel – Hotel Crystal Towers according to its English language signboard – has been open for seven years. Ninety per cent of its customers are Korean. Most work at or have links with the massive Hyundai car plant on the outskirts of town. This opened in 1999, eight years after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination; the South Korea-based multinational is now India’s second biggest car maker. One-in-six of all new cars sold in India are made here. Buoyed by Hyundai’s success, Samsung and many other Korean businesses have set up shop in South India.
The Korean presence is discreet. But travel along the national highway, you can spot shops with signs in distinctive Korean characters. In Chennai, the South Korean consulate takes up an entire floor in a high-rise office block in one of the smarter parts of the city. The consul-general says there are now five-thousand Koreans and three-hundred Korean firms in and around Chennai – the largest ex-patriate community in the area. From my city centre flat, a Korean restaurant, Korean hotel, Korean bakery and Korean café and gift shop are all within walking distance.
At first, I suspect, the Koreans coming to work here for a year or two counted down the days until their return home. There’s still not a lot of mingling between Koreans and local Madrasis, but a centre has been established - with support from South Korea-based business houses - to encourage dialogue between the cultures. You can take lessons in the Korean language, join a Korean dance troupe – and if you are Korean, there are courses in Tamil cuisine and Indian spirituality as well as treks and fishing outings.
Once, the port of Madras was an important trading post with links to South-East and East Asia. Between the world wars, the sea lanes east across the Bay of Bengal were among the world’s busiest migration routes. If you look hard, you can still find an imprint of that – in Chennai’s ‘Burma’ market, in the small Chinese community, particularly prominent among the city’s private dentists. The Korean presence is, in a way, a rekindling of those pan-Asian ties.
But things aren’t always as they seem. Having decided I quite like Korean food, I called in on my local restaurant – take it from me, the soft-shell crab is wonderful. The Korean proprietor told me she’d been based in Chennai for eleven years – though she’s picked up little Tamil or indeed English.
I asked the waiting staff how long they had been in India. They smiled awkwardly. They weren’t Korean at all, but from the remoter corners of India’s north-east –Mizoram, Meghalaya and Nagaland - where many people look more East Asian than South Asian. And the kitchen staff – are they also from the north east, I asked? Oh no – not at all, I was told; they’re from Nepal.
Korean food, cooked by Nepalis, and served by north-easterners, in south India. How’s that for cultural crossover?
NDTV.com: What Rahul Gandhi said to LSE Students
When Congress President Rahul Gandhi addressed a town hall-style meeting at the LSE, he used the occasion to rip in to his party's old guard - and yes, I did suggest a livelier headline! (25 August 2018) - the PTI photo of me shaking RG's hand appears here
www.ndtv.com/opinion/opinion-at-lse-rahul-gandhi-admits-to-congress-many-problems-1905978?pfrom=home-topstoriess
www.ndtv.com/opinion/opinion-at-lse-rahul-gandhi-admits-to-congress-many-problems-1905978?pfrom=home-topstoriess
Asia Dialogue blog: Is Kashmir facing a new crisis?
The state government in Indian Kashmir falls - the glimmer of hope for a political initiative disappears - and Kashmir's best known and regarded journalist is killed: my assessment on the University of Nottingham Asia blog (2 July 2018)
theasiadialogue.com/2018/07/02/kashmir-faces-new-crisis/
theasiadialogue.com/2018/07/02/kashmir-faces-new-crisis/
BBC News: Shujaat Bukhari, 'the best of Kashmir'
A tribute to Shujaat Bukhari, editor of 'Rising Kashmir' and a fine journalist as well as a friend, who was shot dead outside his office in Srinagar (15 June 2018)
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44480142
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44480142
The Wire: A 'New Woman' Novel set in Pre-Independence India
A piece reposted (with permission) from my blog about a remarkably transgressive Edwardian novel - Anna Lombard by 'Victoria Cross' - set in imperial India, (22 May 2018)
https://thewire.in/books/anna-lombard-a-new-woman-novel-set-in-pre-independence-india
https://thewire.in/books/anna-lombard-a-new-woman-novel-set-in-pre-independence-india
From Our Own Correspondent: Tamil film stars venture back into politics
It seemed as if the era of film stars dominating politics in Tamil Nadu was over - but now Rajinikanth is planning to launch his own political party (14 April 2018) The audio is here, the scripted is posted below:
CUE: To South India, where not one but two Tamil-language film stars are turning to politics – aiming to transform their huge fan base into support at the ballot box. And this in a region where more often than not in recent decades, the top political job has been taken by someone who has gained fame in the movie industry. Andrew Whitehead in Chennai has been watching the drama unfold:
Rajinikanth is at first glance an unlikely celebrity. He’s in his late sixties, bald, with a greying beard, round glasses – and the appearance more of a sage than a superstar. But in this film besotted corner of India, he’s about as big as you get: in terms of fame – and popularity - he outranks politicians, cricketers, singers, religious leaders, the lot.
His new movie is called ‘Kaala’ - black. It is, by some counts, his 155th film. There have been a few flops along the way. But this seems set to do well. A video teaser released on social media was – say the promoters - viewed 12 million times in the first 24 hours.
‘Kaala’ is in Tamil, the first language of some seventy million South Indians. You will have heard of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry -South India has Kollywood.
In this gangster movie Rajinikanth, sporting a full head of hair and dark glasses, is the ‘don’, the criminal mastermind.
The film is being trawled for any sign of a political message. ‘Kaala’, black, the colour of the Dravidian movement, the assertion of Tamil pride and social equality which has reshaped politics here. Black, some critics have mused, because it’s a reminder of Rajinikanth’s dark complexion, his humble background, his association with the masses.
All this matters because Rajinikanth has declared that he intends to enter politics – indeed, to set up his own party. This has the potential to turn Tamil politics upside down. Not least because the film industry has made more political impact in Tamil-speaking South India than anywhere else in the world. For 43 of the last 50 years, the state’s chief minister has either been a movie star or someone closely associated with the film industry.
M. Karunanidhi, an acclaimed Tamil screen writer, spent twenty years as chief minister.His rival - the biggest Tamil film star of them all, M.G. Ramachandran - established a breakaway party and was in power for a decade. MGR’s old home is now a museum, complete with his now stuffed pet lion, Raja. His tomb, adorned with a twelve foot high bronze statue of Pegasus, looms over Chennai’s Marina beach. Thousands visit every day, some putting their ear to the marble slab to test the tale that you can still hear the tick of his Rolex watch.
MGR’s political successor was his leading lady and sometimes co-star: Jayalalithaa, a shrewd and effective politician who dominated the Tamil political scene for a quarter-of-a-century. She died in December 2016 – and now lies alongside her mentor. That appeared to bring down the curtain on the era of film star chief ministers. But since then, there has been a power vacuum, an absence of commanding political personalities.
So is the stage set for another movie star at the helm? Opinion is sharply divided. Rajinikanthhas left it rather late in life to venture into politics. No one’s yet sure quite what he stands for – beyond an assertion of the need for a more spiritual side to public life.
And while his vast network of fan clubs will provide quite a launch pad, those with political ambitions here need very deep pockets. Vote buying has become a well organised industry here. Voters expect lavish food and drink and pay offs often amounting to thousands of rupees before they pledge their support.
Rajinikanth faces another hurdle too. He’s not the only Tamil film star who is turning to politics. Kamal Haasan, also in his sixties and seen as a touch more sophisticated as an actor, has just launched his own party, [the Centre for People’s Justice].
In his breakthrough movie, back in 1975, Haasan played a young rebel who falls head-over-heels in love with an older woman. Also in the cast …Rajinikanth making his screen debut. Their careers have been closely entwined. But as Kamal Haasan recently acknowledged: they have been competitors - and their rival political ambitions are bound to sharpen that divide. [Though both seem to be hedging their bets – they are said to be still considering new film roles.]
There’s no room for two ageing thespians at the apex of Tamil politics. They could make common cause – though it’s difficult to see either ceding the leading role to the other. So, really, for one to thrive, the other has to fail. What a story we may have of deals and demagoguery, of backstabbing and betrayal.
It has all the makings of a marvellous Tamil movie.
Rajinikanth is at first glance an unlikely celebrity. He’s in his late sixties, bald, with a greying beard, round glasses – and the appearance more of a sage than a superstar. But in this film besotted corner of India, he’s about as big as you get: in terms of fame – and popularity - he outranks politicians, cricketers, singers, religious leaders, the lot.
His new movie is called ‘Kaala’ - black. It is, by some counts, his 155th film. There have been a few flops along the way. But this seems set to do well. A video teaser released on social media was – say the promoters - viewed 12 million times in the first 24 hours.
‘Kaala’ is in Tamil, the first language of some seventy million South Indians. You will have heard of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry -South India has Kollywood.
In this gangster movie Rajinikanth, sporting a full head of hair and dark glasses, is the ‘don’, the criminal mastermind.
The film is being trawled for any sign of a political message. ‘Kaala’, black, the colour of the Dravidian movement, the assertion of Tamil pride and social equality which has reshaped politics here. Black, some critics have mused, because it’s a reminder of Rajinikanth’s dark complexion, his humble background, his association with the masses.
All this matters because Rajinikanth has declared that he intends to enter politics – indeed, to set up his own party. This has the potential to turn Tamil politics upside down. Not least because the film industry has made more political impact in Tamil-speaking South India than anywhere else in the world. For 43 of the last 50 years, the state’s chief minister has either been a movie star or someone closely associated with the film industry.
M. Karunanidhi, an acclaimed Tamil screen writer, spent twenty years as chief minister.His rival - the biggest Tamil film star of them all, M.G. Ramachandran - established a breakaway party and was in power for a decade. MGR’s old home is now a museum, complete with his now stuffed pet lion, Raja. His tomb, adorned with a twelve foot high bronze statue of Pegasus, looms over Chennai’s Marina beach. Thousands visit every day, some putting their ear to the marble slab to test the tale that you can still hear the tick of his Rolex watch.
MGR’s political successor was his leading lady and sometimes co-star: Jayalalithaa, a shrewd and effective politician who dominated the Tamil political scene for a quarter-of-a-century. She died in December 2016 – and now lies alongside her mentor. That appeared to bring down the curtain on the era of film star chief ministers. But since then, there has been a power vacuum, an absence of commanding political personalities.
So is the stage set for another movie star at the helm? Opinion is sharply divided. Rajinikanthhas left it rather late in life to venture into politics. No one’s yet sure quite what he stands for – beyond an assertion of the need for a more spiritual side to public life.
And while his vast network of fan clubs will provide quite a launch pad, those with political ambitions here need very deep pockets. Vote buying has become a well organised industry here. Voters expect lavish food and drink and pay offs often amounting to thousands of rupees before they pledge their support.
Rajinikanth faces another hurdle too. He’s not the only Tamil film star who is turning to politics. Kamal Haasan, also in his sixties and seen as a touch more sophisticated as an actor, has just launched his own party, [the Centre for People’s Justice].
In his breakthrough movie, back in 1975, Haasan played a young rebel who falls head-over-heels in love with an older woman. Also in the cast …Rajinikanth making his screen debut. Their careers have been closely entwined. But as Kamal Haasan recently acknowledged: they have been competitors - and their rival political ambitions are bound to sharpen that divide. [Though both seem to be hedging their bets – they are said to be still considering new film roles.]
There’s no room for two ageing thespians at the apex of Tamil politics. They could make common cause – though it’s difficult to see either ceding the leading role to the other. So, really, for one to thrive, the other has to fail. What a story we may have of deals and demagoguery, of backstabbing and betrayal.
It has all the makings of a marvellous Tamil movie.
BBC: The Tibetan Muslims who have gone home to Kashmir
The Kashmir-origin community which has returned to the Valley after several centuries - a piece for 'From Our Own Correspondent' reversioned for the website (2 December 2017) - 130,000+ views
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-42165908
Republished by Kashmir Monitor: www.kashmirmonitor.in/Details/137951/the-tibetan-muslims-who-have-made-kashmir-their-homeandrew-whitehead
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-42165908
Republished by Kashmir Monitor: www.kashmirmonitor.in/Details/137951/the-tibetan-muslims-who-have-made-kashmir-their-homeandrew-whitehead
BBC News: 'Return to Kashmir, where our parents were shot'
A visit back to Baramulla with two sons of the young British couple who were among those killed there seventy years ago. (16 November 2017) - more than 1.2 million views
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-41996612
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-41996612
The Wire: Meeting Dina Wadia on Madison Avenue
On the death of Jinnah's daughter, a piece about my encounter with her in New York - reposted (with permission) from my blog (3 November 2017)
thewire.in/193905/muhammad-ali-jinnah-daughter-dina-wadia/
Also reposted on the BBC website: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41863423
thewire.in/193905/muhammad-ali-jinnah-daughter-dina-wadia/
Also reposted on the BBC website: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41863423
BBC News: Why India and Pakistan fight over Kashmir
A BBC News video about the genesis of the Kashmir conflict - I am one of the contributors (28 October 2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgAypF0rBGI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgAypF0rBGI
The Conversation: Why Kashmir is still ensnared in conflict after 70 years
70 years on from Kashmir's accession to India and the arrival of the first Indian troops, why the conflict continues (25 October 2017)
theconversation.com/why-kashmir-is-still-ensnared-in-conflict-after-70-years-85202
Reposted on Quartz India with 40,000+ views: qz.com/1112379/70-years-after-the-crisis-broke-out-why-is-kashmir-still-simmering/
Reposted on IAPS blog: https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/08/18/india-and-pakistan-at-70-kashmir/
theconversation.com/why-kashmir-is-still-ensnared-in-conflict-after-70-years-85202
Reposted on Quartz India with 40,000+ views: qz.com/1112379/70-years-after-the-crisis-broke-out-why-is-kashmir-still-simmering/
Reposted on IAPS blog: https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/08/18/india-and-pakistan-at-70-kashmir/
History Workshop Online: Kashmir's women's militia at the end of Empire
On the anniversary of the invasion which plunged Kashmir into crisis, a revisit of the women's self-defence corps (20 October 2017)
www.historyworkshop.org.uk/kashmirs-womens-militia-at-the-end-of-empire/
Reposted on The Wire: thewire.in/189763/kashmir-women-militia/
www.historyworkshop.org.uk/kashmirs-womens-militia-at-the-end-of-empire/
Reposted on The Wire: thewire.in/189763/kashmir-women-militia/
IAPS Blog: Kashmir @ 70
Seventy years after the end of the Raj, where are we now with the Kashmir conflict? (18 August 2017)
iapsdialogue.org/2017/08/18/india-and-pakistan-at-70-kashmir/
iapsdialogue.org/2017/08/18/india-and-pakistan-at-70-kashmir/
Daily Mirror: 70 Years After Independence, Our Tragic Legacy
The what, why, where, when and how of Partition - and its lingering impact, in South Asia and Britain (15 August 2017)
www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/million-dead-12m-refugees-wars-10990115
www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/million-dead-12m-refugees-wars-10990115
If you are curious to read what I wrote for the Mirror, I am posting the article as submitted:
Seven decades ago exactly, as the stroke of midnight ushered in August 15th 1947, India and Pakistan gained their independence - but at a terrible price. The breaking up of British India into two independent nations, Hindu majority India and mainly Muslim Pakistan, provoked one of the most terrible catastrophes of a turbulent century.
About a million people - no one knows the number for sure - were slaughtered as Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other embarked on a fury of communal violence. Twelve million people became refugees, many traipsing across the new international borders in seeming endless columns of the near destitute.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
A radical Labour government was elected in Britain at the close of the Second World War determined to grant independence to our biggest colony, India. The dashing Louis Mountbatten - uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and distant relative of the Queen - was given the role of the last Viceroy of India. His task: to organise an orderly British exit and a seamless transfer of power.
Mountbatten was a naval officer and during the war had served as the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. As befits a military man, he wanted the job done quickly. He was a man in a hurry - and India paid the price.
India's main political leaders, Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, couldn't agree on what should follow British imperial rule. The founding father of Pakistan, Jinnah, argued that British India's Muslim minority - about a quarter of the total population - were a nation in their own right. Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, reluctantly acquiesced in the dividing of the country.
That meant dissecting two of India's biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. A task that should have taken months, perhaps years, was completed in five weeks by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before. And who never came back.
He had to carve up India based on unreliable census returns and out-of-date maps. The news about where the new boundary would run was announced only on August 17th, two days after independence. Tens of millions of people celebrated the end of British rule not knowing which new nation they were part of.
Clashes between different religious communities intensified in the run-up to independence. It wasn't simply spontaneous mob violence. Local politicians and gang leaders were involved - the excited political rhetoric heightened emotions - and in the aftermath of a world war in which millions of Indians fought, there were a lot of men around with military training and army issue weapons.
The violence spiralled out of control. Trainloads of refugees were massacred. Tens of thousands of women were abducted and raped - and their either killed or married off. Each mass slaughter prompted demands for revenge, and neither the politicians nor the police were able to stop the frenzy. The steps taken to enforce law and order and deal with large numbers of refugees proved to be utterly inadequate. It was an inglorious end to Imperial rule in India.
In Punjab in particular, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived together peaceably for generations. No one expected a forced mass migration. But by the close of 1947 almost all Hindus and Sikhs in west Punjab had fled east, often encountering long processions of Muslim refugees heading in the opposite direction.
It was one of the biggest population movements of the modern world and a grim start to nationhood. But within weeks, events took a turn for the worse.
The British had pulled out of the 'jewel in the crown' of Empire without a final decision on who should rule the mountain kingdom of Kashmir. The maharajah was a Hindu. Most of his citizens were Muslims. Both India and Pakistan claimed the princely state.
By the end of October 1947, India and Pakistan were fighting over Kashmir. In all, these two nations - now both nuclear powers - have fought four wars in the past seventy years. Three of them have been in or about Kashmir. The conflict remains unresolved. Many Kashmiris would prefer independence.
India and Pakistan have a great deal of shared history in common. They both have a passion for cricket. If you speak Hindi, India's main language, then you will understand Urdu, Pakistan's official language. India's Bollywood movies are big in Pakistan; Pakistani TV soaps are avidly watched in India.
But the two nations have never become friends. There are no direct flights between the two capitals; no big regional news organisation has a reporter in the 'other' capital; India has more trade with Belgium than with its neighbour to the west.
The territory that was allocated to the new Muslim nation in 1947 amounted to, in Jinnah's famous words, a 'moth-eaten Pakistan'. Two wings divided by a thousand miles of Indian territory. In 1971, with the support of the Indian army, East Pakistan broke away to become the independent nation of Bangladesh. For many in Pakistan, it felt like a second partition.
The intense rivalry with India has destabilised Pakistan's democracy. The army is by far the most powerful institution. And radical Islam has been able to use the war cry of saving Muslim Kashmir from Hindu India to win recruits and money.
On the other side of the Partition line, India has developed into a major world power, with a robust if flawed democracy and a booming economy. Muslims make up just one-in-six of India's population, but soon - it's forecast - India will be home to more Muslims than anywhere else. Pakistan was founded as a nation for Muslims - India is destined to be the biggest Muslim nation in the world.
Britain's imperial history in South Asia explains the large number of migrants who came to find work or get an education here. There are almost one-and-half million people of Indian descent in Britain - and slight more whose forbears came from Pakistan or Bangladesh.
The tensions between different religious groups which flared up so tragically seventy years ago have inevitably had an impact on the outlook of migrants in Britain. But as British Asians of all communities reflect on the immense tragedy that accompanied independence, they do so more in sadness than in anger. [ENDS]
Seven decades ago exactly, as the stroke of midnight ushered in August 15th 1947, India and Pakistan gained their independence - but at a terrible price. The breaking up of British India into two independent nations, Hindu majority India and mainly Muslim Pakistan, provoked one of the most terrible catastrophes of a turbulent century.
About a million people - no one knows the number for sure - were slaughtered as Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other embarked on a fury of communal violence. Twelve million people became refugees, many traipsing across the new international borders in seeming endless columns of the near destitute.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
A radical Labour government was elected in Britain at the close of the Second World War determined to grant independence to our biggest colony, India. The dashing Louis Mountbatten - uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and distant relative of the Queen - was given the role of the last Viceroy of India. His task: to organise an orderly British exit and a seamless transfer of power.
Mountbatten was a naval officer and during the war had served as the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. As befits a military man, he wanted the job done quickly. He was a man in a hurry - and India paid the price.
India's main political leaders, Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, couldn't agree on what should follow British imperial rule. The founding father of Pakistan, Jinnah, argued that British India's Muslim minority - about a quarter of the total population - were a nation in their own right. Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, reluctantly acquiesced in the dividing of the country.
That meant dissecting two of India's biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. A task that should have taken months, perhaps years, was completed in five weeks by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before. And who never came back.
He had to carve up India based on unreliable census returns and out-of-date maps. The news about where the new boundary would run was announced only on August 17th, two days after independence. Tens of millions of people celebrated the end of British rule not knowing which new nation they were part of.
Clashes between different religious communities intensified in the run-up to independence. It wasn't simply spontaneous mob violence. Local politicians and gang leaders were involved - the excited political rhetoric heightened emotions - and in the aftermath of a world war in which millions of Indians fought, there were a lot of men around with military training and army issue weapons.
The violence spiralled out of control. Trainloads of refugees were massacred. Tens of thousands of women were abducted and raped - and their either killed or married off. Each mass slaughter prompted demands for revenge, and neither the politicians nor the police were able to stop the frenzy. The steps taken to enforce law and order and deal with large numbers of refugees proved to be utterly inadequate. It was an inglorious end to Imperial rule in India.
In Punjab in particular, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived together peaceably for generations. No one expected a forced mass migration. But by the close of 1947 almost all Hindus and Sikhs in west Punjab had fled east, often encountering long processions of Muslim refugees heading in the opposite direction.
It was one of the biggest population movements of the modern world and a grim start to nationhood. But within weeks, events took a turn for the worse.
The British had pulled out of the 'jewel in the crown' of Empire without a final decision on who should rule the mountain kingdom of Kashmir. The maharajah was a Hindu. Most of his citizens were Muslims. Both India and Pakistan claimed the princely state.
By the end of October 1947, India and Pakistan were fighting over Kashmir. In all, these two nations - now both nuclear powers - have fought four wars in the past seventy years. Three of them have been in or about Kashmir. The conflict remains unresolved. Many Kashmiris would prefer independence.
India and Pakistan have a great deal of shared history in common. They both have a passion for cricket. If you speak Hindi, India's main language, then you will understand Urdu, Pakistan's official language. India's Bollywood movies are big in Pakistan; Pakistani TV soaps are avidly watched in India.
But the two nations have never become friends. There are no direct flights between the two capitals; no big regional news organisation has a reporter in the 'other' capital; India has more trade with Belgium than with its neighbour to the west.
The territory that was allocated to the new Muslim nation in 1947 amounted to, in Jinnah's famous words, a 'moth-eaten Pakistan'. Two wings divided by a thousand miles of Indian territory. In 1971, with the support of the Indian army, East Pakistan broke away to become the independent nation of Bangladesh. For many in Pakistan, it felt like a second partition.
The intense rivalry with India has destabilised Pakistan's democracy. The army is by far the most powerful institution. And radical Islam has been able to use the war cry of saving Muslim Kashmir from Hindu India to win recruits and money.
On the other side of the Partition line, India has developed into a major world power, with a robust if flawed democracy and a booming economy. Muslims make up just one-in-six of India's population, but soon - it's forecast - India will be home to more Muslims than anywhere else. Pakistan was founded as a nation for Muslims - India is destined to be the biggest Muslim nation in the world.
Britain's imperial history in South Asia explains the large number of migrants who came to find work or get an education here. There are almost one-and-half million people of Indian descent in Britain - and slight more whose forbears came from Pakistan or Bangladesh.
The tensions between different religious groups which flared up so tragically seventy years ago have inevitably had an impact on the outlook of migrants in Britain. But as British Asians of all communities reflect on the immense tragedy that accompanied independence, they do so more in sadness than in anger. [ENDS]
BBC News: Partition 70 Years On
The legacy of Partition - the trauma, turmoil and rivalry (27 July 2017) - over 900,000 views in first two days
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40643413
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40643413
The Hindu: An Anguished Farewell to Austerity
The Grenfell Tower fire in London has prbably brought down the curtain on a decade of austerity (6 July 2017)
www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/grenfell-tower-fire-an-anguished-farewell-to-austerity/article19216896.ece?homepage=true
www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/grenfell-tower-fire-an-anguished-farewell-to-austerity/article19216896.ece?homepage=true
From Our Own Correspondent: Toyah Sofaer's ill-fated romance
The tragic story behind the grave of a young woman in Chennai's half-forgotten Jewish cemetery (11 June 2017) - 1,096,000 views
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40221002
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40221002
ndtv.com: Why Theresa May got it all so terribly wrong
How the Conservative Prime Minister called an election she didn't need to, and lost her gamble (9 June 2017)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/the-catastrophic-misjudgement-of-theresa-may-1709906?pfrom=home-opinion
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/the-catastrophic-misjudgement-of-theresa-may-1709906?pfrom=home-opinion
ndtv.com: Is this the end of May?
How Britain's 'dull' election campaign has come to life (5 June 2017)
www.ndtv.com/opinion/as-britain-votes-this-week-is-it-the-end-of-theresa-may-1707917
www.ndtv.com/opinion/as-britain-votes-this-week-is-it-the-end-of-theresa-may-1707917
Oxford Today: From Oxford to Lahore
An article by Naomi Canton based on an interview with me about my impending Freda Bedi biography (2 June 2017)
http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/interviews/oxford-lahore-%E2%80%94-anti-imperialist-briton-who-became-tibetan-buddhist-nun
http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/interviews/oxford-lahore-%E2%80%94-anti-imperialist-briton-who-became-tibetan-buddhist-nun
Greater Kashmir: Angry and Fearless
What's changed in Kashmir and what hasn't. (26 April 2017)
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/angry-and-fearless/247553.html
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/angry-and-fearless/247553.html
ndtv.com: What the Westminster attack shows about London's police + MPs
How Britain is responding to the attack on the House of Parliament (23 March 2017)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-westminster-attack-shows-about-london-police-and-mps-1672658
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-westminster-attack-shows-about-london-police-and-mps-1672658
ndtv.com: In Chennai, Sasikala is viscerally unpopular
A look at a turbulent few weeks in Tamil politics and the prospect of a political 'clean-up' campaign (21 February 2017)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/in-chennai-sasikala-is-viscerally-unpopular-1661635
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/in-chennai-sasikala-is-viscerally-unpopular-1661635
The Nation (Pakistan): "Monday Morning" in Lahore
An appeal to retrieve copies of one of Lahore's liveliest political journals - from the late 1930s (2 February 2017)
http://nation.com.pk/columns/02-Feb-2017/monday-morning-in-lahore
http://nation.com.pk/columns/02-Feb-2017/monday-morning-in-lahore
ndtv.com: Theresa May plays the Trump card
An assessment as Theresa May heads to Washington to be the first world leader to visit President Trump at the White House (25 January 2017)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/as-theresa-may-meets-trump-india-should-watch-closely-1652224
Also posted on IAPS Dialogue: https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/01/25/as-theresa-may-meets-trump-india-should-watch-closely/
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/as-theresa-may-meets-trump-india-should-watch-closely-1652224
Also posted on IAPS Dialogue: https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/01/25/as-theresa-may-meets-trump-india-should-watch-closely/
The Guardian: Other Lives - Arthur Whitehead
A brief obituary of my father for the Guardian's 'Other Lives' (27 October 2016 - in paper on 29 October 2016)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/27/arthur-whitehead-obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/27/arthur-whitehead-obituary
BBC Hindi: How Kashmir acceded to India
69 years on, an account of how the Maharaja of Kashmir came to sing the instrument of accession by which his princely state became part of India (26 October 2016)
http://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-37765477?ocid=socialflow_facebook
http://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-37765477?ocid=socialflow_facebook
Morley Observer: Tales of Gildersome's Mills
On the death of my father at the age of 91, I wrote a piece for the weekly paper in the part of Yorkshire where he (and I) grew up about about his life and the woollen mills which were once such a large part of it. (19 October 2016)
http://www.morleyobserver.co.uk/news/local/obituary-a-tribute-to-my-dad-tales-of-gildersome-mills-and-days-gone-by-1-8186075
http://www.morleyobserver.co.uk/news/local/obituary-a-tribute-to-my-dad-tales-of-gildersome-mills-and-days-gone-by-1-8186075
Newshour Extra: Kashmir in Crisis
Back to the studios of the BBC World Service, as a panellist on an hour-long radio special on 'Kashmir in Crisis' (23 September 2016)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0480bxy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0480bxy
BuddhistDoor: How Freda Bedi became a Buddhist nun
Article for Hong Kong-based Buddhist website about Freda Bedi, and the spiritual journey which took her to ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist nun - 3.7k 'likes' (12 August 2016)
http://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/freda-bedi-the-making-of-a-buddhist-nun
http://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/freda-bedi-the-making-of-a-buddhist-nun
ndtv.com: Nigel Farage's exit
Nigel Farage has left the political centre stage of his own volition - other leading Brexiteers have been despatched more viciously (5 July 2016)
www.ndtv.com/opinion/nigel-farages-exit-and-political-assassinations-after-brexit-1428049?pfrom=home-topstories
www.ndtv.com/opinion/nigel-farages-exit-and-political-assassinations-after-brexit-1428049?pfrom=home-topstories
ndtv.com: Why and how Brexit happened
Britain's shock decision to leave the European Union - how it happened and what it means (24 June 2016)
www.ndtv.com/opinion/with-brexit-a-divided-nation-turns-in-on-itself-1422841
www.ndtv.com/opinion/with-brexit-a-divided-nation-turns-in-on-itself-1422841
ndtv.com: Priti Patel's growing profile in the UK
A profile of the Conservative junior minister who is one of the few politicians to come out well of the European Union referendum campaign (8 June 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/priti-patel-seizes-her-moment-to-stand-out-as-conservative-star-1415893
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/priti-patel-seizes-her-moment-to-stand-out-as-conservative-star-1415893
The Hindu: Britain's Great Curry Crisis
Why chicken tikka masala can no longer be described as Britain's national dish. (26 May 2016)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/chicken-tikka-masala-in-uk-britains-great-curry-crisis/article8646432.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/chicken-tikka-masala-in-uk-britains-great-curry-crisis/article8646432.ece
ndtv.com: Map of Kashmir Creates New Pak-India Stress Point
The perils of mapping Kashmir - and how both India and Pakistan tend to map geopolitical aspirations rather than the ground realities. (24 May 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/map-of-kashmir-creates-new-pak-india-stress-point-but-it-shouldnt-1408175
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/map-of-kashmir-creates-new-pak-india-stress-point-but-it-shouldnt-1408175
ndtv.com: London's Obama moment - a Muslim mayor
Labour's Sadiq Khan becomes the first Muslim to be elected the mayor of a major western capital (7 May 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/londons-obama-moment-a-muslim-mayor-1403743
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/londons-obama-moment-a-muslim-mayor-1403743
The Hindu: Leicester City - little teams matter too
Why Leicester City's unlikely triumph in the Premier League is good for the game. (4 May 2016)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/leicester-city-winning-the-english-premier-league-little-teams-matter-too/article8552324.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/leicester-city-winning-the-english-premier-league-little-teams-matter-too/article8552324.ece
ndtv.com: Will keep your gold safe, say candidates for London Mayor
How the battle for the Indian vote has sured the campaign for mayor of London (26 April 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/will-keep-your-gold-safe-candidates-for-london-mayor-assure-indians-1399405?pfrom=home-opinion
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/will-keep-your-gold-safe-candidates-for-london-mayor-assure-indians-1399405?pfrom=home-opinion
ndtv.com: Give back the Kohinoor? Fat chance!
Why the Kohinoor diamond will be staying in the Tower of London (21 April 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/london-point-of-view-give-back-kohinoor-fat-chance-1397608?pfrom=home-lateststories
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/london-point-of-view-give-back-kohinoor-fat-chance-1397608?pfrom=home-lateststories
The Hindu: A taxing time for David Cameron
A miserable few weeks for David Cameron, above all because of the fuss abut his - and his late father's - financial and tax affairs (18 April 2016)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-taxing-time-for-david-cameron/article8486495.ece_
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-taxing-time-for-david-cameron/article8486495.ece_
IAPS blog: In the Footsteps of Freda Bedi
A hint of what I discovered on a research trip to Mumbai and Bangalore to meet the sons of Freda and B.P.L. Bedi (13 April 2016)
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/asiapacificstudies/2016/04/13/in-the-footsteps-of-freda-bedi/
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/asiapacificstudies/2016/04/13/in-the-footsteps-of-freda-bedi/
ndtv.com: What Mehbooba in charge means for Kashmiri women
On the day that Jammu and Kashmir's first woman chief minister is sworn in, a look at what this might means for the political role of Kashmiri women (4 April 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-mehbooba-in-charge-means-for-kashmiri-women-1334218
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-mehbooba-in-charge-means-for-kashmiri-women-1334218
ndtv.com: Why Tata Steel means so much to David Cameron
The political implications of Tata Steel's decision to pull out of the UK. (1 April 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/why-tata-steel-means-so-much-to-david-cameron-1292889
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/why-tata-steel-means-so-much-to-david-cameron-1292889
Times of India: Ram Advani - 'He represented the grace of old Lucknow'
My tribute to the peerless bookseller Ram Advani, who has died at the age of 95 - for the Lucknow edition of the Times of India (11 March 2016)
NDTV.com: 'Why Kanhaiya Kumar's Speech is International News'
The remarkable speech made on his return to the JNU campus in Delhi of the bailed leftist student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar, (4 March 2016) - 3.0k shares
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-made-kanhaiya-kumars-speech-spectacular-1283984?pfrom=home-lateststories
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-made-kanhaiya-kumars-speech-spectacular-1283984?pfrom=home-lateststories
The Hindu: 'Britain Embattled over Europe'
The battle raging within Britain's governing Conservative party over the looming referendum on European Union membership (2 March 2016)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/britain-embattled-over-europe/article8300753.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/britain-embattled-over-europe/article8300753.ece
NDTV.com: 'What Trump and Modi have in common'
Articles about the global phenomenon of insurgent, populist, 'anti-politics-as-usual' parties and political figures (28 February 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-trump-and-modi-have-in-common-1282010
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-trump-and-modi-have-in-common-1282010
The Wire: 'English Girl, Indian Nationalist, Buddhist Monk'
Article for a new Indian website about Freda Bedi (22 February 2016)
http://thewire.in/2016/02/22/english-girl-indian-nationalist-buddhist-monk-the-extraordinary-life-of-freda-bedi-22312/
http://thewire.in/2016/02/22/english-girl-indian-nationalist-buddhist-monk-the-extraordinary-life-of-freda-bedi-22312/
NDTV.com: 'Can India really not cope with a few anti-national slogans'
An article about the JNU row in India and the value, as well as the limitations, of student radicalism. (18 February 2016)
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/can-india-really-not-cope-with-a-few-anti-national-slogans-1278410
http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/can-india-really-not-cope-with-a-few-anti-national-slogans-1278410
Derby Telegraph: 'From Derby to Delhi - the remarkable story of Freda Bedi'
An account of the remarkable life, and political and spiritual journeys, of Derby-born Freda Bedi (7 February 2016)
http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Bygones-remarkable-story-Littleover-s-Freda-Bedi/story-28688145-detail/story.html
http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Bygones-remarkable-story-Littleover-s-Freda-Bedi/story-28688145-detail/story.html
Indian Express: 'Beyond the Headlines'
A review of Barkha Dutt's This Unquiet Land (9 January 2016)
http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/book-review-beyond-the-headlines/
http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/book-review-beyond-the-headlines/
The Hindu: 'After the storm, what lies ahead for Britain?'
A New Year's look ahead to politics in Britain in 2016 - with a few rash predictions as well. (31 December 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/article8045881.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/article8045881.ece
BBC News website: 'Why Indians abroad succumb to Modi mania'
In the week that Narendra Modi is expected to address a rally of 60,000 Indians at Wembley stadium in London, a look at why the diaspora are so enthused by India's Hindu nationalist prime minister (10 November 2015) - 190,000 page views
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34709354
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34709354
Ballots and Bullets: 'The Modi enigma'
On the eve of Narendra Modi's visit to London, a look at the unanswered questions about the Indian prime minister's underlying political identity (10 November 2015)
http://nottspolitics.org/2015/11/10/the-modi-enigma/
http://nottspolitics.org/2015/11/10/the-modi-enigma/
The Hindu: 'Brexit, the word that's haunting Britain's leaders'
An op ed piece about the signs that support for Brexit, Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, are increasing (15 October 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/world-view-brexit-the-word-that-haunts-britains-leaders/article7762220.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/world-view-brexit-the-word-that-haunts-britains-leaders/article7762220.ece
BBC News website: 'Subhas Chandra Bose: looking for India's "lost" leader'
As Narendra Modi meets the extended family of 'Netaji' Subhas Chandra Bose, why India's independence-era heroes still stir-up such powerful emotions and political impact (13 October 2015) - 160,000 page views
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34473241
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34473241
Rising Kashmir: 'The Crown Princes of Kashmir'
An opinion piece about the persistence of political dynasties in Kashmir (28 September 2015)
The Hindu: 'Old Labour's 21st Century Moment'
An opinion piece on Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the British Labour Party - the victory of the anti-politician politician (14 September 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/old-labours-21st-century-moment/article7648687.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/old-labours-21st-century-moment/article7648687.ece
London Review of Books: 'Within the Saffron Family'
A long review (3,000+ words) of books by Lance Price and Rajdeep Sardesai about Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, and the 2014 general election which delivered him a landslide victory (10 September 2015)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/andrew-whitehead/within-the-saffron-family
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/andrew-whitehead/within-the-saffron-family
Within the Saffron Family / Andrew Whitehead
Narendra Modi tried hard to conceal her existence. When he fought elections, he always left blank the column about marital status in the nomination papers. But as an aspiring prime minister in last year’s general election he could no longer get away with it. Rajdeep Sardesai, a TV anchor who has written a book about the election, says the fact that Modi, who became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, had ‘a wife tucked away in the village’ was one of the worst kept secrets in Gujarat politics – but even so, most Gujaratis, and certainly most Indians, didn’t know about it. When Sardesai wanted to find the missing wife a few years ago he was warned off: Modi, he was told, ‘is very sensitive about it’.
After her husband’s election victory, Mrs Modi was given a security detail. She filed a request under India’s freedom of information legislation to try to find out who authorised it and why. ‘I am surrounded by five security guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public transport and the guards are following me in an air-conditioned car.’ Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole privilege she’d been awarded as her country’s first lady, Indian newspapers reported that she was willing to return to her husband’s side, if he asked. In May, unhappy that she hadn’t received a satisfactory answer and upset by the use of her maiden name in the official response, she submitted a second request. By this time, the media’s interest in her had largely faded, but the revelation had made clear how little India knew about its prospective leader and how different his background was from that of most of the country’s political elite.
Jashodaben’s name doesn’t appear in the index of Lance Price’s account of Modi’s rise to power. Her story is recounted briefly, along with Modi’s usual response: ‘Modi refuses to discuss the marriage.’ Price’s book is part of a rebranding exercise: it’s not a partisan account, but it is a result of the desire of Modi and the team around him to be, as they would see it, better understood. One of Modi’s London-based associates arranged access for Price, a former BBC political correspondent who worked as deputy communications director for Tony Blair. Modi usually keeps his distance from the media and particularly from organisations or individuals seen as liberal-inclined and unsympathetic, but eight weeks after his swearing-in, Price was ushered into Race Course Road for the first of four hour-long interviews. Nothing was off-limits, no copy approval was sought: it was a calculated risk to give a left-of-centre political writer so much access to the most right-wing prime minister in India’s history.
The risk paid off. Price’s account is respectful rather than admiring, but it contains none of the censure Modi often attracts. Price praises his determination and ‘indomitable will’. Of all the heads of government he has rubbed shoulders with, Price says that Modi is ‘without doubt the most intriguing and the hardest to fathom’. But the access he was given is more remarkable than anything he was told: the bulk of the book is an account of Modi’s ‘superbly fought and extraordinarily successful’ election campaign – though Price wasn’t in India at the time and doesn’t pretend to expertise in Indian politics. For a sense of place and occasion you need Sardesai’s effervescent account.
The damage to Modi’s reputation dates back more than a decade. In 2002, within five months of his becoming chief minister of Gujarat, rioting between Hindus and Muslims left more than a thousand dead. The trigger was an attack on an express train carrying Hindu activists and pilgrims back from a ceremony in Ayodhya, where ten years earlier the pulling down of a mosque, said to have been built on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram, had led to the worst communal violence in India since Partition. The facts, as so often, are disputed, but it seems that a large crowd threw stones at the train, four carriages were set on fire, and 59 people, 12 of them children, burned to death. Over the next three days, hundreds of Muslims were killed, and, initially at least, the police and civil authorities appeared unwilling or unable to respond. Modi compounded his inability to prevent the rioting with his reluctance to express remorse, though he did offer his resignation at a meeting of the national executive of his party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It wasn’t accepted. Two years later, after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP prime minister at the head of a coalition government, suffered a surprise election defeat, he lamented that not removing Modi had been a mistake: Modi had tarnished both the party and the government.
Modi says that his role in the riots has been investigated fully and repeatedly, and that he has never been charged with any offence. That’s true, though some of his political colleagues have been charged and convicted. The US and the UK were sufficiently concerned to place Modi in diplomatic quarantine, withholding visas and ambassadorial meetings, until he became too big a political figure to shun.
Sardesai reported on the 2002 riots and conducted an interview with Modi at the time. He ‘came out … almost convinced that the chief minister was intent on ending the cycle of violence’. Less than an hour after he’d finished filming the interview, though, his team was stopped at a roadblock set up by Hindu vigilantes who were brandishing swords and axes, ‘drunk on the power they had over us’. They demanded that the broadcasters pull down their trousers. Sardesai had been circumcised at birth, which would have been enough to seal his fate. But he and his team escaped what he describes as a ‘near-death experience’ by invoking Modi’s name and showing their attackers a clip from the interview.
As the grandson of a senior police officer in Gujarat, Sardesai knows what he’s talking about when he asserts that ‘no major riot takes place in this country without the government of the day being either incompetent or complicit, or both.’ He thinks Modi was incompetent: at this early stage of his career as chief minister he was unable to restrain more febrile elements within the Hindu nationalist alliance. But Sardesai still wonders whether Modi ‘wilfully allowed the riots to simmer’. As Modi became more prominent nationally, he was repeatedly questioned about the riots; he never found a satisfactory way of addressing the issue. In one TV interview, he pulled off his lapel microphone and walked out. On another occasion, he compared the way he felt to the pain he would suffer if a puppy fell under the wheels of his car. Now he won’t talk about it at all: ‘I have said enough,’ he told Price, ‘and you can read the reports and the Supreme Court judgment for yourself.’
In order to win power, Modi had to neutralise his reputation for religious extremism, letting the 2002 riots ‘fade into history’, as Price puts it, while focusing instead on his reputation for economic competence. It worked, and Price’s view, which is more favourable than Sardesai’s and many others’, is that Modi should be judged on what he has achieved in office, not on past events. As chief minister in Gujarat, Modi established a reputation for efficient, pro-business leadership and higher than average growth and development. He won three successive elections in his home state, a rare achievement in a country where the ‘anti-incumbency factor’ has become a cliché of psephological analysis. Critics have argued that Gujarat’s economic success has been overstated, but Modi’s reputation remains high, especially with big business, which had grown frustrated with the in-ability of the outgoing Congress-led national government to see liberalisation through. Industrialists who had initially seen Modi as a divisive figure were won over, and bankrolled his general election victory.
Whatever his economic successes, without the loyalty of the millions that the Hindu nationalist movement can mobilise, he would never have won the election. As he made the move from periphery to centre, he managed to continue to appeal to the party faithful while advocating modernisation. ‘If Narendra Modi were to jettison completely the Hindu nationalist ideology that he grew up with then he wouldn’t last very long,’ Price argues. ‘He won’t do that and, so far as I can tell, he has no desire to. But if he allows the more extreme elements … to influence the way he governs to any significant degree then he risks alienating those at home and abroad who want to believe that his commitment to create a modern, successful and outward-looking India reflects the real Modi.’
*
The trail to the ‘real’ Modi leads back to his marriage and the way he left it. He told his wife that he wanted to travel across India, and spent two years or so visiting ashrams and pilgrimage sites. At about this time, he became a ‘pracharak’ – a preacher or proselytiser for the Hindu nationalist movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Most pracharaks are vegetarian, teetotal and celibate – which may explain why, when news of his wife got out, Modi’s family insisted that the marriage had not been consummated.
The RSS is an immensely influential yet publicity-shy organisation. It is at the apex of a loose confederation of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. Most of the senior figures in the BJP have close links with the RSS, and many of their policy and personnel decisions are guided by it. ‘The RSS may not be the BJP’s daily remote control, as its critics suggest,’ Sardesai writes, ‘but neither is it some voluntary organisation solely devoted to social welfare. It is, at the end of the day, the final word within the saffron “family”.’ At the heart of Hindutva is the belief that India’s Hindus – a billion of them, constituting four-fifths of the population – are burdened by the weight of centuries of Muslim and colonial rule, and by a secular tradition in public life that is too indulgent to religious minorities and insufficiently respectful of Hindu values.
RSS full-timers are sometimes deputed to the BJP, but they don’t usually make it to the top. Modi is the first pracharak to get as far as state chief minister, never mind prime minister. The role of pracharak requires discipline, service and renunciation, but Modi also possesses more worldly qualities. As you might expect from a veteran of Blair’s Downing Street, Price is best when describing the branding and positioning, the advertising and social media campaigns, the creation of the ‘Modi wave’ that swept the pracharak to victory. Modi positioned himself as an outsider, a member of a low caste, from a small town, who’d never been an MP or national minister – and Congress made mistakes that allowed him to trade on this image. Because Modi, as a child, had helped out on his father’s tea stall, the Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar joked on TV that while Modi would never be prime minister he could always sell tea. So the BJP presented Modi as a ‘chai wallah’, up against the shehzada (‘prince’) Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers. The snobbery of the South Delhi elite played to Modi’s advantage in a democracy where the disadvantaged know their political strength.
Just about every aspect of Modi’s campaign was carefully managed. An exceptional speaker in Gujarati and Hindi, he understood the importance of TV coverage of his campaign, and the BJP provided a live feed of his speeches. He used a 3D hologram to reach those who couldn’t get to his rallies – not simply as an election tool, but as an exemplar of the digital India he spoke of so often. It cost a fortune, but by the end of the campaign Modi had addressed more than seven million voters by hologram. He built a presence on social media well ahead of the election, and had a team of digital bandits who trolled his rivals. By the end of the campaign he had four million followers on Twitter; an account in Rahul Gandhi’s name had 56,000. On the ground, the BJP network stretched to every polling area, with the RSS providing much of the manpower. NaMo, as he was often called (his hapless Congress opponent was RaGa), won in what the Indian media described as a ‘tsunamo’.
‘It’s great to be talking to someone who just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe,’ David Cameron told Modi. The BJP took 31 per cent of 550 million votes – barely above the Miliband mark – but the first-past-the-post system Britain bequeathed to India, combined with the strength of regional parties in the east and south, transformed this into a decisive victory. The BJP won 282 seats; Congress was reduced to 44 MPs, not even enough to be the formal opposition. Among first-time voters, the BJP’s margin was particularly emphatic, and it won in every social group apart from Muslims and Christians.
According to the Pew Research Centre, by 2050 India will have surpassed Indonesia as the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Yet the Muslim influence in politics is diminishing. The BJP used to manage to rustle up a handful of Muslim MPs for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Not this time. Last year’s election returned only 23 Muslim MPs, just 4 per cent of the Lok Sabha – though Muslims make up at least 14 per cent of the population.
The lurking concern is that a majoritarian political culture is emerging which could damage India’s greatest achievement of the past seventy years, the bedding down of a robust and secular participatory democracy. By all the standard benchmarks, India’s democracy is, as the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney puts it, an ‘improbable success’. In Battles Half Won (2013), he argues that a country’s survival as a democracy is mostly down to income levels and that India stands almost alone as a poor country that has had democracy based on the universal franchise ever since the first post-independence election (with the striking exception of the 19 months of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency). Democracy is now the ‘institutionalised common sense of Indian politics’. For all the barbs about Modi being a demagogue, his election is a landmark: it’s the first time any party other than Congress has secured more than half the seats in the Lok Sabha. This shows a democracy maturing rather than unwinding.
As yet, Modi has not acted on any of the standard BJP/RSS demands – building a temple on the disputed site at Ayodhya, abolishing Muslim family law, removing the special status given in the constitution to Muslim-majority Kashmir – any of which may inflame communal tensions. Others have been less careful: emboldened by his victory, some who regard themselves as his supporters have tried to organise voluntary mass ‘reconversions’ to Hinduism, using the phrase ghar wapsi, or ‘homecoming’, which reflects the Hindutva belief that all Indians are Hindus, even if some have strayed; they have complained loudly about a ‘love jihad’ (Muslim men marrying and converting Hindu women); and they have committed sporadic acts of violence and vandalism, which have put the small Christian community on edge. It feels too soon to endorse Price’s verdict that ‘there has been no evidence’ since Modi became prime minister of his religious beliefs having ‘any impact on policy that is remotely comparable … to the damaging influence of fundamental Christianity on the administration of President George W. Bush’. The truth is that on social issues, Modi has managed to be both a moderniser and a religious conservative. He used his first independence day speech to address India’s shaming record on sexual violence, urging parents to take as much responsibility for their sons’ behaviour as for their daughters’. He later made the bizarre claim that Hindu holy texts demonstrate that ancient India developed expertise in human genetics and plastic surgery.
After a year in office, Modi seems comfortable and secure in power. He has established a firm grip on his party, shunting aside the old guard, including his mentor and protector, L.K. Advani, the hardline party patriarch who even in his eighties believed he should be the prime ministerial candidate. But there are challenges. At first, the BJP claimed a series of impressive state election victories; but earlier this year, an upstart, anti-corruption party won local elections in Delhi – once a BJP citadel – in an even more emphatic manner. This will have reminded Modi that much of his support is pragmatic rather than ideological, and that it will ebb away if campaign promises aren’t met.
At home, Modi confronts the difficulty of reconciling his pro-business policies with his campaign promises to instal toilets in every home, clean up the Ganges and build tens of millions of houses. So far, at least, there’s no sign of the additional taxes and spending required for this accelerated social development. A political row over a proposed law that would make it easier (and cheaper) for businesses to buy agricultural land for industrial use has revealed how tricky it is to reward those who financed his election victory while maintaining his broad appeal.
Once, Modi’s international standing was his weak point. Now it’s his biggest success. He must be the only head of government to top the bill at Madison Square Garden, where he evangelised to the already devoted Indian diaspora. A clutch of US Congress members lined up to pay court. Of course, the world wants access to Indian markets, and the West wants a democratic counterpoint in Asia to China’s growing might. But it’s still a turnaround. It was only last year that the US ambassador to India met with Modi, signalling the end of his diplomatic isolation. Since the election, Obama has hosted Modi and visited him, and endorsed his inclusion as one of Time magazine’s ‘100 Leaders’. ‘Like India,’ Obama claimed, ‘he transcends the ancient and the modern – a devotee of yoga who connects with Indian citizens on Twitter and imagines a “digital India”.’
There is still much of the pracharak about him: his modest lifestyle, intense discipline and unsettling certainty of purpose. When he announced from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort that he was willing to work 15 hours a day in the nation’s service, it rang true. He has no immediate family in Delhi, no enthusiasms or outside interests, no apparent desire for relaxation. It’s difficult to pin down what drives him, but reasonable to assume that he is still working for the RSS as much as fir the nation. [ENDS]
- The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India by Lance Price
Hodder, 342 pp, £25.00, March, ISBN 978 1 4736 1089 7 - 2014: The Election that Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai
Penguin, 372 pp, £16.99, November 2014, ISBN 978 0 14 342498 7
Narendra Modi tried hard to conceal her existence. When he fought elections, he always left blank the column about marital status in the nomination papers. But as an aspiring prime minister in last year’s general election he could no longer get away with it. Rajdeep Sardesai, a TV anchor who has written a book about the election, says the fact that Modi, who became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, had ‘a wife tucked away in the village’ was one of the worst kept secrets in Gujarat politics – but even so, most Gujaratis, and certainly most Indians, didn’t know about it. When Sardesai wanted to find the missing wife a few years ago he was warned off: Modi, he was told, ‘is very sensitive about it’.
After her husband’s election victory, Mrs Modi was given a security detail. She filed a request under India’s freedom of information legislation to try to find out who authorised it and why. ‘I am surrounded by five security guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public transport and the guards are following me in an air-conditioned car.’ Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole privilege she’d been awarded as her country’s first lady, Indian newspapers reported that she was willing to return to her husband’s side, if he asked. In May, unhappy that she hadn’t received a satisfactory answer and upset by the use of her maiden name in the official response, she submitted a second request. By this time, the media’s interest in her had largely faded, but the revelation had made clear how little India knew about its prospective leader and how different his background was from that of most of the country’s political elite.
Jashodaben’s name doesn’t appear in the index of Lance Price’s account of Modi’s rise to power. Her story is recounted briefly, along with Modi’s usual response: ‘Modi refuses to discuss the marriage.’ Price’s book is part of a rebranding exercise: it’s not a partisan account, but it is a result of the desire of Modi and the team around him to be, as they would see it, better understood. One of Modi’s London-based associates arranged access for Price, a former BBC political correspondent who worked as deputy communications director for Tony Blair. Modi usually keeps his distance from the media and particularly from organisations or individuals seen as liberal-inclined and unsympathetic, but eight weeks after his swearing-in, Price was ushered into Race Course Road for the first of four hour-long interviews. Nothing was off-limits, no copy approval was sought: it was a calculated risk to give a left-of-centre political writer so much access to the most right-wing prime minister in India’s history.
The risk paid off. Price’s account is respectful rather than admiring, but it contains none of the censure Modi often attracts. Price praises his determination and ‘indomitable will’. Of all the heads of government he has rubbed shoulders with, Price says that Modi is ‘without doubt the most intriguing and the hardest to fathom’. But the access he was given is more remarkable than anything he was told: the bulk of the book is an account of Modi’s ‘superbly fought and extraordinarily successful’ election campaign – though Price wasn’t in India at the time and doesn’t pretend to expertise in Indian politics. For a sense of place and occasion you need Sardesai’s effervescent account.
The damage to Modi’s reputation dates back more than a decade. In 2002, within five months of his becoming chief minister of Gujarat, rioting between Hindus and Muslims left more than a thousand dead. The trigger was an attack on an express train carrying Hindu activists and pilgrims back from a ceremony in Ayodhya, where ten years earlier the pulling down of a mosque, said to have been built on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram, had led to the worst communal violence in India since Partition. The facts, as so often, are disputed, but it seems that a large crowd threw stones at the train, four carriages were set on fire, and 59 people, 12 of them children, burned to death. Over the next three days, hundreds of Muslims were killed, and, initially at least, the police and civil authorities appeared unwilling or unable to respond. Modi compounded his inability to prevent the rioting with his reluctance to express remorse, though he did offer his resignation at a meeting of the national executive of his party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It wasn’t accepted. Two years later, after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP prime minister at the head of a coalition government, suffered a surprise election defeat, he lamented that not removing Modi had been a mistake: Modi had tarnished both the party and the government.
Modi says that his role in the riots has been investigated fully and repeatedly, and that he has never been charged with any offence. That’s true, though some of his political colleagues have been charged and convicted. The US and the UK were sufficiently concerned to place Modi in diplomatic quarantine, withholding visas and ambassadorial meetings, until he became too big a political figure to shun.
Sardesai reported on the 2002 riots and conducted an interview with Modi at the time. He ‘came out … almost convinced that the chief minister was intent on ending the cycle of violence’. Less than an hour after he’d finished filming the interview, though, his team was stopped at a roadblock set up by Hindu vigilantes who were brandishing swords and axes, ‘drunk on the power they had over us’. They demanded that the broadcasters pull down their trousers. Sardesai had been circumcised at birth, which would have been enough to seal his fate. But he and his team escaped what he describes as a ‘near-death experience’ by invoking Modi’s name and showing their attackers a clip from the interview.
As the grandson of a senior police officer in Gujarat, Sardesai knows what he’s talking about when he asserts that ‘no major riot takes place in this country without the government of the day being either incompetent or complicit, or both.’ He thinks Modi was incompetent: at this early stage of his career as chief minister he was unable to restrain more febrile elements within the Hindu nationalist alliance. But Sardesai still wonders whether Modi ‘wilfully allowed the riots to simmer’. As Modi became more prominent nationally, he was repeatedly questioned about the riots; he never found a satisfactory way of addressing the issue. In one TV interview, he pulled off his lapel microphone and walked out. On another occasion, he compared the way he felt to the pain he would suffer if a puppy fell under the wheels of his car. Now he won’t talk about it at all: ‘I have said enough,’ he told Price, ‘and you can read the reports and the Supreme Court judgment for yourself.’
In order to win power, Modi had to neutralise his reputation for religious extremism, letting the 2002 riots ‘fade into history’, as Price puts it, while focusing instead on his reputation for economic competence. It worked, and Price’s view, which is more favourable than Sardesai’s and many others’, is that Modi should be judged on what he has achieved in office, not on past events. As chief minister in Gujarat, Modi established a reputation for efficient, pro-business leadership and higher than average growth and development. He won three successive elections in his home state, a rare achievement in a country where the ‘anti-incumbency factor’ has become a cliché of psephological analysis. Critics have argued that Gujarat’s economic success has been overstated, but Modi’s reputation remains high, especially with big business, which had grown frustrated with the in-ability of the outgoing Congress-led national government to see liberalisation through. Industrialists who had initially seen Modi as a divisive figure were won over, and bankrolled his general election victory.
Whatever his economic successes, without the loyalty of the millions that the Hindu nationalist movement can mobilise, he would never have won the election. As he made the move from periphery to centre, he managed to continue to appeal to the party faithful while advocating modernisation. ‘If Narendra Modi were to jettison completely the Hindu nationalist ideology that he grew up with then he wouldn’t last very long,’ Price argues. ‘He won’t do that and, so far as I can tell, he has no desire to. But if he allows the more extreme elements … to influence the way he governs to any significant degree then he risks alienating those at home and abroad who want to believe that his commitment to create a modern, successful and outward-looking India reflects the real Modi.’
*
The trail to the ‘real’ Modi leads back to his marriage and the way he left it. He told his wife that he wanted to travel across India, and spent two years or so visiting ashrams and pilgrimage sites. At about this time, he became a ‘pracharak’ – a preacher or proselytiser for the Hindu nationalist movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Most pracharaks are vegetarian, teetotal and celibate – which may explain why, when news of his wife got out, Modi’s family insisted that the marriage had not been consummated.
The RSS is an immensely influential yet publicity-shy organisation. It is at the apex of a loose confederation of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. Most of the senior figures in the BJP have close links with the RSS, and many of their policy and personnel decisions are guided by it. ‘The RSS may not be the BJP’s daily remote control, as its critics suggest,’ Sardesai writes, ‘but neither is it some voluntary organisation solely devoted to social welfare. It is, at the end of the day, the final word within the saffron “family”.’ At the heart of Hindutva is the belief that India’s Hindus – a billion of them, constituting four-fifths of the population – are burdened by the weight of centuries of Muslim and colonial rule, and by a secular tradition in public life that is too indulgent to religious minorities and insufficiently respectful of Hindu values.
RSS full-timers are sometimes deputed to the BJP, but they don’t usually make it to the top. Modi is the first pracharak to get as far as state chief minister, never mind prime minister. The role of pracharak requires discipline, service and renunciation, but Modi also possesses more worldly qualities. As you might expect from a veteran of Blair’s Downing Street, Price is best when describing the branding and positioning, the advertising and social media campaigns, the creation of the ‘Modi wave’ that swept the pracharak to victory. Modi positioned himself as an outsider, a member of a low caste, from a small town, who’d never been an MP or national minister – and Congress made mistakes that allowed him to trade on this image. Because Modi, as a child, had helped out on his father’s tea stall, the Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar joked on TV that while Modi would never be prime minister he could always sell tea. So the BJP presented Modi as a ‘chai wallah’, up against the shehzada (‘prince’) Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers. The snobbery of the South Delhi elite played to Modi’s advantage in a democracy where the disadvantaged know their political strength.
Just about every aspect of Modi’s campaign was carefully managed. An exceptional speaker in Gujarati and Hindi, he understood the importance of TV coverage of his campaign, and the BJP provided a live feed of his speeches. He used a 3D hologram to reach those who couldn’t get to his rallies – not simply as an election tool, but as an exemplar of the digital India he spoke of so often. It cost a fortune, but by the end of the campaign Modi had addressed more than seven million voters by hologram. He built a presence on social media well ahead of the election, and had a team of digital bandits who trolled his rivals. By the end of the campaign he had four million followers on Twitter; an account in Rahul Gandhi’s name had 56,000. On the ground, the BJP network stretched to every polling area, with the RSS providing much of the manpower. NaMo, as he was often called (his hapless Congress opponent was RaGa), won in what the Indian media described as a ‘tsunamo’.
‘It’s great to be talking to someone who just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe,’ David Cameron told Modi. The BJP took 31 per cent of 550 million votes – barely above the Miliband mark – but the first-past-the-post system Britain bequeathed to India, combined with the strength of regional parties in the east and south, transformed this into a decisive victory. The BJP won 282 seats; Congress was reduced to 44 MPs, not even enough to be the formal opposition. Among first-time voters, the BJP’s margin was particularly emphatic, and it won in every social group apart from Muslims and Christians.
According to the Pew Research Centre, by 2050 India will have surpassed Indonesia as the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Yet the Muslim influence in politics is diminishing. The BJP used to manage to rustle up a handful of Muslim MPs for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Not this time. Last year’s election returned only 23 Muslim MPs, just 4 per cent of the Lok Sabha – though Muslims make up at least 14 per cent of the population.
The lurking concern is that a majoritarian political culture is emerging which could damage India’s greatest achievement of the past seventy years, the bedding down of a robust and secular participatory democracy. By all the standard benchmarks, India’s democracy is, as the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney puts it, an ‘improbable success’. In Battles Half Won (2013), he argues that a country’s survival as a democracy is mostly down to income levels and that India stands almost alone as a poor country that has had democracy based on the universal franchise ever since the first post-independence election (with the striking exception of the 19 months of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency). Democracy is now the ‘institutionalised common sense of Indian politics’. For all the barbs about Modi being a demagogue, his election is a landmark: it’s the first time any party other than Congress has secured more than half the seats in the Lok Sabha. This shows a democracy maturing rather than unwinding.
As yet, Modi has not acted on any of the standard BJP/RSS demands – building a temple on the disputed site at Ayodhya, abolishing Muslim family law, removing the special status given in the constitution to Muslim-majority Kashmir – any of which may inflame communal tensions. Others have been less careful: emboldened by his victory, some who regard themselves as his supporters have tried to organise voluntary mass ‘reconversions’ to Hinduism, using the phrase ghar wapsi, or ‘homecoming’, which reflects the Hindutva belief that all Indians are Hindus, even if some have strayed; they have complained loudly about a ‘love jihad’ (Muslim men marrying and converting Hindu women); and they have committed sporadic acts of violence and vandalism, which have put the small Christian community on edge. It feels too soon to endorse Price’s verdict that ‘there has been no evidence’ since Modi became prime minister of his religious beliefs having ‘any impact on policy that is remotely comparable … to the damaging influence of fundamental Christianity on the administration of President George W. Bush’. The truth is that on social issues, Modi has managed to be both a moderniser and a religious conservative. He used his first independence day speech to address India’s shaming record on sexual violence, urging parents to take as much responsibility for their sons’ behaviour as for their daughters’. He later made the bizarre claim that Hindu holy texts demonstrate that ancient India developed expertise in human genetics and plastic surgery.
After a year in office, Modi seems comfortable and secure in power. He has established a firm grip on his party, shunting aside the old guard, including his mentor and protector, L.K. Advani, the hardline party patriarch who even in his eighties believed he should be the prime ministerial candidate. But there are challenges. At first, the BJP claimed a series of impressive state election victories; but earlier this year, an upstart, anti-corruption party won local elections in Delhi – once a BJP citadel – in an even more emphatic manner. This will have reminded Modi that much of his support is pragmatic rather than ideological, and that it will ebb away if campaign promises aren’t met.
At home, Modi confronts the difficulty of reconciling his pro-business policies with his campaign promises to instal toilets in every home, clean up the Ganges and build tens of millions of houses. So far, at least, there’s no sign of the additional taxes and spending required for this accelerated social development. A political row over a proposed law that would make it easier (and cheaper) for businesses to buy agricultural land for industrial use has revealed how tricky it is to reward those who financed his election victory while maintaining his broad appeal.
Once, Modi’s international standing was his weak point. Now it’s his biggest success. He must be the only head of government to top the bill at Madison Square Garden, where he evangelised to the already devoted Indian diaspora. A clutch of US Congress members lined up to pay court. Of course, the world wants access to Indian markets, and the West wants a democratic counterpoint in Asia to China’s growing might. But it’s still a turnaround. It was only last year that the US ambassador to India met with Modi, signalling the end of his diplomatic isolation. Since the election, Obama has hosted Modi and visited him, and endorsed his inclusion as one of Time magazine’s ‘100 Leaders’. ‘Like India,’ Obama claimed, ‘he transcends the ancient and the modern – a devotee of yoga who connects with Indian citizens on Twitter and imagines a “digital India”.’
There is still much of the pracharak about him: his modest lifestyle, intense discipline and unsettling certainty of purpose. When he announced from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort that he was willing to work 15 hours a day in the nation’s service, it rang true. He has no immediate family in Delhi, no enthusiasms or outside interests, no apparent desire for relaxation. It’s difficult to pin down what drives him, but reasonable to assume that he is still working for the RSS as much as fir the nation. [ENDS]
Our Beeb: 'Does the World Service have a future?'
Why the World Service's record of innovation and adaptation to digital, and the consequent rise in its audience reach, should mean that this heritage brand also has an exciting future - an abridged version of a chapter in a book being published in September (August 2015)
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/andrew-whitehead/does-world-service-have-future
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/andrew-whitehead/does-world-service-have-future
The Hindu: 'Hard Left turn ahead'
As old-style leftists Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders benefit from the soul-searching within social democratic parties, this article looks at why that's both exciting and alarming. (12 August 2015). The article was trimmed quite substantially, so I am also posting the text as submitted below.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/hard-left-turn-ahead/article7527070.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/hard-left-turn-ahead/article7527070.ece
for The Hindu, 9/8/15
Turning Left =Andrew Whitehead=
Jeremy Corbyn has been whipping up the sort of fervour that gives him the aura of a latter-day Godman. In a British (or more strictly English) political landscape largely devoid of excitement, he is generating levels of enthusiasm way beyond anything seen in the UK's general election earlier this year.
The Labour party MP recently addressed a rally in central London. The main hall was fully booked well in advance. Two overflow rooms were filled to capacity. So Corbyn resorted to climbing on top of a fire engine to address the hundreds milling around on the street, unable to get inside.
It's not the fiery oratory that's attracting the crowds - Corbyn's a staid, low-key speaker. He's not a political rock star - he's 66, bearded, vegetarian, teetotal, with a dress sense that hasn't changed for decades. There's no new message - Corbyn's hard left political views have barely shifted since he was elected to the British Parliament in 1983.
He's about as far to the left as it is possible to be as a Labour MP: anti-war, anti-austerity, anti-nuclear, and a supporter of such unfashionable causes as higher taxes, renationalisation of key industries and greater powers for trades unions.
And if the bookmakers are to be believed, he's on course to be the party's new leader.
The comprehensive Conservative party victory in May's election led to despair in the ranks of the opposition Labour party. They hadn't seen the result coming. Within hours, Ed Miliband resigned as party leader. A gaggle of contenders to succeed him argued that Labour needed to learn the lesson of its defeat - it had to win the trust of middle England, develop more business-friendly policies and edge towards the centre ground. But the groundswell of support for Corbyn suggests that party members are heading in the other direction and determined to push Labour further to the left.
When Jeremy Corbyn announced his intention to stand for the party leadership, he was seen as a 100-1 outsider. He was well short of the number of Labour MPs required to endorse his nomination, and is now a candidate only because he persuaded colleagues who didn't support him to sign his papers.
If Labour MPs alone elected the party leader, Corbyn wouldn't have the ghost of a chance. He's likeable and hardworking - but a serial rebel against the party line and leadership.
But the ballot extends to all party members, and to registered party supporters - and it costs just £3 (Rs 300) to register. Tens of thousands have been signing up. A few are supporters of other parties who want to make mischief. Most are genuinely enthused by the prospect of an old-style socialist leading the Labour party.
There are similar stirrings in the US. Senator Bernie Sanders - in his seventies, also an avowed socialist and even more of a maverick than Corbyn - has got more traction than expected for his campaign for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. He too has won support mainly from the young, many of whom see the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, as too much part of the system to be able to challenge and transform it.
Across the English-speaking world, a decade of hardship and economic recession has failed to produce the sort of progressive, left-wing political tide often evident in troubled times. The Occupy movement, which promised so much, has delivered little enduring political legacy. A financial crisis for which the bankers and big business are widely seen as being to blame has led not to greater emphasis on social justice, but an ever more glaring inequality.
In a few countries profoundly affected by economic collapse - think of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain - new left-wing forces have emerged. In Britain and the United States, it's the old-time leftists, Corbyn and Sanders, who have been beneficiaries of a soul-searching within social democratic parties which feel as if they have lost their way. The hard-line socialists, with their unchanging message and evident sincerity, offer hope - a commodity in short supply in progressive politics.
Sanders won't gain his party's nomination; Corbyn could well win his party's leadership, though the race has some way to run - we'll get the result in mid-September. As yet, the chorus of voices - within Labour and beyond - insisting that a party led by such a committed left-winger will be unelectable appears not have eroded his support.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, mocked those Labour party members whose hearts were with Corbyn; his message to them. "get a transplant!" Blair is by far the most electorally successful leader Labour has ever had - but his stock is now so low within the party, any barbs he delivers boomerang to the benefit of those he's criticising.
Some of Corbyn's rivals - there are three other candidates, none of whom have impressed - have already said that if he wins, they won't serve as a shadow minister. There have been mutterings that Labour might split. That's unlikely. The party's last big split in the early 1980s saw a swathe of right-wing MPs form the Social Democratic Party, which won a series of by-election victories but quickly faded. Left-wing breakaways have been of still less significance.
Corbyn's supporters contend that the danger is not schism, but a Labour party that fades into irrelevance because it has lost its radical vision. They argue that new forces such as environmentalism and Scottish nationalism have managed to engage with young idealists, and Labour also needs to have a clear, principled political message.
Yet when the established market-based economic system is facing such profound difficulties, when the big corporations and the banks are so distrusted and when the digital revolution demands new ways of working and thinking, it is troubling that radicalism's most vibrant manifestation is a reworking of a tired ideology and style of politics. New times require new thinking - and there's not much sign of that on the left.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC Delhi correspondent and also reported for the BBC on British politics.
Turning Left =Andrew Whitehead=
Jeremy Corbyn has been whipping up the sort of fervour that gives him the aura of a latter-day Godman. In a British (or more strictly English) political landscape largely devoid of excitement, he is generating levels of enthusiasm way beyond anything seen in the UK's general election earlier this year.
The Labour party MP recently addressed a rally in central London. The main hall was fully booked well in advance. Two overflow rooms were filled to capacity. So Corbyn resorted to climbing on top of a fire engine to address the hundreds milling around on the street, unable to get inside.
It's not the fiery oratory that's attracting the crowds - Corbyn's a staid, low-key speaker. He's not a political rock star - he's 66, bearded, vegetarian, teetotal, with a dress sense that hasn't changed for decades. There's no new message - Corbyn's hard left political views have barely shifted since he was elected to the British Parliament in 1983.
He's about as far to the left as it is possible to be as a Labour MP: anti-war, anti-austerity, anti-nuclear, and a supporter of such unfashionable causes as higher taxes, renationalisation of key industries and greater powers for trades unions.
And if the bookmakers are to be believed, he's on course to be the party's new leader.
The comprehensive Conservative party victory in May's election led to despair in the ranks of the opposition Labour party. They hadn't seen the result coming. Within hours, Ed Miliband resigned as party leader. A gaggle of contenders to succeed him argued that Labour needed to learn the lesson of its defeat - it had to win the trust of middle England, develop more business-friendly policies and edge towards the centre ground. But the groundswell of support for Corbyn suggests that party members are heading in the other direction and determined to push Labour further to the left.
When Jeremy Corbyn announced his intention to stand for the party leadership, he was seen as a 100-1 outsider. He was well short of the number of Labour MPs required to endorse his nomination, and is now a candidate only because he persuaded colleagues who didn't support him to sign his papers.
If Labour MPs alone elected the party leader, Corbyn wouldn't have the ghost of a chance. He's likeable and hardworking - but a serial rebel against the party line and leadership.
But the ballot extends to all party members, and to registered party supporters - and it costs just £3 (Rs 300) to register. Tens of thousands have been signing up. A few are supporters of other parties who want to make mischief. Most are genuinely enthused by the prospect of an old-style socialist leading the Labour party.
There are similar stirrings in the US. Senator Bernie Sanders - in his seventies, also an avowed socialist and even more of a maverick than Corbyn - has got more traction than expected for his campaign for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. He too has won support mainly from the young, many of whom see the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, as too much part of the system to be able to challenge and transform it.
Across the English-speaking world, a decade of hardship and economic recession has failed to produce the sort of progressive, left-wing political tide often evident in troubled times. The Occupy movement, which promised so much, has delivered little enduring political legacy. A financial crisis for which the bankers and big business are widely seen as being to blame has led not to greater emphasis on social justice, but an ever more glaring inequality.
In a few countries profoundly affected by economic collapse - think of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain - new left-wing forces have emerged. In Britain and the United States, it's the old-time leftists, Corbyn and Sanders, who have been beneficiaries of a soul-searching within social democratic parties which feel as if they have lost their way. The hard-line socialists, with their unchanging message and evident sincerity, offer hope - a commodity in short supply in progressive politics.
Sanders won't gain his party's nomination; Corbyn could well win his party's leadership, though the race has some way to run - we'll get the result in mid-September. As yet, the chorus of voices - within Labour and beyond - insisting that a party led by such a committed left-winger will be unelectable appears not have eroded his support.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, mocked those Labour party members whose hearts were with Corbyn; his message to them. "get a transplant!" Blair is by far the most electorally successful leader Labour has ever had - but his stock is now so low within the party, any barbs he delivers boomerang to the benefit of those he's criticising.
Some of Corbyn's rivals - there are three other candidates, none of whom have impressed - have already said that if he wins, they won't serve as a shadow minister. There have been mutterings that Labour might split. That's unlikely. The party's last big split in the early 1980s saw a swathe of right-wing MPs form the Social Democratic Party, which won a series of by-election victories but quickly faded. Left-wing breakaways have been of still less significance.
Corbyn's supporters contend that the danger is not schism, but a Labour party that fades into irrelevance because it has lost its radical vision. They argue that new forces such as environmentalism and Scottish nationalism have managed to engage with young idealists, and Labour also needs to have a clear, principled political message.
Yet when the established market-based economic system is facing such profound difficulties, when the big corporations and the banks are so distrusted and when the digital revolution demands new ways of working and thinking, it is troubling that radicalism's most vibrant manifestation is a reworking of a tired ideology and style of politics. New times require new thinking - and there's not much sign of that on the left.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC Delhi correspondent and also reported for the BBC on British politics.
The Kashmir Walla: 'Kashmir twenty years after'
A piece for the Kashmir Walla magazine and website reflecting on the changes in Kashmir over the twenty years I have known the valley and my personal engagement with the place and its people. (June 2015)
http://thekashmirwalla.com/2015/06/kashmir-twenty-years-after/
http://thekashmirwalla.com/2015/06/kashmir-twenty-years-after/
Rising Kashmir: 'Scotland edges towards Independence'
As Scottish nationalists emerge as the third biggest bloc in the UK Parliament, how has a separatist party achieved such remarkable success? (12 May 2015)
http://risingkashmir.in/article/scotland-edges-towards-independence/
http://risingkashmir.in/article/scotland-edges-towards-independence/
The Hindu: 'Sweet Surprise for Tories'
A sometimes lifeless election campaign ended with a shock outcome - a Conservative majority government, a nationalist sweep in Scotland, and the resignation of a succession of party leaders (9 May 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/uk-elections-sweet-surprise-for-tories/article7185656.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/uk-elections-sweet-surprise-for-tories/article7185656.ece
“This is the sweetest victory of all”, David Cameron told party workers on May 8 morning. More because it was so unexpected. “I never quite believed we would get to the end of this campaign in the place we are now,” he said at the party headquarters. The euphoria is understandable. Mr. Cameron has led the Conservatives to probably the biggest surprise win in a British general election for 70 years.
The opinion polls throughout the campaign put Conservatives and Labour so close that everyone was convinced that Britain was heading for another hung Parliament. The Conservatives’ overall majority is wafer thin. All the same, Mr. Cameron was able to call on the Queen to tell her that he will form a Conservative majority government — he no longer needs a coalition partner.
The Conservatives ended up with a 6 per cent lead in the national vote over Labour. With a first-past-the-post electoral system, it has given the Conservatives about a 100 more MPs than their Labour opponents. Although if all the other parties joined forces against them, the Conservatives would have a narrow majority in the House of Commons of about 10 seats.
Referendum on EU issue
It is difficult to be sure why, at the last minute, one million or more voters who were thinking of supporting Labour changed their minds. But the Conservatives’ negative campaigning — that Britain’s economic recovery would be in jeopardy under Labour and that party leader Ed Miliband was too Leftwing to be trusted — seems to have worked.
Mr. Cameron will now have to deliver on his pledge to hold a referendum on whether Britain leaves the European Union. He has promised to hold that vote by the end of 2017 and hopes to negotiate changes to Britain’s relationship with the EU, which will allow him to argue that Britain should stay in. Business certainly wants the U.K. to remain part of Europe. But there is a distinct possibility that Britain will no longer be part of the EU by the time the next general election is held.
The Prime Minister will also preside over further sharp cuts in government spending as he seeks to bring down the country’s stubbornly large budget deficit. It’s not clear where the axe will fall, but welfare benefits will certainly be targeted. Mr. Cameron’s former coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have been the most emphatic losers at this election — from more than 50 MPs to fewer than 10. Nick Clegg, the outgoing Deputy Prime Minister, was one of the handful of Lib Dems to win re-election, but has made clear that he is standing down as party leader.
The Labour opposition, brushing itself down from its worst election result for a generation, will also now face a leadership election — Mr. Miliband announced his resignation within hours of the scale of the defeat becoming clear. He said this was to allow “a full and open debate” about the party’s future. A bruising battle is already taking shape. “You can’t win from the Left in Britain,” said one Labour insider who was critical of Mr. Miliband — and many in the party believe that Labour needs to embrace the political centre ground. But the radical wing will argue the opposite, insisting that Labour could have won if it had presented a bolder alternative to the Conservatives.
In Scotland, Labour has been outflanked on the left by a nationalist party, which advocated not just independence but an end to economic austerity and a greater emphasis on equality. The scale of the Scottish nationalists’ success is striking; indeed it reshapes British politics. Scotland has 59 seats in the U.K. Parliament — the Scottish National Party had six MPs in the last Parliament; they now have 56.
New political dimensions
Just eight months ago, the Scots voted in a referendum against separating from the rest of the U.K. But the surge in support for the nationalists is likely to re-open the issue, particularly if they repeat their success in elections for the Scottish Parliament next year. By 2020, Scotland could well be on its way to full independence. Mr. Cameron addressed this directly when speaking outside 10 Downing Street on Friday. “We will govern as a party of one nation,” he pledged, adding that further devolution of powers will go ahead promptly. But the tensions of a new political settlement embracing not only Scotland but every other part of Britain will be one of his most pressing problems.
There’s another aspect of Britain’s political system that will also face close scrutiny. The three main nationwide parties — Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats — together won 75 per cent of the vote. Five years ago, they took more than 95 per cent of all votes cast. This sharp swing away from the established parties is one of the most remarkable aspects of the 2015 election.
While the SNP has emerged with a large band of MPs, other parties that have polled strongly will have hardly any representation at Westminster. The right-wing U.K. Independence Party, which wants stricter controls on immigration, took more than three million votes, but has ended up with one MP. The Leftwing Greens did less well, but with a fully proportional system they would have 20 MPs, and they, too, have only one. On both right and left, there will be demands for a new look at a voting system that is not well suited to the multi-party politics that now appears to be a lasting aspect in Britain.
(Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC Delhi correspondent and has also reported for the BBC on British politics.)
The opinion polls throughout the campaign put Conservatives and Labour so close that everyone was convinced that Britain was heading for another hung Parliament. The Conservatives’ overall majority is wafer thin. All the same, Mr. Cameron was able to call on the Queen to tell her that he will form a Conservative majority government — he no longer needs a coalition partner.
The Conservatives ended up with a 6 per cent lead in the national vote over Labour. With a first-past-the-post electoral system, it has given the Conservatives about a 100 more MPs than their Labour opponents. Although if all the other parties joined forces against them, the Conservatives would have a narrow majority in the House of Commons of about 10 seats.
Referendum on EU issue
It is difficult to be sure why, at the last minute, one million or more voters who were thinking of supporting Labour changed their minds. But the Conservatives’ negative campaigning — that Britain’s economic recovery would be in jeopardy under Labour and that party leader Ed Miliband was too Leftwing to be trusted — seems to have worked.
Mr. Cameron will now have to deliver on his pledge to hold a referendum on whether Britain leaves the European Union. He has promised to hold that vote by the end of 2017 and hopes to negotiate changes to Britain’s relationship with the EU, which will allow him to argue that Britain should stay in. Business certainly wants the U.K. to remain part of Europe. But there is a distinct possibility that Britain will no longer be part of the EU by the time the next general election is held.
The Prime Minister will also preside over further sharp cuts in government spending as he seeks to bring down the country’s stubbornly large budget deficit. It’s not clear where the axe will fall, but welfare benefits will certainly be targeted. Mr. Cameron’s former coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have been the most emphatic losers at this election — from more than 50 MPs to fewer than 10. Nick Clegg, the outgoing Deputy Prime Minister, was one of the handful of Lib Dems to win re-election, but has made clear that he is standing down as party leader.
The Labour opposition, brushing itself down from its worst election result for a generation, will also now face a leadership election — Mr. Miliband announced his resignation within hours of the scale of the defeat becoming clear. He said this was to allow “a full and open debate” about the party’s future. A bruising battle is already taking shape. “You can’t win from the Left in Britain,” said one Labour insider who was critical of Mr. Miliband — and many in the party believe that Labour needs to embrace the political centre ground. But the radical wing will argue the opposite, insisting that Labour could have won if it had presented a bolder alternative to the Conservatives.
In Scotland, Labour has been outflanked on the left by a nationalist party, which advocated not just independence but an end to economic austerity and a greater emphasis on equality. The scale of the Scottish nationalists’ success is striking; indeed it reshapes British politics. Scotland has 59 seats in the U.K. Parliament — the Scottish National Party had six MPs in the last Parliament; they now have 56.
New political dimensions
Just eight months ago, the Scots voted in a referendum against separating from the rest of the U.K. But the surge in support for the nationalists is likely to re-open the issue, particularly if they repeat their success in elections for the Scottish Parliament next year. By 2020, Scotland could well be on its way to full independence. Mr. Cameron addressed this directly when speaking outside 10 Downing Street on Friday. “We will govern as a party of one nation,” he pledged, adding that further devolution of powers will go ahead promptly. But the tensions of a new political settlement embracing not only Scotland but every other part of Britain will be one of his most pressing problems.
There’s another aspect of Britain’s political system that will also face close scrutiny. The three main nationwide parties — Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats — together won 75 per cent of the vote. Five years ago, they took more than 95 per cent of all votes cast. This sharp swing away from the established parties is one of the most remarkable aspects of the 2015 election.
While the SNP has emerged with a large band of MPs, other parties that have polled strongly will have hardly any representation at Westminster. The right-wing U.K. Independence Party, which wants stricter controls on immigration, took more than three million votes, but has ended up with one MP. The Leftwing Greens did less well, but with a fully proportional system they would have 20 MPs, and they, too, have only one. On both right and left, there will be demands for a new look at a voting system that is not well suited to the multi-party politics that now appears to be a lasting aspect in Britain.
(Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC Delhi correspondent and has also reported for the BBC on British politics.)
The Hindu: 'A Campaign without Poetry'
On the final stretch of Britain's general election campaign, why has a desperately close contest brought a disappointingly dull campaign? (4 May 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-campaign-without-poetry/article7167425.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-campaign-without-poetry/article7167425.ece
The Hindu: 'British polls - towards High Noon'
A third piece about the UK general election for the op ed pages of The Hindu - this about the manner in which Scotland seems likely to shape the election outcome (9 April 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/british-polls-towards-high-noon/article7081886.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/british-polls-towards-high-noon/article7081886.ece
Asian Affairs: 'Indian Kashmir's Unlikely Alliance'
Analysis of the PDP-BJP coalition which has taken office in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir after elections at the end of last year (April 2015)
Biblio: review of Rajiv Dogra's Where Borders Bleed
Posted below is my review of Rajiv Dogra's Where Borders Bleed, which appeared in the March-April 2015 issue of 'Biblio', the twentieth anniversary edition of by far India's best literary review:
The Hindu: 'In Britain immigrant votes matter'
There are about as many voters in the UK general election from immigrant communities as there are minded to vote UKIP - yet it's the 'get tough on immigration' lobby that's is shaping the election campaign. Are the main political parties making a political mistake? An op ed piece for The Hindu (16 March 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/in-britain-immigrant-and-migrant-votes-matter/article6996278.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/in-britain-immigrant-and-migrant-votes-matter/article6996278.ece
IAPS blog: 'A new Political Turn for Indian Kashmir'
A piece for the blog of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at the University of Nottingham - where I am a visiting fellow - about the implications of the BJP's entry into government in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir (4 March 2015)
http://nottspolitics.org/2015/03/04/a-new-political-turn-for-indian-kashmir/
http://nottspolitics.org/2015/03/04/a-new-political-turn-for-indian-kashmir/
The Hindu: 'Britain on a Political Knife-Edge'
An op ed piece for The Hindu, perhaps the best regarded of Indian daily papers, about Britain's coming general election three months ahead of polling day (10 Feb 2015)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article6875319.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article6875319.ece
India Gazette: 'Dance of Democracy'
Reflections on similarities and contrasts between India's and Britain's political systems (May 2015 - written February 2015)
And delving further back, some BBC journalism ...
BBC News website: 'Bold Modi tackles Muslim Kashmir head on'
A stand back piece for the BBC News website about Narendra Modi's campaigning in Srinagar for the Jammu & Kashmir state elections (9 Dec 2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30380227
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30380227
BBC News website: 'Kashmir looks for lessons in Scottish referendum'
How Scotland's independence referendum was being seen in Kashmir, where a plebiscite on self-determination has long been talked about but never taken place (17 Sept 2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29204977
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29204977
BBC News website: 'The last Armenians of Myanmar'
How the Armenian Orthodox church in Yangon/Rangoon, the main city of Myanmar/Burma, is adjusting to life with next-to-no Armenian community to serve (17 Aug 2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28867884
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28867884
From Our Own Correspondent: 'Kashmir Revisited'
Reflections on returning to the Kashmir Valley, where violence has much abated but disaffection with Indian rule remains intense (May 2014)
http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/kashmir-revisited
http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/kashmir-revisited
BBC News website: 'How India's iconic Gandhi cap has changed sides'
The purloining of the Gandhi cap, so long associated with India's Congress party, by a new political force, the anti-corruption Aam Admi (Common Man) party (28 April 2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-27100491
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-27100491
BBC News website / FOOC: 'The radical readers of San Francisco'
A From Our Own Correspondent piece about two San Francisco bookshops - City Lights, and the beat generation, and Bolerium, for political anoraks (30 March 2014)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26776613
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26776613
FOOC: ' An atheist at Martin Luther King's church in Atlanta'
How a chance visit to the mast famous of baptist churches, in Atlanta, prompted thoughts about my own upbringing and family history (Nov 2013)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26776613
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26776613
BBC News website: 'Eric Hobsbawm on 2011: "It reminds me of 1848 ..."'
An interview with Eric Hobsbawm about the year of the Arab spring:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16217726
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16217726
BBC News website: 'How the Kashmir Crisis Began'
Sixty years after the event, an explanation of how the Kashmir crisis first erupted (Oct 2007)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7057694.stm#
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7057694.stm#
BBC website: 'Join the Debate'
The transcript of an interview by Robin Lustig about my time as BBC Delhi correspondent (January 1999)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newstalk/correspondent_biographies/246341.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newstalk/correspondent_biographies/246341.stm
... and some non-BBC journalism
Guardian: obituary of Fermin Rocker
An obituary of the artist and libertarian Fermin Rocker, 1907-2004 (26 October 2004)
www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/26/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/26/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
The artist Fermin Rocker, who has died aged 96, was one of the last links with the heroic era of European and American anarchism, which faded beyond hope of revival with the Spanish civil war. The younger son of the anarchist thinker and writer Rudolf Rocker, one of the last anarchists of international renown, Fermin was certainly the last person alive who remembered the brief but remarkable flowering of anarchism as a mass movement among the Yiddish-speaking migrants of London's East End, a movement all but snuffed out by the turbulence of the first world war and the countervailing attractions of the Russian revolution.
Fermin was greatly in awe of his father, whose tousled hair, goatee beard and corpulent frame featured in many of his early drawings and paintings. "I looked upon him as a god," he wrote years later. So did many others. Rudolf Rocker was a German gentile who came to live among migrant Jews, learned Yiddish, and became an inspirational teacher and leader to a marginalised community deeply suspicious of authority, and yearning for a voice, a means of securing self-respect, and a path to education and advancement.
The craft trade unions which Rudolf Rocker nurtured and encouraged, and the lively anarchist journals he and his colleagues published, notably the Arbaiter Fraind (The Workers' Friend), won a large following among the victims of pogroms and oppression who crowded into Stepney and Whitechapel in the years before 1914. Fermin's Russian-born mother, Milly Witcop, was also a revolutionary, one of four Jewish sisters, three of whom were prominent either as anarchists or militant feminists.
Fermin was born in London and named after a prominent Spanish anarchist. He grew up in a tenement block in Stepney in an intensely political environment, captured with delightful irreverence in his memoir, The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood, published by the long-established anarchist imprint, Freedom Press, in 1998. As a small boy, he got to know and admire such leftwing luminaries as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta ("a loveable little fellow"), sat up through long meetings in the hope that his father would tell him a bedtime story and was taken to the Jubilee Street Club, the epicentre of East End Jewish radicalism, where he used to filch paper on which to draw.
"There was hope in the air, an anticipation of better things to come," Fermin recalled. "In later years my father would look back at it with profound nostalgia and regret. It was a time, he insisted, that still had aspirations and ideals, that still had visions of a better future, of a world more just and humane. No one dreamt what horrors the century had in store for us, what despair and disillusionment it would bring."
With the first world war came repression. Rudolf Rocker was interned in Alexandra Palace, north London. Fermin remembered visiting him there. His mother was also arrested. The family was reunited in Amsterdam in 1918, moving on to Germany, where Fermin first mixed with artists and began to draw and paint.
Then, in 1929 - with the decline of the Weimar Republic - he moved to New York. A few years later his parents followed, settling in a rural commune in New York state.
Fermin's art was influenced by the realist school, though he was always too much of an individualist to be saddled with an easy label. He worked in New York as a draughtsman, a cartoon animator, a commercial artist, and then for many years as a book illustrator. Times were often tough. From the 1950s, he turned increasingly to oil painting, developing a hallmark style - precise, in a minor key and with a limited palette, portraying human activity (a meeting, or musical performance, or busy city street) but with each individual cocooned, isolated, even while in a common endeavour.
His first one-man exhibition was in New York in 1944, but it was only after returning to London in 1972, with his American wife, Ruth Robins, that he began to make a living from painting. From the mid-1980s, he had a succession of successful shows, notably at the Stephen Bartley Gallery in Chelsea. He became, to some degree, and late in his life, fashionable (Mick Jagger once called round to select a canvas) - though that never influenced his art, which, in style and tone, felt as if it belonged to an earlier era.
Few of his themes were directly political. The painting bought by Jagger, depicting a mass of Basque refugees heading away from the devastation wrought by Franco's allies towards the French border, is something of an exception.
While standing broadly within the anarchist tradition, Fermin was impatient of its feuds, and critical of the left's reluctance to engage with the modern world and to accept that capitalism has improved lives and living standards. But some anarchists regarded Fermin almost as a crown prince. His son, Philip - who cared for him in his closing years - was always amused that the anarchist paper Freedom arrived unbidden in the mailbox.
Fermin continued to paint in his top-floor flat in London's Tufnell Park until his last few weeks. He died peacefully in his own bed. Just 24 hours later, more than 100 admirers and well-wishers gathered at the Chambers Gallery in London's Smithfield for the private view of his first retrospective (which continues there until November 14). His wife died in 1989; he is survived by Philip.
· Fermin Rocker, artist, born December 22 1907; died October 18 2004
Fermin was greatly in awe of his father, whose tousled hair, goatee beard and corpulent frame featured in many of his early drawings and paintings. "I looked upon him as a god," he wrote years later. So did many others. Rudolf Rocker was a German gentile who came to live among migrant Jews, learned Yiddish, and became an inspirational teacher and leader to a marginalised community deeply suspicious of authority, and yearning for a voice, a means of securing self-respect, and a path to education and advancement.
The craft trade unions which Rudolf Rocker nurtured and encouraged, and the lively anarchist journals he and his colleagues published, notably the Arbaiter Fraind (The Workers' Friend), won a large following among the victims of pogroms and oppression who crowded into Stepney and Whitechapel in the years before 1914. Fermin's Russian-born mother, Milly Witcop, was also a revolutionary, one of four Jewish sisters, three of whom were prominent either as anarchists or militant feminists.
Fermin was born in London and named after a prominent Spanish anarchist. He grew up in a tenement block in Stepney in an intensely political environment, captured with delightful irreverence in his memoir, The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood, published by the long-established anarchist imprint, Freedom Press, in 1998. As a small boy, he got to know and admire such leftwing luminaries as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta ("a loveable little fellow"), sat up through long meetings in the hope that his father would tell him a bedtime story and was taken to the Jubilee Street Club, the epicentre of East End Jewish radicalism, where he used to filch paper on which to draw.
"There was hope in the air, an anticipation of better things to come," Fermin recalled. "In later years my father would look back at it with profound nostalgia and regret. It was a time, he insisted, that still had aspirations and ideals, that still had visions of a better future, of a world more just and humane. No one dreamt what horrors the century had in store for us, what despair and disillusionment it would bring."
With the first world war came repression. Rudolf Rocker was interned in Alexandra Palace, north London. Fermin remembered visiting him there. His mother was also arrested. The family was reunited in Amsterdam in 1918, moving on to Germany, where Fermin first mixed with artists and began to draw and paint.
Then, in 1929 - with the decline of the Weimar Republic - he moved to New York. A few years later his parents followed, settling in a rural commune in New York state.
Fermin's art was influenced by the realist school, though he was always too much of an individualist to be saddled with an easy label. He worked in New York as a draughtsman, a cartoon animator, a commercial artist, and then for many years as a book illustrator. Times were often tough. From the 1950s, he turned increasingly to oil painting, developing a hallmark style - precise, in a minor key and with a limited palette, portraying human activity (a meeting, or musical performance, or busy city street) but with each individual cocooned, isolated, even while in a common endeavour.
His first one-man exhibition was in New York in 1944, but it was only after returning to London in 1972, with his American wife, Ruth Robins, that he began to make a living from painting. From the mid-1980s, he had a succession of successful shows, notably at the Stephen Bartley Gallery in Chelsea. He became, to some degree, and late in his life, fashionable (Mick Jagger once called round to select a canvas) - though that never influenced his art, which, in style and tone, felt as if it belonged to an earlier era.
Few of his themes were directly political. The painting bought by Jagger, depicting a mass of Basque refugees heading away from the devastation wrought by Franco's allies towards the French border, is something of an exception.
While standing broadly within the anarchist tradition, Fermin was impatient of its feuds, and critical of the left's reluctance to engage with the modern world and to accept that capitalism has improved lives and living standards. But some anarchists regarded Fermin almost as a crown prince. His son, Philip - who cared for him in his closing years - was always amused that the anarchist paper Freedom arrived unbidden in the mailbox.
Fermin continued to paint in his top-floor flat in London's Tufnell Park until his last few weeks. He died peacefully in his own bed. Just 24 hours later, more than 100 admirers and well-wishers gathered at the Chambers Gallery in London's Smithfield for the private view of his first retrospective (which continues there until November 14). His wife died in 1989; he is survived by Philip.
· Fermin Rocker, artist, born December 22 1907; died October 18 2004
Guardian: 'Daughter of Faith who will fight the Holy War for ever'
An interview with Asiya Andrabi, a leading woman Kashmiri separatist (April 2001)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/23/india.kashmir
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/23/india.kashmir
The voice is clear. "My belief is that Kashmir will get liberated, inshallah (God willing), only by the armed struggle." Her words are concise, but she betrays a hint of nervousness. Asiya Andrabi is not accustomed to giving interviews - least of all to foreign, male journalists."The way these political leaders are working, Kashmir will never get free from India. The freedom struggle is much more important to us than the peace moves they are talking about."
As she speaks, only her hazel eyes are visible through a peephole in her burqa, the Islamic veil. Her one-year-old son is playing on her lap, sometimes pulling at the burqa, causing it to ride up and catch repeatedly on her lower eyelids.
Does she support the killing of Indian police and soldiers? "Not only the police, but all the Indian politicians, too. We support that." Does she back a call made by a Kashmiri militant group for the assassination of India's prime minister? "We'd be very happy, inshallah .."
Asiya Andrabi is the head of Dukhtran-e-Millat, Daughters of the Faith, a women's Islamic group in Indian-administered Kashmir. It claims no more than a few hundred members. But her views have importance. While her organisation has no direct links with the Pakistan-based armed separatist groups, it shares with them the concept of jihad, of an Islamic holy war, to rid Kashmir of what she describes as Hindu-majority India's "Brahmin imperialism". She's one of the rare voices in Srinagar who speaks what the new, hardline militants think.
Although not herself a fighter, Andrabi has spent time in jail. Her husband has been an armed militant - she prefers the term mujahid - and served a seven-year prison term. They keep on the move, to try to avoid the Indian security forces.
My rendezvous had been arranged through an intermediary. One of Andrabi's associates, a 20-year-old, met me, took the back seat of the car while insisting that I sit in the front, and guided the driver a short distance across Srinagar.
"This is not my home," Asiya Andrabi explained, as she welcomed me into a comfortable middle-class house, and offered a cup of kehwa, the fragrant, spiced Kashmiri tea. "I won't stay here more than an hour. I'm not scared. It's just that if I'm arrested, I can't do my work."
Her work is to Islamise the Kashmiri movement. While many separatist leaders proclaim that their cause is political - to achieve the right of self-determination for the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir lost when India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 - Andrabi insists the issue is religious.
"This struggle is purely an Islamic struggle," she argues. "We have sacrificed 80,000 martyrs [the more accepted figure is 30,000 dead in 12 years of insurgency] and we are ready to sacrifice more."
In the Indian-ruled Kashmir valley, which is now 98% Muslim, that message gets a mixed response. Kashmir has a long history of a composite culture, much diminished by the recent flight of the Kashmiri-speaking Hindu minority.
Kashmiriat, the local word for the relaxed Kashmiri outlook on life, encompasses a rather mystical, Sufi-influenced type of Islam. Chants are intoned in the mosques, and there are Islamic shrines, even relics, housed in buildings with an architectural style more akin to central Asia than to the Punjab plains.
All this earns the disapproval of Asiya Andrabi. "I oppose traditional Kashmiri culture," she declares. "We want to return our women to Islamic culture."
Most Kashmiris are ambivalent about the new breed of militant. While Asiya Andrabi is a Kashmiri, many of the like-minded fighters are seen as outsiders, from Pakistan or further afield. Two British Muslims have been among the "guest militants" killed in Kashmir, according to the Indian army.
Ceasefires failing
But the new militants are better equipped and trained, and altogether bolder, as the Indian authorities acknowledge. The armed separatist movement, once close to being humbled by the military, is again showing its mettle.
As a consequence, Srinagar is a violent city. The weekend before last, 10 people were killed in two separate clashes and 10 more died elsewhere in the Kashmir valley. The two ceasefires being observed by Indian security forces have engendered little optimism, because while one is holding, the other is not. For the past five months, the Indian and Pakistani artillery guns facing each other across the line of control have been quiet. But the more crucial ceasefire, with the militants inside Indian-administered Kashmir, has had little effect. The armed separatists have not responded to New Delhi's unilateral initiative.
Separatists divided
The Indian government has offered unconditional talks with Kashmiri groups. The main separatist alliance in Srinagar, the All Parties Hurriyat [Freedom] Conference, has responded cautiously. It wants Pakistan involved, and does not trust Delhi to consider any option which might loosen India's sovereignty over the 5m people of the Kashmir valley.
The mainstream separatists are divided - some want accession to Pakistan, others an independent Kashmir, a prospect widely supported by Kashmiris, however impractical it might be for a remote mountain valley.
Asiya Andrabi has no time for the moderates of the Hurriyat Conference. "We want Pakistan," she says. "Then it will be our first and foremost duty to Islamise Pakistan."
She escorts us to the door. She asks about my children, and I enquire after hers. Her elder son, now eight, was confined with her in jail and she's still angry about that. "When he grows up, I would like him to be a jihadi, and fight for Islam anywhere in the world." Unless the deadlock in Kashmir is broken, Asiya Andrabi's son will not have to search far for his battleground.
Andrew Whitehead presents The World Today on the BBC World Service.
As she speaks, only her hazel eyes are visible through a peephole in her burqa, the Islamic veil. Her one-year-old son is playing on her lap, sometimes pulling at the burqa, causing it to ride up and catch repeatedly on her lower eyelids.
Does she support the killing of Indian police and soldiers? "Not only the police, but all the Indian politicians, too. We support that." Does she back a call made by a Kashmiri militant group for the assassination of India's prime minister? "We'd be very happy, inshallah .."
Asiya Andrabi is the head of Dukhtran-e-Millat, Daughters of the Faith, a women's Islamic group in Indian-administered Kashmir. It claims no more than a few hundred members. But her views have importance. While her organisation has no direct links with the Pakistan-based armed separatist groups, it shares with them the concept of jihad, of an Islamic holy war, to rid Kashmir of what she describes as Hindu-majority India's "Brahmin imperialism". She's one of the rare voices in Srinagar who speaks what the new, hardline militants think.
Although not herself a fighter, Andrabi has spent time in jail. Her husband has been an armed militant - she prefers the term mujahid - and served a seven-year prison term. They keep on the move, to try to avoid the Indian security forces.
My rendezvous had been arranged through an intermediary. One of Andrabi's associates, a 20-year-old, met me, took the back seat of the car while insisting that I sit in the front, and guided the driver a short distance across Srinagar.
"This is not my home," Asiya Andrabi explained, as she welcomed me into a comfortable middle-class house, and offered a cup of kehwa, the fragrant, spiced Kashmiri tea. "I won't stay here more than an hour. I'm not scared. It's just that if I'm arrested, I can't do my work."
Her work is to Islamise the Kashmiri movement. While many separatist leaders proclaim that their cause is political - to achieve the right of self-determination for the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir lost when India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 - Andrabi insists the issue is religious.
"This struggle is purely an Islamic struggle," she argues. "We have sacrificed 80,000 martyrs [the more accepted figure is 30,000 dead in 12 years of insurgency] and we are ready to sacrifice more."
In the Indian-ruled Kashmir valley, which is now 98% Muslim, that message gets a mixed response. Kashmir has a long history of a composite culture, much diminished by the recent flight of the Kashmiri-speaking Hindu minority.
Kashmiriat, the local word for the relaxed Kashmiri outlook on life, encompasses a rather mystical, Sufi-influenced type of Islam. Chants are intoned in the mosques, and there are Islamic shrines, even relics, housed in buildings with an architectural style more akin to central Asia than to the Punjab plains.
All this earns the disapproval of Asiya Andrabi. "I oppose traditional Kashmiri culture," she declares. "We want to return our women to Islamic culture."
Most Kashmiris are ambivalent about the new breed of militant. While Asiya Andrabi is a Kashmiri, many of the like-minded fighters are seen as outsiders, from Pakistan or further afield. Two British Muslims have been among the "guest militants" killed in Kashmir, according to the Indian army.
Ceasefires failing
But the new militants are better equipped and trained, and altogether bolder, as the Indian authorities acknowledge. The armed separatist movement, once close to being humbled by the military, is again showing its mettle.
As a consequence, Srinagar is a violent city. The weekend before last, 10 people were killed in two separate clashes and 10 more died elsewhere in the Kashmir valley. The two ceasefires being observed by Indian security forces have engendered little optimism, because while one is holding, the other is not. For the past five months, the Indian and Pakistani artillery guns facing each other across the line of control have been quiet. But the more crucial ceasefire, with the militants inside Indian-administered Kashmir, has had little effect. The armed separatists have not responded to New Delhi's unilateral initiative.
Separatists divided
The Indian government has offered unconditional talks with Kashmiri groups. The main separatist alliance in Srinagar, the All Parties Hurriyat [Freedom] Conference, has responded cautiously. It wants Pakistan involved, and does not trust Delhi to consider any option which might loosen India's sovereignty over the 5m people of the Kashmir valley.
The mainstream separatists are divided - some want accession to Pakistan, others an independent Kashmir, a prospect widely supported by Kashmiris, however impractical it might be for a remote mountain valley.
Asiya Andrabi has no time for the moderates of the Hurriyat Conference. "We want Pakistan," she says. "Then it will be our first and foremost duty to Islamise Pakistan."
She escorts us to the door. She asks about my children, and I enquire after hers. Her elder son, now eight, was confined with her in jail and she's still angry about that. "When he grows up, I would like him to be a jihadi, and fight for Islam anywhere in the world." Unless the deadlock in Kashmir is broken, Asiya Andrabi's son will not have to search far for his battleground.
Andrew Whitehead presents The World Today on the BBC World Service.
New Statesman: 'Killing time in Kashmir'
A magazine article based on my initial visits to Kashmir (September 1993)
