THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

[I was intrigued by the storm in South Africa over David Bullard in 2008. I am an Indian and I am dead against racism; but I was thrilled by a column for which he was accused of racism. So I got interested in how South Africans tackle race. I haven't been to South Africa for 52 years; and even then I spent a day in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town while my ship replenished itself on way to England. At that time, racism was official in South Africa; I remember separate benches and toilets in gardens. Although all that is gone, racism continues to live a clandestine life in South African languages; that is what fascinated me. This column was published in the Telegraph of 6 May 2008]

THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

When Harbhajan Singh was ticked off for racist abuse of Andrew Symonds, most Indians were befuddled. He is supposed to have called Symonds a monkey; in defence, he said he had only said “Maa ki…” at which the match referee laughed and reduced his penalty. Our colonial ancestors used to be quite well versed in the intricacies of racism; they had rigorous lessons from the British. Every schoolchild knows the story of Gandhiji being thrown out of a train in South Africa because he entered a first-class carriage (and he had bought a first-class ticket). But after our independence in 1947, we did pretty thorough racial cleansing. Whites almost disappeared from India – certainly racist whites. So we are somewhat uneducated in racism. We could do with some lessons from South Africa, where race remains a live issue although non-whites have been in power since 1994.

Let me start with David Bullard, who has just been sacked as a columnist by The Sunday Times of Johannesburg. He describes himself as follows: “Bullard’s meteoric rise to fame as a newspaper columnist and media celebrity came after a hugely successful and obscenely profitable twenty-four years in the financial markets trading bonds and derivatives. He is an opinionated sod who is as impervious to criticism as he is to bullets. He’s also old enough and rich enough to not give a damn what other people think. When he’s not driving fast cars, drinking expensive whisky, traveling down the sharp end of planes and eating absurdly expensive meals in swanky restaurants he enjoys the simple things in life such as reading “A Brief History of Time” and making critical pencil notes in the margin. He has had his teeth whitened, doesn’t dye his hair and has it on good authority that the halitosis is curable.”

On 7 April, he wrote a column in Johannesburg Sunday Times. He imagined a South Africa uncolonized by whites: a South Africa without cars, television, internet, cellphones, newspapers, magazines, shopping malls, cigars or wallpaint. The people live an idyllic life. They have enough and want nothing more. They have discovered fire and are developing the wheel. Despite this blissful existence, they miss something: they do not know what. Then one day, the Chinese arrive looking for minerals, land, water and labour. Then the South Africans know what was missing in their lives: someone to blame.

This summary does not capture Bullard’s style, which I found riveting. It was good entertainment – I would have been chuffed to write it. As to content, obviously Bullard was blaming black South Africans for blaming whites. This had local relevance. A local reader may disagree with him, and may think of counterarguments. It is not inevitable that if whites had not exploited Africa, the Chinese would have. Africa might never have been discovered; or it might have been too remote and might have been neglected by the whites, like Japan; or it might not been rich in minerals. There are so many alternative scenarios that can be imagined; none is more probable than another. It was possible to controvert or dismiss Bullard’s argument; but I could not see how it was racist.

Then, after being dismissed, Bullard wrote an apology which listed what his readers found offensive about the column. He called his subjects “simple tribesmen”; that was interpreted to mean they were stupid. He wrote that if a child was eaten up by a lion or a crocodile, its parents would mourn for a while and then have another; that was considered insensitive. He wrote that the huts were built so as to catch most of the day’s sun; that was taken to mean that blacks were lazy.

Bullard’s remarks may have been impolite or unpleasant. But I thought they were well within the kind of discourse that goes on in any democracy. They reminded me of some Indians’ habit of taking umbrage at their opponents’ remarks and asking for an apology. The Hindutwits are particularly good at this; Muslims also indulge in it sometimes. Children do it all the time – picking up fights over real and imagined insults. It is the context that defines racism. In particular, certain epithets from the Apartheid era are taboo as classic racism – boertjie or plank (white Afrikaans – that is, of Dutch descent – generally known as Boer), roeinek, bhulu or soetie (English South African), kaffir, bushcat, groenewald or baboon (black), boesman or bushman (tribesman from South-west Africa), hotnot, baster, gam, ghoffel or geelbek (mixed-race), meid (black or coloured woman, from maid), koelie or coolie (South Asian), skeepfokker (Australian) or kwerekwere (foreigner visiting an African ghetto). Indians had their own terms: for instance, gora for whites, bruin for coloured people, ravan or pekkie for blacks, slum for Muslims, roti for north Indians and porridge for Tamils. It was not only other races for which people had rude descriptions. The police also attracted many epithets: for instance, gatta, boere (because most policemen were Boers), or kerel (the Dutch word for boy).

Boer is a wonderful transplant of Dutch, of special interest to me because of its affinity with German. Take, for instance, boekkie, which means darling or honey. If you are in love with her, you can say you are hard up. Bok means a goat, whence come Springboks – leaping goats – a name for the South African cricket team. Boekkie means a little goat, a kid. That would be the right word for a girl friend; so would tjerrie (cherie) or stukkie (from stuck, Dutch for a small piece). But if it is a non-girl friend, you can greet him, “Howzit, china!” China means a mate: china plate – mate – it is a typical Cockney derivation. On the same lines, “I must get some tom” means I need money; it comes from tomfoolery, which rhymes with jewellery. There are many words for something admirable or cool. For example, kief comes from gif, which means poison, but has come to be used for local marijuana, hence cool. Tit, lekker, befok and kwaai mean the same thing.

The English have their own slang in South Africa, though it is not nearly as colourful as Boer (“Dutch” is South African Englishmen’s slang for Boer.) They use “now” in peculiar ways. “Just now” means some time – not necessarily soon. “Now now” may mean recently or soon. If they say, “I am scheming”, they have nothing sinister in mind; they are only thinking.

I am not familiar with local African slang. But some words have become well known. For instance, an indaba is a conference, while dagga is marijuana. At football matches, one shouts, “Ladooma!” which I think means a goal.

This is a very superficial and amateur introduction to South African lingo. South Africa is known in India only for its lions and elephants. But its people are equally interesting. The mixture of Africans, English and Dutchmen has produced a fascinating mélange. Every community that has gone to Africa has turned into a tribe, and developed a tribal language. India may have been like that at one time, but now it has become too integrated and boring. For the true colours of tribal differentiation, one must go to South Africa.

PORTRAIT OF A TALIB

[While trawling Canadian press in 2008, I came across a gripping account of the Taliban by Graeme Smith, a Globe and Mail Correspondent. This is what I wrote about it in The Telegraph of 8 April 2008.]

GETTING CLOSE TO THE TALIBAN 

Indians know Graeme Smith well. He is the youngest captain of a test cricket team ever: he was 22 when he captained South Africa in the 2003 World Cup. He scored 277 against England at Edgbaston in 2003, and 259 at Lords in the next test, breaking Don Bradman’s record of 254 for the ground.

But there is another Graeme Smith – a Canadian reporter who has done an extraordinary video series for Toronto Globe and Mail on the Taliban. Canadian troops are fighting the Taliban along with other NATO troops, so it would have been unhealthy for Smith to go anywhere near the Taliban. But he engaged an Afghan who went and interviewed 42 Taliban fighters without their knowing they were being interviewed.

Indians are perfectly familiar with the Taliban; they were created by the Pakistanis in their madrassahs and sent to Afghanistan to fight the Russians in the early 1980s. Pakistan got much American money and arms for the service. This impression is correct but outdated. Today’s Talib fighter was barely born at the time of the proxy war against the Soviet Union; he remembers none of it. Of the 42 fighters, 12 had lost close relatives in the indiscriminate bombing that NATO specializes in, and 21 had their opium fields, the only source of comfortable living, destroyed. The Americans use helicopter gunships liberally in Afhganistan – more than in Iraq. They flew 2,764 sorties in Afghanistan in 2007 against 1,140 in Iraq. Air strikes killed about 1000 Afghan civilians in 2006 and 1500 in 2007; it is these killings, indiscriminate and unjust, that feed the Taliban. The other factor is opium. That may surprise, because the original Taliban government was very active in destroying opium cultivation. But the current generation of Taliban fighters often cites destruction of opium fields as the cause for joining. They justify opium cultivation by saying that opium is exported to and harms only kafirs.

Insurgency is most active in the south, around Kandahar; so Pashtoon tribes that inhabit that region are more heavily represented amongst the Taliban. Noorzai and Eshaqzai tribes were the source of 16 out of the 42 fighters. Only two were from the Popalzai, the tribe to which Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, belongs; one had lost relatives, and the other an opium field. When the Taliban took over in 1994-96, three tribes – Popalzai, Barakzai and Alokozai of the Zirak Durrani group – lost power; Hotak branch of Ghilzai, the tribe of Mullah Mohammed Omar, gained power. On the fall of the Taliban, the three tribes regained power, and the Ghilzai lost it.

The Taliban find refuge in Pakistan; they get medical treatment in Pakistan, and go there for R&R (rest and recreation), as the American troops in Vietnam used to go to Bangkok and Hong Kong. But their soldiers were not very complimentary towards their host country; they openly abused Pervez Musharraf. They had aggressive designs on Pakistan; they considered Peshawar and Quetta as parts of their own domain and wanted to annex them. One said that these areas were sold to Pakistan by Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan.

There is no doubt that the Taliban were originally created and trained by Pakistan; many of that generation continue in the present Taliban. Musharraf claimed to have severed relations with the Taliban in 2001, but ISI is widely believed by people in India and elsewhere to have continued secretly to support and finance the Taliban. But the current generation of the Taliban shows no sense of obligation to Pakistan. It seems to have changed its stripes in other ways too. A family in Kandahar was celebrating a wedding when four Taliban walked in with guns. The people in the wedding party were petrified; when the Taliban was in power, they could have been shot for revelry. But the fighters asked them to relax, saying they were no longer shooting revelers.

The Taliban are sophisticated users of communication technology; they distribute videos for propaganda, and send news to foreign reporters by SMS. But their view of the world is extremely naïve. They have heard of America, and identify it as the enemy. But in general, they believe they are fighting against Kafirs for an Islamic government; the content of Kafirs is extremely vague. Three of the fighters could not identify President Bush; he was called a Jew, King of America, and son of Clinton W.

Suicide bombings have been a matter of controversy amongst the Taliban. Some argued that wearing an explosive vest was cowardly, as it prevented the fighter from fighting his enemy face-to-face. In 2006, a Taliban faction even took out an advertisement in a Kandahar weekly blaming foreigners for suicide attacks and promising to stop them. But the Afghan interviewees were solidly in favour of suicide attacks, which they equated to their enemies’ air attacks. The Taliban are not very competent at suicide bombing; more than three suicide attacks were required to inflict a single casualty. But lack of competence does not reflect lack of faith; all the Taliban were convinced that suicide attacks were justified by the Quran. They did not know which part of the Quran. One told a story about a battle waged by the Prophet, where a wall could not be breached, so one fighter hauled another over the wall, knowing full well that he would be killed. But the story is apocryphal. Islam prohibits suicide; and it requires that a fighter must declare his intent to fight.

What struck me about Graeme Smith’s reports and videos was not what was there but what was not: Al Qaeda did not figure at all. This would surprise everyone who bought propaganda that the Americans invaded Afghanistan to stop Al Qaeda from attacking the west. The propaganda was persuasive in the aftermath of the New York bombings. But the Afghan mujahid does not care a hoot about a global war between Muslims and Kafirs. He is all for the expulsion of Kafirs from Afghanistan, but has no great ambitions of clearing the earth of Kafirs. He is ignorant and parochial. Graeme Smith thought, though, this might be local: that there may more Arabs and Pakistanis in eastern Afghanistan.

As Smith drove across the green fields of Pakistani Punjab, he thought that many valleys of Afghanistan could be equally lush but for the war. Everyone – Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Russians – is intent on rescuing the Afghans from others. But this international rescue game has kept the Afghans poor and primitive, while they might have shared our good fortune.

We Indians must bear our share of responsibility for the Afghans’ plight; if we were not so keen on using the Afghans to spite the Pakistanis, their country would not be so war-torn. Pakistan has a young new leader in Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani. In all these days he has still not uttered the K-word. Maybe the time has come when we can make peace with Pakistan.

And yes – we should remove the ban on opium. Since Ambumani Ramadoss is determined to put an end to tobacco, we need another addiction. Let us take to opium in small doses; it will transform Afghanistan.

FUTURE OF TEA ESTATES

[This was a column I wrote in the Telegraph of 25 March 2008 after an enchanting trip to a tea garden in the hills of South India in 2001.]

WHAT THE BRITISH LEFT BEHIND

I have been to paradise – well, as close to it as I am likely to get this side of the earth. It was a 100-years-old bungalow called Stanmore in a tea garden off Valparai, some 50 miles west of and 4000 feet above Coimbatore. It is a 10,000-sq-ft single-story building with just three enormous bedrooms, a drawing room with ancient novels, and a dining room. A long verandah runs along one side where I spent most of the time, reading or surveying the green carpet of tea bushes spread over the surrounding hills as far as I could see. This is not the picking season, so for hours I saw no one at all. Apart from a station wagon maybe twice in a day, there were no vehicles in sight at all. So everything I hate about modern India – the traffic, the cacophony, the crowds, the chaotic energy – was banished. When Ranga’s dishes incited overeating, I could go for a walk down to a stream in the valley below and back up again; it took two hours. If I was too lazy, I just sprawled on a bench under a tree and read.

I must admit to a weakness for bungalows. They were standard housing for the well-to-do in my childhood. The tall hall in the centre was cooled by currents rising and going out of the skylights, which also let in light. There was a verandah in front, from which one entered the hall; the back also generally had a verandah. Bedrooms were attached to the two sides of the hall. The dining room was usually at the back, often in the verandah. Beyond the back was an outhouse which housed the kitchen, pantry and the stables, or in later times, the garage.

But Stanmore was different. It was not meant for a district collector, but for a tea estate manager, who did not expect to receive a large number of people. So he did not need a large hall. It was quite small; it had a cosy drawing room on one side, and a dining room on the other. Then a passage led down to three bedrooms. Unlike an official bungalow, where the hall is the centrepiece, Stanmore had none; it devoted most of the space to the bedrooms. Each would be about 1200 square feet. Half of it would be the bedroom itself, a quarter would be a bathroom, and a quarter a dressing room. People a hundred years ago wore cottons; and the British had a lot of clothes. So they needed plenty of wardrobe space. Everyone wore hats, so there were hatstands in strategic places. I saw some other bungalows belonging to the group as well. One had jacarandas showering flowers in front; another had a bignonia venesta laden with orange flowers. If I had had the time, I would have tried out a number of bungalows.

Well, I did try out another bungalow some weeks ago; it is in Matheran, some 50 miles from Bombay in the Sahyadris. It is called the Verandah in the Forest; at one time it was known as Dubash bungalow. I cannot say whether this was the Ardeshir Dubash who made it rich in World War I from stevedoring, or the Nariman Dubash who sold the plot to Shah Rukh Khan where he lives now, or the Homai Dubash who was with me in college, or another one. But the Verandah is a two-story construction. The ground floor has three or four bedrooms. But it is the upper floor which is its glory. It has one long hall, with skylights, which is divided into half a dozen big suites with a drawing room in the centre and a dining room behind it. All open out on a vast, 25-feet-wide verandah in the front. It has beautiful colonial armchairs whose arms can be stretched out and brought together in front; one can put one’s feet up on the chair’s arms and doze off. If it is warm, one can withdraw to the back of the verandah; if it is cold, one can sit at the edge and sun oneself.

But going back to Stanmore, it is difficult to imagine today what an ambitious feat tea gardens were. For on the way to it, one passes through forests which are pretty impenetrable; all one finds in them even now is elephants, bison and langurs. The hills that grow tea today must all have been covered with such forest once. They must have been cleared with axes and machetes by armies of men. Food for them must have been brought on ponies. The British made a massive investment in the tea gardens, and in the process changed the landscape unrecognizably. A politically correct environmentalist would shudder at the thought, but I do not mind the sacrilege. I think the tea gardens look lovely; I would take a holiday in them any day.

Indian tea gardens are no longer profitable. They have largely lost the international market to newer competitors – Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam. And the domestic market does not have much taste for quality; it mostly consumes tea dust, the cheaper the better. Most tea gardens have a resident labour force. Minimum wage legislation has made it expensive, especially in West Bengal. The workers have children for whom they would like to have jobs; but the tea gardens cannot employ more.

The gardens in Tamil Nadu have a different problem. Industry is booming in Tamil Nadu, which is experiencing labour shortage. There is so much employment in the textile factories of Coimbatore and Tiruppur that they have drained surrounding areas of labour. As one drives out of these cities, it is difficult to find a rice field any more; vast tracts have been put down to coconut because it needs less labour. And labour has been getting scarcer in Valparai as well.

It is these rising costs that are compelling tea estate managers like the Woodbriar Group to explore conversion of tea bungalows to tourism. I am all for it. But I did think that managers’ bungalows were not enough to turn tea estates into profitable tourist resorts. The tourist density would have to increase.

That in itself would not be a problem, since the current density is so low. But estate owners would have to keep two things in mind. One is unity of architecture. Our hill and forest areas are being ruined by ugly, storied houses built by hungry hoteliers. If the tea estates built such houses, they would ruin the ambience of the estates. They would be well advised to stick to low-rise bungalows, which blend so well with the landscape. And second, they should site new bungalows so as to preserve the ambience. This is not difficult. But it is important to realize that the attraction of tea gardens lies in the way they have refashioned nature; the less signs they show of the human hand, the more successful they will be in attracting human tourists. I look forward to the spreading of a new tea culture which would enable us to get away from the madding crowd, and to recapture a century-old way of life.

MAIDAN-I-JUNG

[This was written in the Telegraph on 26 February 2008. when on a petition of green jihadis, the Calcutta High Court banished the Calcutta Book Fair from the Maidan, the sprawling open space at the heart of Calcutta.]

MAIDAN-I-JUNG

Calcuttans have been fighting a sanguine battle over whether the book fair should be held on the Maidan. The row evokes strong emotions on both sides. On the one side, booklovers, amongst whom Buddhadev Bhattacharya counts himself, think that there is something beautifully Bengali about the book fair, as with Shantiniketan’s Poush Mela. The picture of young women going to the fair and returning laden with books is as romantic to them as one of young women going to the village well and returning with pots balanced on their heads is to less literate Indians. On the other side, the sight of the Maidan being ravaged by uncouth booksellers digging holes, spreading shop-soiled books that they want to get rid of on rickety tables in jerrybuilt stalls, outrages the Bengali who orders his books from Blackwells and would rather use the Maidan for cricket and racing.

In the time-honoured Bengali tradition, the two sides talked at each other instead of to each other. Each wanted an extreme solution, and would settle for nothing less. So typically they ended up in Calcutta High Court, and typically it intervened in a matter that had little to do with law. If law were involved, it would be relevant only to deciding who, if anyone, had the right to dispose of the Maidan, and whether he had followed whatever rules he was subject to. This matter was illuminated in The Telegraph; apparently, the army was the relevant authority, and it was unwilling to host any more book fairs. However, there was still the Park Circus maidan, which belonged to the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. It was not charging the usual rent, and there could be doubt on whether it had given a discount correctly or not; this was the full extent of possible controversy as I saw it. But the High Court had other ideas; it simply stopped the booksellers and their benefactors – the government, the corporation, the communist party – in their tracks. Just what it sought to achieve thereby, apart from favouring one side, is not clear to me. And if it was only a matter of taking sides, one hardly needs the High Court to do it; any old Bengali can do it with passion.

But then, Calcutta has the habit of taking its quarrels to the courts. Some years ago, Calcutta was plagued by street processions of disaffected trade unionists. Whereas Shiv Sainiks, when they get worked up about anything, go out, smash taxis and ravage shops, Calcuttans form a procession, shout slogans, and fling their arms about. It is not their intention to disrupt traffic; but if motorists insist on using the roads precisely when the affected processionists have to pour out their passions in public, it is hardly the latter’s fault.

That was not the view taken by an honourable judge of Calcutta High Court when a procession delayed his proceeding to the court. I cannot remember whom he hauled up, but he was quite effective. Nowadays, when I go to Calcutta, I miss the sight of miscellaneous workers enjoying themselves on the roads. It used to be as if people who did not know the ABC of dancing had invented what they thought was Bharat Natyam. It is a tragedy that with the exodus of industry and commerce from Calcutta, the tribe of strikers is dying out. Whilst those who came to Calcutta for board meetings might not have appreciated the screaming workers outside the door, I am sure that many tourists came just to see those workers; if the latter die out, Calcutta will lose many a visitor.

This is a problem that other countries have faced, and some have worked out quite ingenious solutions. In New Zealand, for example, Maori tribes died out long ago. But without them, New Zealand is indistinguishable from, say, Wales. English may be spoken differently there, but then, every speaker of English has a right to murder it in his own way. Hardly any tourist is likely to travel halfway round the world just to hear the New Zealanders speak English. So New Zealand has turned some places into Maori villages, with antique huts and so on. When tourists are to visit them, they gather Maori-looking bartenders and bus drivers, take clothes off them and drape them in cowhide, give them a spear and get them to make warlike noises. To me it looked quite authentic. And if you cannot go to New Zealand, you only have to go to Gujarat at Navratri and see 10,000 young men and women do garba on a Maidan to get my point.

I would recommend this solution to Buddhadev; he must, for Calcutta’s prosperity, get some of his followers to dress up every Sunday morning and march to the Maidan shouting revolutionary slogans. It does not have to be so drab as it used to be. He can dress them up like, say, Santal tribesmen, and pay Indian Ocean, that wonderful half-Bengali band, to compose music for them. If he does it cleverly, West Bengal can make much more money out of tourism that it ever will out of a chemical factory.

But let me come back to the point: is a fair the best way to sell books? I can think of a better way: a book street. One of the most enchanting places I have visited is the old fort of Damascus, which was built by Knights Templar a thousand years ago. Inside the fort, there is no traffic; it is an entirely pedestrian area. Each street in this fort has shops selling only one product. There is a street for jewellery, another for wedding dresses, and so on. It is like walking into a fairyland.

It would be nice if Calcutta, or some of part of it, came to be organized like that, with streets devoted to books (and now, CDs and DVDs). I am told that College Street was one. But nowadays when I go there, it looks little different from the rest of Calcutta; the few books one finds there are mostly textbooks and popular books. A book street is what Buddhadev should work on; he will be remembered more fondly for it than for a car factory.

And fairs – have they any life left in them? I think so. Calcutta is not a linear city, with streets purposefully marching off in one or other direction. It is an engagingly confused city with streets that often go nowhere in particular. Calcutta has many neighbourhoods off main roads. They should be turned into pedestrian areas on Sundays, and residents should be encouraged to spread tables outside their homes and offer all their considerable junk for sale. To attract custom they may make and sell delicacies. They may revive the old Bengali art of making toddy. They may put up posters of film stars. They may start practicing, in a small way, the Gujarati art of buying and selling; and who knows, in a few years they will become the best shopkeepers in India. It would only be jest if they were to inherit the title of a nation of shopkeepers which the British vacated some time ago.

THE MERCHANT OF WORDS

[This was published in the Calcutta Telegraph of 8 January 2008]

THE MERCHANT OF WORDS

The mind of the Indian media consumer underwent carpet bombing last month. Whatever channel, whatever newspaper he opened, he encountered the same face; when it was not the face, it was its mask. The face was that of Narendra Modi. The only other face he saw with nearly equal frequency was that of Shah Rukh Khan – and his promoters had to pay through the nose for the exposure he got. Modi got publicity without paying a penny. If he had been so minded, he could have made millions from sale of masks, teashirts and coffee mugs.

Modi’s exposure was largely visual. His Hindi is good; it is more comprehensible than Vajpayee’s. But it was not his words that the media carried so much as news about him. No doubt they reported what he was saying; but it was they, not he, who told us. For Modi does not suffer from verbal diarrhoea like Advani. He is economical with his words; he gifts them only to a select few in the media.

That need not have handicapped the rest, for in the past two months, Modi could not afford to be economical with his words. He was fighting for survival. His only weapon was his words. So he spread the word liberally. My estimate is that he made at least 150 election speeches.

However, these words were largely wasted on the media – at least those media we received in Delhi or Calcutta. For this time Modi was a figure of national interest; all the media had sent correspondents to cover him. And somehow, there was hardly a Gujarati amongst the correspondents. Even those non-Gujaratis were touched by Modi’s eloquence; seldom has an Indian politician been so frequently quoted in his own language. And never has he been quoted so inaccurately. Consider Modi’s most quoted sentence: “Hoon khaato nathi, ney khaavaa deto nathi” (I don’t eat, and I don’t let anyone eat) and compare it with the transliterations of it you saw in the press. Seldom has a politician been listened to by so many correspondents with so much attention and so little comprehension.

I am so firmly prejudiced against Modi the politician that I had not given much attention to him as a man. The prejudice is unlikely to wear out any time soon, for it has nothing to do with him as a person. It emanates from my belief that Hindutwits are India’s most dangerous enemies. In the name of unifying the country, they work assiduously to divide it, by marginalizing Muslims. They actively work to make traitors out of people who only want to earn a livelihood and bring up their children.

But this time, television channels often carried cuts out of his speeches. I realized for the first time that he is a very good speaker. He speaks, not just to express himself, but to influence his audience. He speaks simple, idiomatic Gujarati. He does not disgorge a flood of words at his audience. For him, each sentence is an arrow to the listener’s heart. He delivers it, and then waits to make sure it has hit the mark. He often pauses dramatically. He is not just a speaker; he is an actor.

Good speakers are rare; I have not heard many. Nehru was one. Till the end of his life he could draw listeners in lakhs, and they would listen to him with rapt attention for hours. He was not particularly dramatic; but he too was a master of the pause. His forte was his ability to simplify, to explain even his foreign policy to the worker or the student. He was a master of language.

Churchill was a better speaker. His linguistic skills were as good as Nehru’s; his sentences were short and dramatic. But he modulated his voice better. I noted Modi’s ability to use sentences like arrows; that is what Churchill was a master of. His leonine growl did the rest of the work.

But by far the best speaker I have heard in that genre was Hitler. He had what Modi and Churchill had, but something more. He too could construct arrow-like sentences; but he spoke in long paragraphs. Listening to him was like reading a detective story. He carried you along in an avalanche. He not only raised your emotional temperature; he made you impatient to hear what he was going to say next. He built up suspense. The result was that when he delivered his punch line, his audience went into a cathartic ecstasy. The dramatic effect was enhanced by the props he used. Standing below him would be Nazi cadre; at appropriate junctures they would repeat slogans after him, burst into cheers, act as his orchestra. I do not know whether Modi’s hit on Sohrabuddin was rehearsed or orchestrated; but the performance reminded me of Hitler. In short, staccato sentences, Modi characterized Sohrabuddin as a terrorist one could only fear and hate. Then he asked, “What should we do with such a man?” As if on a cue, the audience screamed, “Kill him.” Compare this with Sonia, at the end of her speeches, asking her audience to shout Jai Hind. Where is the context? Where is the drama? Where is the intensity? It is not oratory, it is ritual. Nehru also used to ask his audience to say Jai Hind; but it was at the end of a speech which explained to them what India and Indians stood for. He made essentially patriotic speeches, to which Jai Hind was a fitting conclusion.

I cannot write about Modi’s language with equal confidence because I did not pay attention to him earlier. But I find a distinct transition. My early impression of Modi was that he specialized in abuse – of the Congress, of Sonia, of secularists. He concentrated on creating and reinforcing paranoia in his audience. That has not quite disappeared; note his use of Sohrabuddin. But uncharacteristically but very effectively, he is turning the other cheek. He replied to Sonia and Manmohan Singh in such gentle terms; often he just twisted the things they had said and made them sound wrong, unfair or anti-Gujarati.

This change, I think, has something to do with his experience as chief minister. He came up as an RSS hatemonger; all he knew was hatred and abuse. But for 12 years he has been meeting politicians above his rank; he has had to persuade them to give him favours or ward off disfavours. So instead of abusing opponents, he has learnt to deplore their abuse, to make them feel guilty about being so nasty, and to make them grant him something because they have been nasty.

To sum up, Modi has a mind that I do not understand very well; even if I did, I do not think I would be fond of what I would find in it. But now I find it a fascinating mind. He is not stupid by any means. He has been learning, and he will learn more. He has developed into an excellent speaker and communicator – skills that make all the difference in leadership. Soon he will leave his Hindutwit colleagues far behind.

CAN BENGAL INDUSTRIALIZE?

[Bengal was India's most industrialized state still the 1950s. Then its industries got into trouble, their workers were unionized by communists. They won elections in 1977, and have been in power ever since. Industrialists have withdrawn from the state and set themselves up in more friendly states in the west and south. Recently, however, the communist government has tried to attract private industry. Its most conspicuous success in persuading the Tatas to make a small car in India has run into trouble over land acquisition, which has been strongly resisted by people who would lose their land and their jobs. I wrote this critique of West Bengal government's attempts to attract industry in the Calcutta Telegraph of 3 January 2007.]

CAN BENGAL INDUSTRIALIZE?

Being a west Indian, I never met a Bengali till I was through my teens. My image of Bengal was shaped by Rabindra Nath Tagore, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Satyajit Ray. I used to think that the Bengalis were the most talented Indians. When I went abroad, I met my first Bengalis, and the awe in which I held them depreciated; especially after I went to Germany and found even children speaking German, I came to think that Germans were more intelligent than Bengalis.
But then I made some good Bengali friends. So I was pained when West Bengal began after 1965 to make news for all the wrong reasons: strikes, bandhs, gheraos, processions, and economic paralysis. My Bengali friends were, of course, overjoyed that revolution was round the corner. Slowly, though, these disruptions passed out of the news although they continued: West Bengal ceased to matter to the rest of India.
Today, I find West Bengal again in the news – not for the bandhs and processions which continue, but for Singur. The lineup is, however, different. Whereas the communists were the villains of the 1970s and 1980s, angels are on their side today; so also are capitalist devils. Everyone takes it for granted that Ratan Tata’s plan to make people’s cars in Singur is a Good Thing, that it is heroic of Buddhadev Bhattacharya to vanquish all opposition to it, and that Mamata Banerjee is a crazy Luddite.
Ratan Tata is one of the most respected men of my generation. But I find some of his recent actions uncharacteristic. Throughout independent India’s history, the Tatas kept a distance from the government. In the licence-permit raj, the right to expand or diversify became a favour from the government for which businessmen had to fight and bribe. Most of them did both. But the Tatas stuck to their knitting, and did what they could without courting politicians, begging for favours and oiling political wheels. They dominated the truck and bus industry, made TISCO the least-cost steel producer, and built up TCS outside the control net. They did not bend their knee to anyone – not to Indira Gandhi, nor to Rajiv, nor to George Fernandes. When I joined government in the 1990s, controls were still in place. Many industrialists came to pay court or nudge files along; never anyone from the Tatas. For that I respected them – and so did many of my fellow-Indians.
Singur is the first project on which the Tatas have relied on a government – this time the government of West Bengal – and sought its favours. This is not necessarily improper – not unless they raise their contributions to CPI(M) immoderately – but it is unusual; this is precisely the sort of thing they eschewed when it was so much more common and so necessary for success.
What made them change? My guess is that after the passing of central controls, competition has intensified, corruption has seeped from the centre to the states, and in the dirty new world that has arrived, the Tatas have decided that the West Bengal government is the lesser evil. With the opening up of the economy, it has become easy to import automobile components. And for the smaller manufacturers, accessing the export market has become essential if they are to reach the necessary minimum scale. So the entire automobile industry is rushing to the coast. Tamil Nadu and Gujarat are the favoured locations. Tamil politicians are reputed to be economically rational; and the BJP, of which Narendra Modi is the satrap in Gujarat, is equally realistic about the relationship between power and political prosperity. Ratan Tata has publicly rued that the Tatas were kept out of the aviation industry while sundry upstarts approached politicians and obtained licences. It must hurt because both JRD and Ratan have been amateur flyers and because Air India, the Tatas’ pioneer airline, was snatched away by the government. Ratan Tata presumably found Tata Motors losing out because it would not bribe the politicians of the coastal states; he made a bargain with the government of West Bengal that he found acceptable. I would like to know, though, what the bargain is.
I wondered, earlier, about the Tatas’ bid for Corus. The Birlas were the first to go international; today, every Tom, Dick and Harry is buying companies abroad. But the Tatas stuck to their domestic base through the worst years of controls; why are they trying to acquire a foreign company three times the size of Tata Steel? I attributed the decision to the forthcoming consolidation of the world steel industry, of the emergence of big players like Mittal-Arcelor and their likely entry into the Indian market space. But then I realized that the Tatas were not far behind in acquisitions abroad; their companies too have been spreading out since it was allowed. So I now wonder if it has something to do with the competitive corruption emerging between Indian states – whether the Tatas are winning beachheads in markets abroad where industry is freer and governments cleaner.
Coming to West Bengal, it has always struck me how top-down development in this state is. If you look at India’s most developed states – Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat – most industry there is indigenous and small-scale. All the businessmen whom the West Bengal government favours are big and non-Bengali. In the 1980s and 1990s, they were foreign; Indian industrialists were not welcome. Even now they are generally foreign, like the Salims. The Tatas are the first Indian group to have found favour; and they are different. They treat their workers well, and are friendly to trade unions. They are more congenial to communists.
In particular, I have been struck by Buddhadev’s studied neglect of Mukesh. He is sitting on huge reserves of gas of the Krishna-Godavari coast, and is looking for somewhere to land it and sell it. He tried UP, but the split with Anil wrecked that plan. He has been courting Tamil Nadu, so far without success. All that gas would transform the industrial future of West Bengal. What makes Buddhadev hesitate? The spectre of CITU descending on Calcutta with hundreds of thousands of coal miners?
So I am tempted to formulate the following laws of development under communism. The communist state is a slave of its trade unions. It is forced to rely on big industrialists because small industry cannot survive organized, militant trade unions. Amongst big industrialists it prefers foreign ones who would have no constituency in this country. If it cannot get them, it will settle for Indian ones, but only if they accept CITU. And competition in product markets weakens the bargaining power of trade unions; so it would prefer firms that have a monopoly or a niche market.
These are stringent requirements; if the West Bengal government sticks to them, it may attract Tata Motors, but it will achieve little overall industrialization of the state. If I am right, Buddhadev will face increasingly obstinate opposition within the CPM family, will win ever greater admiration from the bourgeoisie, and will be largely ineffective. It is not his fault; it is the party he belongs to. He should bend it to his will, or split it.

A FIRST VISIT TO LUXEMBURG

[I went to Luxemburg in January 2007 on an official visit, and met ministers, bankers and businessmen amongst others. This report of the visit was published in Business World of 15 January 2007.]

LUXEMBURG EXPERIENCED

Lakshmi Mittal’s acquisition of Arcelor put Luxemburg on Indians’ mental map. I had never been to Luxemburg before; from photographs I had imagined the Arcelor headquarters to be a chateau – a country house to which you drove up along a long shaded avenue. So I was surprised to find it situated in the center of Luxemburg, close to the railway station.. I had expected ‘Mittal-Arcelor’ to be emblazoned in bold on it; instead, I found that the building still bears the name ‘Arbed’ in big stucco lettering at the top (Arbed was Luxemburg’s steel company which was merged with Usinor of France and Aceralia of Spain to form Arcelor in 2001). The new name of the company is found at the entrance in small letters. I had imagined Lakshmi Mittal looking out of its windows on his green, wooded domain; actually, he looks out on busy noontime traffic. That is, when he visits the four-story office mansion built almost a century ago. He does it often; Arcelor-Mittal no doubt engages much of his attention these days. But he has not converted the office into his residence; he stays in a hotel.
Why the Mittal-Arcelor affair made such big news in India is clear – Lakshmi Mittal is of Indian descent, and all true Indians wanted to take up cudgels for him – verbally. But why did it stir people so in Luxemburg? Luc Frieden, minister of justice, the budget and the treasury, said it was because the father or uncle of almost everyone had once worked in Arbed. Jeannot Krecké, minister of the economy, commerce and sports, attached importance to the survival of manufacturing industry. (They do have thick portfolios, these Luxemburg ministers; after all, there are only 15 of them.) Arbed is to Luxemburgers what the Tata Steel is to India. It is an icon; whatever happens to it will reverberate in the local polity – even though Arbed today employs just 6,000 people out of the country’s work force of 311,000, and produces just 4 million tons of steel.
There is also a local way of doing things into which the hostile bid for Arcelor did not fit. Luxemburg has a small share of Arcelor’s equity, and prefers to have a voice in the board. Its government likes to resolve issues by consultation. It also favours shared decision taking, for which it has tripartite bodies in which it brings together workers and employers. Mittal’s reputation as a capitalist buccaneer caused some trepidation at the outset. But both the government and the Mittals (Lakshmi and his son Aditya) have been talking and learning each other’s ways. Luxemburg has a small and approachable government; it acts quickly, and looks for solutions friendly to business. When Luc Frieden drafts a law, he talks to businesses and institutions to learn what they would like to see in it.
I am sure that if Mittal thinks about it, Luxemburg’s ways must contrast to its favour with those of Indian governments. Their slow, opaque, ponderous ways may not so much affect services which require little of land, logistics or investment. But in manufacturing industry, costs depend a great deal on the infrastructure provided by the government. And timing is important in a competitive industry; it makes all the difference how quickly one can go into production. In quality of government, Luxemburg with its small, agile government would score higher than India.
All of manufacturing employs only 11 per cent of Luxemburg’s labour force. Despite – or perhaps because – of the fading of industry, Luxemburg has the highest national income per head in Europe, more than twice that of France, Britain or Japan. Admittedly, the figure involves a bit of sleight of hand, for many people come every day and work in Luxemburg, which is only 82 km long and 57 km wide. Germans call their Turkish workers guest workers, although they have been guests for over 40 years; German guests in Luxemburg, however, commute to work in the morning and go back to their homes across the border every evening, as do workers from France and Belgium, the other countries encircling Luxemburg. A third of Luxemburg working population is non-resident. Foreign workers speed along six-lane highways. As they enter the city, street signs tell them how many parking spaces are available in which underground car park.
Underground activity goes quite far back in Luxemburg’s history. For it is settled on a sandstone cliff overlooking the confluence of the Alzette and Petrusse rivers. Luxemburgers built a castle; but the Austrians, who were visiting Luxemburg in the 18th century, had an even better idea. They tunneled through the cliffs and opened bastions overlooking the valley; this underground fortress was indestructible and made Luxemburg a formidable obstacle to the imperial armies of France as they fought for the mastery of Europe over centuries. Wars between roughly balanced empires are impossible to win decisively. When people despair of winning, their thoughts turn to God. So religion was Luxemburg's major industry in the Middle Ages; buildings of ancient monasteries in the centre are a conspicuous reminder of it. Luxemburg is close to the heart of Europe.
Whereas at one time this made it the tramping ground of armies, today it is bringing to Luxemburg the august institutions of the European Union. Brussels is the home of the European Commission and the fount of its unceasing Directives. But EU is a federation built from the bottom up; so its members have multiplied its institutions, and strewn them across member countries. Luxemburg, being central and beautiful, has got more than its fair share. It could not accommodate the new European armies of bureaucrats in its old palaces, so it has given over the next hill to them. There they have built imposing glasshouses; European Investment Bank, European Court of Justice, Eurostat are amongst the institutions on this hill.
But while European bureaucracy may provide the cream, it is finance that is Luxemburg’s dominant industry. It has an extraordinary concentration of financial service providers. It is host to 155 banks – only 15 of them local. It has 95 insurance companies, and 271 reinsurance companies. It has 946 investment companies, 1046 unit trusts and 15 other undertakings for collective investment (UCIs) as they are locally called. At the beginning of 2006, the combined assets of Luxemburg’s UCIs were over E1.5 trillion – twice India’s national income. The main business of its financial sector is to attract the savings of people in neighbouring countries, principally Germany and Belgium, and to offer them an enormous variety of avenues for financial investment through companies whose solvency is assured. Switzerland has been in this business for much longer; it specializes in investment services for the world’s super-rich. Luxemburg caters more to the middle classes. To this end, it is home to a large number of mutual funds which offer standardized combinations of investments to cater to savers who cannot afford to go to the private bankers of Zurich. It also has branches of all major Swiss banks, which found it to be a good point of entry into EU territory. Initially, investors were attracted by lower taxes; but the difference is now dwindling. Similar funds are available in the home countries of investors, but Luxemburg has kept its lead. Serge Kolb, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg, attributes it to low costs, greater choice of funds and better knowledge. But as Fernand Grulms of ABBL, the Bankers’ Association of Luxembourg put it, Luxemburg’s command of languages is also important. A large proportion of the work force speaks German, French and English; and the financial institutions combine expertise on the regulations of neighbouring countries. The government is small, approachable, and friendly to business. So it is really the quality of administration and client service that gives Luxemburg an edge. This is why Indian companies have for long found Luxemburg a good place to raise capital. Immediately after they were allowed to do so, 31 Indian companies issued GDRs in Luxemburg in 1994; since then, Luxemburg has been a favourite destination of Indian companies floating GDRs or raising bonds.
But Luxemburg may become attractive to Indian business for another reason. The European Union is a market of 500 million people with high incomes, as Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s minister of foreign affairs and immigration, points out. Indian companies are buying and setting up subsidiaries in EU. If they wanted to establish their presence, Luxemburg would be a strong candidate. It is a small city, consisting largely of offices; only 75,000 people live in the city. But it offers all the conveniences of a city, including a concert hall, an opera house and museums of classical and modern art. It is easy to get into and out of; one can enjoy country life in one of the villages in the neighbourhood and drive into Luxemburg for work. One’s children would grow up speaking French, German and Luxemburgish. Paris, London and Amsterdam would be within driving distance. And for those who get homesick, there are at least five Indian restaurants – Star of Asia, Swagat, Himalaya, Everest and Khana Khazana. No wonder Lakshmi Mittal chose a Luxembourg company to buy into.