Who Killed Shastri, by Vivek Agnihotri - Review

Who Killed Shastri, by Vivek Agnihotri

(Amazon IN, Kindle, Flipkart)

Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s second prime minister, died in Tashkent in the early hours of the 11th of January, 1966. This was shortly after he signed a peace accord between India and Pakistan, brokered by the Soviet Union. He was cremated in his hometown after his body was brought back to India. In case people are wondering, another prime minister from the Congress party, not from the Nehru dynasty, was denied a funeral in the national capital. 

Regarding Shastri’s death, these are the only incontrovertible facts that people agree upon. Why is that? Because Indians, like everyone else, love a good conspiracy theory. Because conspiracy theories behind his death have been used to point fingers at the alleged role of foreign powers and the complicity of certain politicians and political families on the other. Because no one disputed the circumstances of his death till several years later, when it was politically expedient to do so.

Thus goes one line of argumentation. 

Sardar Patel - The Man Who Saved India, by Hindol Sengupta

The Man Who Saved India: Sardar Patel and His Idea of India, by Hindol Sengupta

I
f you want to understand the insidiousness of narratives, pay close attention not only to those who are written about. Pay more attention to that which is left unsaid, and at those who legacy and history are ignored, those political leaders who are rarely written about. In the narrative that was planted in India in the decades following Independence, Sardar Patel's name was conspicuous by its absence. Growing up in socialist India in the 1970s and 1980s, I recall Sardar Patel's name as taken only in the safety and privacy of homes, behind closed curtains, where the elders would cautiously whisper about the man who united India and who should have been prime minister instead of Nehru. We, the children, would wonder who this man was. Who was Sardar Patel, about whom not even a line could be found in our government-sanctioned history textbooks, and about whom one rarely heard a word on the government-run AIR and Doordarshan?

But the legend of Sardar Patel sustained, nurtured by those who had lived through Partition to see one man unite India in the years following Independence and by those who saw a dizzying array of blunders by its first prime minister sink India deeper and deeper into a morass of corruption, socialism, and poverty.

Of Rahul Gandhi and Aurangzeb – A striking similarity of Dynasties

Rahul Gandhi, the 47-year old scion of the Nehru dynasty, is all set to ascend the throne of the Congress Party. If things go as planned, he will succeed his mother, Smt Sonia Gandhi, and become the sixth member from the Nehru family to be coronated Congress party president.

The grand old party of Indian politics has seen five presidents since 1978. For all but seven of those thirty-nine years, a member of the Nehru dynasty has been its president. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, daughter of Pandit Nehru and grand-daughter of Motilal Nehru, both past presidents themselves, was party president from 1978 to 1984, till her assassination. She was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who was its president from 1985 to 1991, till his assassination. From 1998 to the present day, the Congress party’s president has been Italian-born Smt Sonia Gandhi, wife of Rajiv Gandhi, and mother of Rahul Gandhi.

Black Money and Tax Havens Paperback, by R Vaidyanathan - Review

Black Money and Tax Havens Paperback, by R Vaidyanathan

T
he subject of black money and tax havens that facilitate and act as conduits for such black money has been the subject of intense fascination and speculation by the lay public for decades. It has been the subject of countless novels and movies, and some action by governments the world over. In India, the war against black money is one of the few areas where there seems to unanimous political consensus on the need for inaction. Prof. Vaidyanathan's book is a short and accessible reckoner for people wanting to gain more than just a superficial understanding of this subject.

First, some numbers. Calculating accurately the amount of black money generated in an economy is neither possible, nor estimable with any degree of accuracy. This is well-borne out by the varying estimates that have come over the decades.

Aamir Khan's Games and a Management Lesson on Celebrity Brand Endorsements

Movie poster of Dangal
[image credit: Disney]

N
ow that it is becoming clear that Aamir Khan's latest movie, "Dangal", is going to be a blockbuster hit (it's already recorded the second-highest opening of any movie in 2016), and with significant financial contributions in the form of ticket sales from the so-called right-wing brigade, it is time to go back in time a little bit and look at lessons learned and not learned. Lessons on brand management, lessons on social boycotts and boycott-fatigue, and lessons on adaptability.

Female Infanticide and Western Institutions

The Ford Foundation’s Quest to Fix the World - this New Yorker piece in the January, 2016 issue of the magazine, by someone named Larissa MacFarquhar caught my eye. The Ford Foundation is a highly controversial organization with an unsavory past in India (and I suspect in many other third-world countries), and I was therefore keen to know what the insufferably long and at-times rambling piece had to say about the Ford Foundation and India. To be honest, I suspected at the onset this was a puff piece done to massage the egos of the high-and-mighty at the Ford Foundation, and by the time I had read through it, my suspicions had been confirmed, and worse.

New Yorker piece on the Ford Foundation

There were two bits that caught my attention in particular.

The first was the following sentence - "In April, the government froze the bank accounts of Greenpeace India, and in the same month cancelled the registration of nearly nine thousand N.G.O.s that received money from abroad."

While true in itself, this sentence failed the basic smell-test of journalistic ethics. Why? Because the sentence presented facts selectively to present a manifestly one-sided version of what actually transpired.

The Chakravarti Adarsh Lieberal

The Chakravarti Adarsh Lieberal rules over the circle of a dharma where it is but child’s play for to step in and step out of any of the seven steps below. It is what characterizes his or her greatness, and holds lessons for posterity for all.

1. The Harvest of Golden Silence
To be employed when the Adarsh Lieberal’s “own” are hollowing the moral fibre of the nation, gutting the economy, bludgeoning (to be applied literally, liberally, as well as metaphorically) the upright into submission. Preach forbearance. Practice silence. Pray for tolerance. Silence is golden. Silence is also the golden goose that lays golden eggs. The gold is mined by the honest people of the country. They will only hoard it as gold to be used for their false gods. Unless such gold is harvested, by the Adarsh Lieberal, whose silence yields a golden harvest, and while it’s not golden wheat, it does bring in the bacon, or beef – to be politically correct – a pink harvest, to be enjoyed over gin, rum, and all other manners of sophisticated intoxicants. Power, of course, is the biggest intoxicant, but it needs to be supplemented from time to time with the good stuff.

Hygiene as the New Burden

The white man's burden, 1898 Detroit Journal cartoon

Remember the “White Man’s Burden” – the phrase that grew out of Rudyard Kipling’s nineteenth-century poem of the same name, and which exhorted the white man to take on the “burden” of colonizing and serving their “captives’ need”? This was but a natural duty befalling the white man because in the words of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, “negroes” and “all other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites.”

Well, times have changed. It is now no longer politically palatable to be using such phrases. What has however stayed invariant is the assumption of the west’s superiority over the unwashed, unlettered heathens. Hygiene is the latest burden the western man has to bear.

Accidental India, by Shankkar Aiyar

My review of Shankkar Aiyar's book, "Accidental India", was published in the DNA on May 22nd, 2014. Except for the review's title and sub-title - "Should I Be Stupid Just Because the Government Is?"
Funnily enough, in India that was a fact of life and not an absurdity for several decades. - the review was published in its entirety.

This, below, is the review as it appeared in the DNA:

The opportunities that India has squandered, either through indolence or apathy, either individually or collectively, are far too many to be counted. Then there are the quirks of fate that have convinced Indians that perhaps the gods had it in for India – like Lal Bahadur Shastri’s untimely demise just when it seemed India would break free of the socialist straitjacket that had been imposed on the nation, or Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel being asked to make way for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as India’s first prime minister despite being the more qualified and better person on every count, or the most unexpected loss of the NDA in the 2004 general elections just when the nation had found a new, confident, and resurgent voice. The list goes on. Perhaps the most public of all humiliations would have been the shipping of Indian gold reserves to England as surety for a paltry loan of $400 million from the Bank of England. But as in every dark cloud, there proved to the silver lining. An accidental silver lining of sorts.
Shankkar Aiyar’s book, Accidental India, has even more relevance in today’s environment, given the trend towards consumption of real-time information in an abbreviated manner (read social media, especially Twitter) which encourages an almost junk-food style of an information diet – quantity without much value. This book looks at seven “accidents” that shaped India’s post-independent socio-economic landscape, for the better, and substantially so.

India's Iron Man - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, by Balraj Krishna

Sardar Vallabhabhai Patel: India's Iron Man (India's Bismarck: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel), by Balraj Krishna

One-line review: His stupendous achievements dwarfed only by the apathy of an ungrateful polity and dishonest historians.

Short review: Unless we learn the path we took and who led us down the path, we can never truly hope to correct course and tread towards a brighter future. Blind hero-worship of flawed frauds and idolatry of insidious ideologies cannot ever be the basis of writing history. That is hagiography. This short book on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the iron man of India, is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding what was, what happened, and why we are here. If we today breathe in a united and independent India, we have one person - Sardar Patel - to thank more than anyone else.

In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce

In Spite of the Gods - The Rise of Modern India, By Edward Luce

One line review: Crass. Clueless. Sadly Shallow.

Long review: Written by an editor with the Financial Times (Edward Luce was the newspaper's South Asia bureau chief between 2001 and 2006, based out of New Delhi), the book starts off earnestly enough, but falls rapidly into a morass of political biases, cheap shots, shallow-to-nonexistent analysis, ending as another example of those books that people aspire to write, have the connections to do so, yet should not.

Tinderbox, by MJ Akbar

Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan, by M.J. Akbar

"One good section, two okay parts, and several instances of selective interpretations."


(Flipkart, Flipkart ebook, Amazon US / CA / UK, Kindle US / UK, CA, Powell's)

One-line review: Two books, three parts, and some parts confusion and obfuscation.

Indianomix, by Vivek Dehjejia, Rupa Subramaniya

Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India by Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya
A Good Freakonomics-Style Book on India Will Have to Wait

(Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Amazon UK, Kindle UK, Flipkart
My review on Amazon, Indianomix – Wait for the Movie! : Centre Right India)

The trend, the craze, the fashion, that Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist sparked makes it way to an Indian context with this book, but the effects are less than spectacular. A plethora of problems mar what could have been an otherwise successful pop-economics-and-behavioral-psychology book.

Applying economics and blending it with research gleamed from the still nascent field of behavioral economics - in itself a blend of behavioral psychology and economics - to everyday topics can yield fascinating insights that do a better job of explaining how people behave than traditional models that rely on the mythical "rational economic person". It would be an understatement to make the case that we need different, and more rational, models of behavior in the Indian context. As India changes - socially, economically, and politically - providing models of human behavior, in both individual and collective contexts, can help everyone better understand, explain, and perhaps correct undesirable orthodoxy in though.

This book attempts to do just that, but is stymied by several, several factors. When explaining economic concepts, it tends to fall over in talking down to the reader. There is a plethora of phrases like "what economists call a...", "economists are used to ..." - liable to give the reader the impression that he is not supposed to be intelligent enough to know these concepts. When introducing behavioral economics, it sprays basic concepts all over the book, making it very, very difficult for someone who has not already some knowledge of the topic to truly grasp the profoundness of the work of people like Kahnemann and Tversky. When applying these models to Indian problems and behaviors, the arguments put forth are never quite fully fleshed out. Some explanations are simply dropped midway, abruptly. Some are never carried to some logical conclusion. And some are plain wrong. Add to this prose that at times leaves you gasping for semantic clarity, and the result is a miasma of confusion and a picture that never reveals itself.

The section where the book is at its best is when it treads territory pertaining to failures arising out of depletion of cognitive resources. This is a topic that has been covered in other books like "Switch", where willpower is compared to a muscle, albeit a mental muscle. This means that the effort required to suppress our impulses - like resisting a chocolate pie when dieting, can themselves tax and tire our cognitive resources to the extent that we can end up lowering our guard in other areas.
This is of great value when trying to understand why poor, very poor people, indulge in impulse decisions that are very costly. The cognitive restraint required to resists temptations, so very constant and so very tempting, is much greater for the poor than it is for the better off.

"They found that the farmers scored noticeably better after the harvest than before. In other words, their cognitive failures and biases were more pronounced when they were more constrained (and poorer) than when they were less so."

Let us look at some examples of the problems I found with and in the book. Take the example of the QWERTY keyboard and its very sticky ubiquity, despite the so many obvious inefficiencies with its design and the availability, for decades now, of demonstrably better alternatives.

"It turns out that this is what worked best on a typewriter given the position of the metal keys as they struck the paper, not for the ease of the typist,"

Now, this is not strictly correct. The reason that the QWERTY layout was designed was to reduce the incidence of these typewriters jamming. This was especially true of the cheaper typewriters, not so much an issue with the more expensive, and better quality, typewriters. And if you are talking about the QWERTY keyboard, you have to talk about the most popular, relatively speaking, alternative - the DVORAK keyboard - to understand why the QWERTY keyboard has remained to persistently popular. Which the book does not.

One of the cognitive biases that we humans suffer from is "the law of small numbers" - our haste in drawing conclusions from very few observations. The book talks about the probability of getting four heads in a row and how it is fallacious to assume on that basis that the coin is biased - because the chances of a fair coin landing heads four times in succession are 6.25% - not impossibly low by any means. To generalize from randomness is not good. But the example is uninteresting. It's plain boring. As a contrast, look at Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkard's Walk", where he writes, "...mathematician George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 10 (to the power 1000007) zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros. " That does arrest your attention, doesn't it? A million consecutive zeroes is NOT evidence of a biased coin, or a non-random process? Math can amaze us. Even this brilliant Dibert cartoon on randomness brings out the point in a more memorable way than the book's example.

When talking of the differences between autocracies and democracies, the book touches on the topic of the skewed sex-ratio in India being partly the result of the easy and cheap availability to ultrasound machines. These machines made it easy to tell the gender of the foetus, with lethal consequences for the unborn female child. What they fail to mention, and it is incredibly germane to a discussion that includes behavioral economics, is that the government of India actually encouraged the use of these machines and the resulting sex-selective abortions as a means of population control. "Nudges" from the government had unintended consequences. Mara Hvistendahl's excellent book "Unnatural Selection" covers this in some detail, and describes a young doctor's harrowing experience of watching a dog make off with an aborted foetus at the country's most prestigious hospital, AIIMS.

Another potential pitfall with the book is its over-reliance on sole experts. When talking about road safety and accidents, their sole Indian expert in this field seems to be Dinesh Mohan. Nor could they find a psephologist other than Yogendra Yadav, who - while possessing the requisite sartorial skills required of an intellectual, also sports a very sombre and serious beard - it should be noted, is a regular fixture on a cable news channel that has had repeated problems with lapses of ethics and objectivity. When the credibility of an argument is seen to rest on solitary experts, the edifice is on a shaky foundation.

A book that encourages the reader to ask questions is a good thing. But questions about the quality of arguments presented tend to undermine the credibility of the book itself. When such questions start popping up on almost every single page, on almost every single topic, I, as the reader, had to make a serious call on what exactly would the returns on the investment in my time be. After going through approximately two-thirds of the book, I had to stop.

Let me add three more issues I found with the book, and I will stop at that.

The book's intellectual credibility takes a deep, deep dive when it veers into colonialism, and whether it was good or bad for India. One of their premises is that it is difficult to do a strict apples-to-apples comparison in several situations. The issue of the efficacy of seat-belts is one such topic that they cover and the difficulty of doing a credible assessment of its success without having a "credible counter-factual" history to compare with. In simple language, it means having a time machine and running some very interesting "Back to the Future" style experiments. The authors do note that where it is somewhat possible to do such a comparison, albeit on a very isolated and perhaps non-representative manner, between regions under direct British rule and between those under the rule of princely states, the results do suggest that "the regions that were under direct British rule have higher rates of poverty and infant mortality into the present day." Fair enough. But, in the interests of being even-handed, they let loose this thermonuclear of a controversial statement - "But does this tell us that British rule caused India’s economic stagnation, and the country would have prospered otherwise? There’s no way to tell, unless we come up with a plausible and credible counterfactual history."
I am sorry - no, I am not, actually - but this is a complete "Are you effing kidding me?!" I will not say much other than to refer them to Madhushree Mukherjee's excellent book, "Churchill's Secret War", and my equally magnificent review of the book (note the non-self-deprecating sarcasm here).

The authors describe the unfounded optimism that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, exhibited towards an increasingly hostile China's aggressive gestures in words and deeds. They quote Pt. Nehru's confession, "With great candour and self-awareness" that "he’d been living in a dream world before the war broke out." They then question whether the great man had suffered from cognitive failures? Yes, perhaps so. But wouldn't it be also reasonable to mention that several people, and not just Vallabhai Patel (not "Sardar" Patel, mind you), had in the decade preceding India's military humiliation warned Panditji, and repeatedly? Arun Shourie's "Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again" uses Panditji's own words and correspondence to document his repeated blindness to the inevitability of coming events. Is it not possible that Panditji did not want India to be militarily prepared because doing so would have contradicted his self-image in the world as an international man of peace? Isn't that a more believable explanation of Panditji's cognitive failings? Whether or not one agrees with it, it certainly merits an inclusion in a book that is supposed to teach us how to think about events like economists?
As an aside, note that noted security expert Brahma Chellaney writes that the Chinese chose their time of attack to coincide with the preoccupation of the West with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire on November 20, 1962. The USA ended its blockade of Cuba on November 20, 1962. Coincidental? Diabolically Chanakyan?

The book, when talking about random events, dwells a bit on Sonia Gandhi's entry and rise in politics. They write, and I quote:

"Even after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on May 21, 1991, she declined to jump into the fray and stayed out of politics for the next decade and a half. It wasn’t until the Congress’s unexpected victory that we’ve talked about, in 2004, that she stepped into public life as the head of the UPA."

Are they serious? Are they serious???
Firstly, a decade and a half from 1991 would take us to 2006, not 2004. Sonia Gandhi had stepped into public life long before 2004.
Sonia Gandhi became the leader of the Congress party in 1998.
She contested elections to the Lok Sabha in 1999.
Even the events surrounding her accession as the leader of the Congress Party is a story most unedifying.
If these were not indications of her "stepping into public life", I wonder what else would qualify.
Perhaps Tavleen Singh's "Durbar" may help them shed light on why she chose not to enter politics in 1991. Journalist Kanchan Gupta also may have some informed opinion to share on the amount of political influence Sonia Gandhi wielded in the years before 1997/8 also.

Writing good English is difficult. Which is why good writers are rare. Good writers in the sciences are even rarer. Which is why an Atul Gawande (read "Better" and "Complications" to know what I am talking about) is so admired. One reason Freakonomics was as big a blockbuster bestseller as it was had to do with its language. Sample this somewhat risque passage from the book:

"The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. ... As for demand? Let's just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice-versa."

In this book, however, you come across instances where you have to think - surely these gaffes could have been avoided. At times the text gets just stops flowing, and gets mired in the prepositional quicksands of grammar, like in the sentence below.

"... if you're not en route to where he needs to go to hand off to the next driver,"

Or you don't know if you are going or you need to 'comma'.

"She was in Cambridge not at the fabled university but taking English language classes at a private college."

Or when the literal collides with slang, and you're not quite sure what to make of the resulting, err, loaf of a sentence.

"What was once a bread basket has become a basket case."

In conclusion, I have to admit to at least a little bit of guilt when writing this review. It's not quite glowing. It's harsh. I am not paid to write reviews, good or bad, scathing or adulatory. I understand the effort it takes to put together a book, especially when it's not someone's full-time job. To then have someone, a blogger, a non-entity, rip it to pieces is harsh. This is one reason I spend more time on the negative reviews - to put forth my point of view that does not make it seem like an armchair pronouncement. In the final analysis, a review is a very subjective pronouncement on a book, biased by the reader's own views, knowledge, cognitive blindspots, and so many other factors.

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Kindle Excerpt:

 © 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Durbar, by Tavleen Singh

Durbar, by Tavleen Singh

"A Lucid First Draft of History"
   
(Amazon US, Amazon IN, Kindle, Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, my review on Amazon, Powell's)
This very readable book by Tavleen Singh provides a delectable mix of first-person accounts of some of the pivotal episodes in India's political and social history with just the right amount of seasoning and spice in the form of gossip and an insider's peek at the cloistered club that goes by the book's eponymous title, "Durbar".

The author's first-person account begins with the imposition of Emergency in India, and takes us through to 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. These seventeen odd years, from 1974 to 1991, saw India deprived of its Fundamental Rights, for the first time, a non-Congress government at the center, another first, dynastic succession firmly establish itself, the rise of the Hindu Right and the pandering to the Muslim bloc, two assassinations, multiple internal strifes - in Kashmir and Punjab most prominently, external problems, and more. The shadows cast by these events have been long and dark, and the author feels that the "possibility of an Indian renaissance ... recedes further and further away." (pg xii) This was not always the case. In the first couple of decades after Independence, "India was still a dilapidated, unsure sort of place but it had about it the innocence of a country that believed in its dream of democracy and freedom." [page 10]

In a book as short and as long as this one - some 300 pages long, there are bound to be omissions. I will leave those out, omissions on my part if you will, and focus on some of the highlights of this book. A "public school", or "convent" as it is often called in India, education did not turn the author into a "professional India". Rather, a chance encounter on a train with some young men trying to get fresh with some girls travelling with a young Tavleen Singh left a lifelong impression on her - "...it saddens me that I never learned Sanskrit. ..This language that is the key to India's civilization.. and her ancient texts was mocked in the little English world in which I grew up." It is a reflection of our unchanging attitudes that half a century of supposed independence has not dented these prejudices.

[Paragraph added Dec 9, 2012]
One of the more remarkable things about this book, and the fact that it will come as a surprise is in itself disappointing, is the author's travel experiences. Of traveling in stone-cold trains without a blanket, of having to sleep in mosquito and bat-infested rooms, of toilets that were too filthy to even sh*t in. Of editors who looked askance at reporters who wanted to travel out of Delhi - they were suspected of basically wanting to push off on a holiday. Of waiting for hours and hours on end, waiting for a story to break. Part of it was of course before the era of cell-phones, of the Internet, of 24x7 cable television, before the advent of social media, and before journalists who didn't like criticism could bludgeon critics into legal silence or get them banned using the might of the government. What is undeniable is that to build your cred as a journalist one had to get down and literally get one's feet dirty travelling the length and breadth of the country. If nothing else, what should come out in this book is the kind of work that needed to be put in to become a journalist who was taken seriously.

The book follows mostly a linear narrative, and the author's extensive first-person experiences form the backbone of the book - whether it was traveling to Kashmir before a rigged and thoroughly discredited election plunged the state into the darkness of insurgency and external-sponsored terrorism, or her fearlessness in Punjab during the 1980s. No, she did not parachute herself into the state, microphone in hand, videographer in tow, and a carefully selected phalanx of protesters to serve as a backdrop. No sir. She met Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, where she realized only later that "I had witnessed the Sant ordering an execution." - a Hindu police constable who had allegedly beaten up a Sikh was called out by name, and who turned up dead, shot, a few days later. After Operation Blue Star, the complete fustercluck of a military operation to clear the holy shrine of the Sikhs of terrorists barricaded there, the borders of the entire state of Punjab were ordered closed, and the city of Amritsar itself under curfew. She and Sandeep made it to Amritsar, carrying a letter from her father, Brigadier Amarjeet Singh, as the sabre to rattle soldiers into letting them pass through every road barricade they came across, and met up with General Brar (Lt Gen Kuldip Singh Brar, who commanded Operation Blue Star).
Some of the conversation she had went like this:

" "Is the temple badly damaged?"
"Yes. And what is sad is that it needn't have been if we had been allowed to spend a month using military intelligence to find out what was going on. We were forced to depend on those bastards in civilian intelligence and they couldn't even tells us how many entrances there were to the temple."
...
Had we known how many entrances there were we would never have gone in through the main entrance which was so heavily fortified. We lost more than a hundred men in the first few minutes."" [page 167-68]

Note that "more than a hundred men" were lost in the first few minutes. More than a thousand soldiers of the Indian Army were killed in that operation. That alone should have been cause for an inquiry and consequences, both bureaucratic and political. There were none. The reasons were all too clear.

"What I did find out soon enough was that the general view in Rajiv's circle of friends was that Operation Blue Star had been a resounding success and any criticism of it amounted to treason. It took me a while to discover that the reason for this hyper-sensitivity was that Rajiv and his friends had been personally involved in advising a military assault on the Golden Temple. Mrs Gandhis's 'south Indian advisors' had gone along with the plan, but from all accounts were not the ones who initiated it." [page 172]

There is considerable commentary, based on first-hand accounts, of the Emergency, of the riots at Turkman Gate, of the forced sterilization of the poor - in the name of population control, that allows us a glimpse into an India that was brutalized by an arrogant political dynasty and a pliant bureaucracy. More on that later, but after Emergency was lifted, elections announced, and political opponents freed (Rajmata Vijayraje Scindia for one had been imprisoned in a prison cell meant for prisoners on death row, and several other political prisoners lost their mental balance as a result of the solitary confinement they were subject to), a massive rally organized by the opposition political parties is worth recounting in some detail here.

While people today can listen to and watch practiced orators like Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, it is easy to forget, especially for people who have become politically conscious only in the last ten of fifteen years or so, that perhaps India's best orator was none other than Atal Behari Vajpayee. He may have become the butt of jokes on account of his prolonged pauses towards the end of his career, but I, for one, who has watched him on television in the 1990s cannot forget the mesmerizing spell he could cast over listeners. So the following excerpt should come as no surprise. It was the second week of January, 1977. Emergency had been lifted a few weeks back by Indira Gandhi and elections announced. Political leaders imprisoned by the Congress government had been freed, and a massive rally had been announced at the Ram Lila grounds in New Delhi. If you have not been to Delhi in the winters, the evenings and nights can get bitterly cold. Add to it rain, and yet, that night in 1977, the crowds waited. The last speaker was to be Atal Behari Vajpayee.

""It was past 9 p.m. and the night had got colder although the rain had stopped." ... [A colleague from the Hindustan Times remarked,] "nobody will leave until Atalji speaks."...
"Why?"
"Because he is the best orator in India. Have you never heard him speak?"
"No. I've only been in journalism since he went to jail."
"Well, you're in for a treat. And to hear him for the first time today will really be something." [pg 60]
...
He acknowledged the slogans with hands joined in a namaste and a faint smile. Then, raising both arms to silence the crowd and closing his eyes in the manner of a practiced orator, he said, "baad muddat ke mile hain deewane." (बाद मुददत के मिले हैं दीवाने )... He paused. The crowd went wild.
When the applause died he closed his eyes again and allowed himself another long pause before saying, "Kehne sunne ko bahut hain afsane."(कहने सुनने को बहुत हैं अफ़साने ) ... The cheering was more prolonged, and when it stopped he paused again with his eyes closed before delivering the last line of a verse that he told me later he had composed on the spur of the moment. "Khuli hawa mein zara saans to le lain, kab tak rahegi aazadi kaun jaane." (ख़ुली हवा में सांस तो ले लें, कब तक रहेगी आज़ादी कौन जाने )
The crowd was now hysterical." [page 60]

He then went on to deliver a speech decrying the excesses of emergency, especially the bundling of the poor like cattle into trucks, taken away to be forcibly sterilized.

"The clapping this remark evoked went on and on and on and it would be only on election day that I would understand why." [pg 61]

The author drops a tantalizing hint that Atal Behari Vajpayee could have become prime minister instead of the rather spartan and strict Morarji Desai. Perhaps India's destiny would have been different, perhaps for the better. As we know, things turned out different. Incidentally, it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who had admonished Rajiv Gandhi on his incredibly insensitive and appalling statement on the earth shaking when a tree falls, who said that "it is when the earth shakes that trees fall."

And incidentally, when people launch into a harangue on the Yamuna River and its filth, remember that massive numbers of people living in slums in Delhi - lakhs - were forcibly evicted from their homes and forced to live in even more squalid conditions by the Yamuna. Lakhs of these people added to the pollution of the Yamuna. Sanjay Gandhi truly believed in removing the poor and signs of poverty, not really removing poverty. Nameless, faceless, clueless bureaucrats took over the design and planning of Indian cities.

The book is no endless commentary on the political intrigues and escapades of the political class. For instance, the author managed to get permission and time to do an interview of the then Hindi cinema superstar (heck, he is even today, thirty-five years later, the reigning superstar of Hindi cinema).

"By the time he dropped me home at 4 a.m. we had become friends. As for me, I had fallen in love." [pg 108]

Then there is her travel to the Kumbh Mela and the truly heartbreaking sight of seeing little girls at the lost-and-found camp, where she learns that these girls had been deliberately "lost" by parents who did not want girls. Or an even more heartbreaking travel to the drought-stricken district of Kalahandi in Orissa, where entire villages had been wiped out, with people dying a slow death, watching their children dying an even more painful death, distended bellies, vacant eyes, and the existence of a drought being denied by a heartless Chief Minister and a clueless Prime Minister.

But what about Sonia? After all, a disproportionate number of readers are going to pick the book up in the hopes of finding juicy tidbits of gossip on the Empress of India, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Even some of the book's excerpts published on news portals have tended to fixate on those pieces that talk about Sonia Gandhi. Well, the book does have its share of anecdotes about Sonia Gandhi, but Sonia Gandhi is not the object of this book, yet these glimpses provide us with sufficient material to form some sort of an opinion about the politician who would shape India's destiny for a decade, or more. There is also subtext that is there, and words not written that need to be read, between the lines. The author came to become friends with Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, a friendship that did not last more than a decade. The words, or at least some of the words, used are deliberate, and will leave the reader in no doubt that Tavleen Singh is most certainly not a member of the "durbar". Tavleen Singh first noticed Sonia Gandhi, at Mapu's house. Mapu was Arun Singh's brother, and the party had Romi Chopra and Naveen Patnaik, among others. "She was small and slim, with a prominent, sulky mouth and thick brown hair that hung loose down to her waist." [page 20]

The friendship between the author and Sonia Gandhi, that lasted for about a decade, did see moments of closeness and tenderness, in which Sonia Gandhi went out of her way to arrange an interview with Rajiv Gandhi, to help a desperate Tavleen Singh keep her job. The interview made her boss, M.J. Akbar, even more irritated with the author, for reasons that become all too clear later. Sonia Gandhi would often provide the author with Rahul Gandhi's clothes, or clothes gifted to Rahul, for her son, Aatish Taseer - a close and personal friendship. The friendship frayed beyond repair after Tavleen Singh worked on a profile on Sonia Gandhi, after Rajiv Gandhi had become Prime Minister, that was published in India Today, and which though "balanced", did ask some questions about Sonia Gandhi's influence on Rajiv Gandhi and the fact that she controlled access to Rajiv Gandhi and his coterie. This relationship did not revive even after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, an event that saw no other politician lose his or her life - much is said and still left unsaid by the author here.

"Sonia, her daughter and other ladies of the family sat in white saris on the floor. Sonia's dark brown hair was tied back and covered with her cotton sari and her face was carefully made up. Even the lower eyelashes she painted on to make her eyes look bigger were in place. I reached out and held her hand, but she pretended to greet someone else. When our eyes met, she looked at me as if I were a total stranger." [pg 7 - after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination]

And let us not forget that the author makes it clear just how the cozy and close the relationship was between Sonia Gandhi and the infamous Ottavio Quattrochi:

"Then there were the foreign friends with whom Sonia seemed most comfortable and relaxed. Ottavio and Maria Quattrochi were the ones who were nearly always invited where Rajiv and Sonia went. ... Sonia's parents stayed with them when they came to Delhi." [page 23]

The author does not explain, or attempt to explain, how Sonia Gandhi's absolute contempt for politics could be reconciled with her late decision to not only enter politics herself, but also push her son and her daughter into politics.

"I would rather my children begged in the streets than went into politics." - Sonia Gandhi. [page 102]

Perhaps the most scathing pieces in the book are reserved for those who form part of this incestuous clique of power-brokers, the power-wielders, and the plain power-hungry. This power circle resides in Delhi, and operates out of Delhi.

"It is my conviction that the dynasty's real power comes from the support they get from the bureaucracy in Delhi. High officials in India are famous for the disdain with which they treat the representatives of the people but put almost any of them in the presence of a member of the Gandhi family and they behave like humble employees. ... If they ever make it to the inner circles of the court around the family, their obsequiousness knows no bounds... ... but on the edge of their courts have always lurked senior bureaucrats dripping with servility they rarely show anyone else. The most sycophantic are those who went to Oxford and Cambridge and who appear to have developed from this British experience a genetic memory of serving colonial masters." [page 97]

Just how servile the Delhi bureaucracy could get is best described in the behavior of a senior bureaucrat that she leaves unnamed, and who "... lived in a particularly beautiful colonial bungalow on Aurangzeb Road" and who, at a party, came up to Akbar Ahmed (and Tavleen Singh) "with an obsequious smile on his face, and bowed deeply before Akbar, who looked embarrassed and unsure of how to react." [page 97]

Perhaps the only thing that has changed in the thirty intervening years, for the worse, is that the media has got itself entwined, comfortably and willingly so, with this durbar.

This book is also a compilation of the ineptness, cluelessness, and painful missteps of Rajiv Gandhi. Whether it was Kashmir, or Punjab, or Sri Lanka, or Nepal, or the famine in Kalahandi, or the scandal of the Bofors deal, or even foisting on the nation remarkably irritable characters like Mani Shankar Aiyar - the gentleman who went to Pakistan and referred to Hafiz Saeed as "Hafiz saab" in a TV interview. "Hafiz Saab", of course, being the gentlemanly terrorist mastermind behind the Mumbai terrorists attack of November 26, 2010 - or the pandering to the Muslim fundamentalists in the Shah Bano case and then the banning of Salman Rushdie's book, "The Satanic Verses", or the equally disastrous attempt at balancing one bad act with another inexplicable act of idiocy - this time by allowing the gates of the locked temple at Ayodhya to be opened. If there are lamentations on the rise of the so-called "Hindutva" right, its path begins from these actions of Rajiv Gandhi.

And what about the conspiracies? The unsaid conspiracies? You won't find much by way of conspiracy theories being bandied around in this book. So, I took it upon myself to dig, and to read between the lines, and to see gossamer threads of conspiracies and spin from them an entire fabric of paranoia. When Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in 1981, his friend Madhavrao Scindia survived. "The first thing I heard, from either Vasundhra or Madhavrao himself, was that the only reason the young Maharaja of Gwalior had not been on the plane with Sanjay was that he was late that morning." [page 126] Why was Madhavrao late? Who was he meeting that he got delayed? Was the delay arranged by someone? And it is a remarkable coincidence, or probability, or otherwise, that the titular Maharaja of Gwalior would die in a plane crash, some thirty years later. Another tidbit is no more than a passing mention that after Indira Gandhi had been shot, Sonia Gandhi took her mother-in-law in her own Ambassador car to the hospital. Not in the designated ambulance, because the driver had gone off for a cup of tea. After Indira Gandhi's assassination, the author was interviewed, no - questioned is the more appropriate word here - by some bureaucrat from the Intelligence Bureau(?) The author stepped outside her office, only to run into Sonia Gandhi, in her white ambassador.

This book is fast-paced, lucidly narrated, and well-organized chapters. It provides a fascinating glimpse into what was undoubtedly a pivotal period in Independent India's history. It is a most laudable first draft of history.

And a special mention of the publisher, Hachette (@HachetteIndia). Call it sloppiness, call it cost-cutting, call it anything for that matter - it doesn't really matter - but for some reason, they think non-fiction books without indexes are the way to go. They did this with Shishir Gupta's "Indian Mujahideen" - an email requesting an online or PDF version of an index from them has been unanswered for over a year now, and no - I am no longer holding my breath for either a response or an index, and they have done the same with this book.

Let me say that out loud - THIS BOOK, PUBLISHED BY HACHETTE INDIA, HAS NO INDEX.

So, for example, if I were to ask you if Bal Thackeray finds a mention in the book, would you know the answer? And if I were to tell you the answer is "yes", would you which page? And if I told you, it's on page 142, would you know in what context? It is in a statement made by Sant Bhindranwale. Or how many times? Once. Or if I were to ask you if Barkha Dutt (of the Nira Radia 2010 scandal, where she was caught on tape in conversation(s) with Nira Radia, a corporate lobbyist, to allegedly fix cabinet ministerial berths in the UPA government), finds a mention in the book, the answer would be yes. Of course, without an index, you have to take my word for it, or read the book. Producing an index takes time, effort, and therefore money, not to mention a commitment to certain publishing standards.

Kindle Excerpt:

http://tavleensingh.com/
http://hachetteindia.com/TitleDetails.aspx?titleId=32060
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavleen_Singh

Classification : Biography & Memoir
Pub Date : Nov 15, 2012
Imprint : Hachette India
Page Extent : 324
Binding : HB
ISBN : 9789350094440
Price : 599

Political and Incorrect

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, by Evgeny Morozov

"Intellectual Recycling and Internet-Centrism, a tale of Cyber-Utopia Gone Really Wrong"
(Amazon IN, Kindle IN, Kindle, Paperback, Amazon UK, Powell's, Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, my review on Amazon)

"The Net Delusion" by Evegny Morozov dunks a much needed, well-reasoned, and well-researched bucket of cold-water over "Internet-centrists" and "cyber-utopians" (cyber-utopianism is a "naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication"), and assembles together an excellent though somewhat depressing array of evidence to dismantle this edifice of technology-centrists.

The Parliamentary System-Arun Shourie-Review

The Parliamentary System
By Arun Shourie
cover image: Rupa & Co

The Parliamentary System, by Arun Shourie

Elected But Not Representative. 1975 and 2011. A Tale of Two Years.
Arun Shourie's twenty-first book, published in 2007, is even more relevant today than it was when first published. Current events have made this a must-read for every concerned citizen.
This book is divided into three sections. Each is related to the other, but also distinct in what it covers.

Let's look at the first section. Are our elected parliamentarians really the voice of our people? If you look at the table on page 29, a most distressing sight awaits you. "99 percent of the members got into the Lok Sabha by getting less than half the electors to vote for them. Almost 60 percent got in with the endorsement of less than 30 per cent of electors in their constituencies. ... Even if we consider only the electors who actually turned out to vote, 60 per cent of the members got in on a minority vote." This means that nearly two-thirds of our Parliamentarians have won from their respective constituencies despite having less than half the people who voted vote for them! If you look at the entire eligible electorate, the number is a staggering 99%! In essence, there are less than six MPs in the Lok Sabha that have won by polling more than half the votes of the entire electorate in their constituencies! When our parliamentarians talk about speaking for the people, it is manifestly not the case. Forget the nation, they cannot even claim to speak for the eligible electorate. They speak for a minority, a tiny one at times. One can always blame voter apathy for the low turnouts, but to cast blame wholly on low turnout is to turn a blind eye to the larger issues at play.

A problem that has emerged in the last twenty years or so in Indian democracy is the rise of marginal, regional parties that have exerted a disproportionate influence at the national level. The problem with the Congress party, that has been in power in all but thirteen of the sixty-five years following India's Independence in 1947 (1947-77, 1980-89, 1991-96, 2004-present), has been the utter ruthlessness with which it crushed and compromised democratic institutions and put in a place a system of cronyism that grows more pernicious by the day - more on that later in this review. The problem with the decline of the two major national parties, the Congress and the BJP, as evidenced in their declining share of seats and votes at the national level, has been that either party has to rely on the support of regional, minor parties, to reach the majority mark in the Lok Sabha. These smaller parties in turn have used their peculiar position of influence and opportunity to loot the nation with impunity, and to often hold critical economic and social reforms hostage to their own agendas.

Take the General Elections to the Lok Sabha. In 1999 the Congress Party polled 28.3% of the votes, winning 114 seats. In 2004 it polled 26.7% of the votes - less than in 1999, yet it won 145 seats. Being a national party it is reasonable to assume that it would have contested in approximately the same number of seats in both elections, so the decline in percentage of votes polled cannot be attributed to a decline in the number of seats it would have contested. The BJP fared no better, or worse. In 1999, it polled 23.6% of the votes, netting it 182 seats. In 2004 it polled 22.2% of the votes, yet its tally of seats fell to 138.

The situation is no better even at the state level, where one would assume that regional parties would dominate. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, in 59 seats in the state of Uttar Pradesh, not a single candidate polled more than 20% of the votes of the total electorate. Some polled as low as 11, 12, 13, and 14 percent of the electorate votes. Considering that only about 60% of the population is eligible to vote, these candidates had the votes of less 6-7% of the total population in their respective constituencies. For them to speak as though representing the will of the entire people is ludicrous.

Even if we look at the state level, like the 2004 Andhra Pradesh Assembly elections for its 294 members for instance, the Telugu Desam Party polled 37.6 per cent of the votes, and won 47 seats. The Congress party polled 38.6 per cent of the votes, and won 185 seats! A mere one per cent difference in votes polled resulted in an almost four times the number of seats won!! Most observers have credited the Congress victory to astute calculations in the way their party nominees were decided on the basis of caste and religion, and not on intrinsic merit or track record of achievements. The results have been incontrovertibly successful.

"Nor is the pandering confined to caste groups and religious groups. The number of traders who would have to pay more if Delhi's Rent Control Law is modernized must be a minuscule portion of Delhi's electorate. Yet, they have been able to bend the entire political class to prevent for a decade the Act which has been passed from being notified!" [pg 59]

"Never is the political class as unanimous as it is when doing the wrong thing." [pg 59]

The consequences can be dire for the country. Arun Shourie quotes from Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" (Kindle edition) to this end - "Mancur Olson distinguished between a stationary and a roving bandit." He observes what happens when politicians who have little mass following, little appeal among the electorate beyond the narrow confines of one or two districts, and who are certainly not in the noble field of politics for the betterment of the people.

"... the ones who form the smaller groups can loot the most and with the greatest impunity, as predation by their members will affect the total the least! Those who are most incompetent, who are most unpopular, will also loot with abandon as in their own eyes they are least likely to return. And so will the ones who are most secure, the ones whose return is not affected their loot - recall the number of ministers and their controllers who are returned by their caste-followers irrespective of their performance, and think of what they do in office." [pg 23]

He provides the examples of the Akali Dal in Punjab, the DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, the Janata Dal in Karnataka, and other parties that have little to no influence or votes beyond their respective states, yet exercise inordinate control over proceedings at the national level. The problem is not unique to the Congress. The BJP has had to face the same pulls and pressures from smaller parties with which it had to ally to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha in 1998 and 1999.

"Political leaders are most reluctant to take any step that might cause offence to the lower bureaucracy, the police, primary school teachers, for instance, as these groups can have a devastating effect at the time of elections." [pg 60]

"I remember Arif Mohammed Khan describing to me the Cabinet meeting at which V.P. Singh's Government lunged for the Mandal Commission's ruinous proposals. He recalled one Minister telling V.P. Singh, 'Sir ise laagoo kar dijeeye, bees saal ke liye koi hamen sarkar se hila nahin sakegaa.'" [pg 60]

Interesting point that "The true center, that is the left wing of the right combined with the right wing of the left, is never mobilized at all.Yet this central body of opinion probably corresponds best to the wishes of the electorate as a whole." [pg 67]

Arun Shourie has several prescriptions that could address this critical problem - that of a lack of true representativeness of our parliamentarians, and that of the narrow, sectarian base that they exploit to come to and retain power. A lottery system, multiple preferences for voters, a negative vote, barring a person from contesting elections against whom a court of law frames charges, de-recognizing a party that fields candidates with criminal antecedents, and so on. Each has its merits, and each has its demerits. The biggest stumbling block is that to get these reforms debated and passed would require the cooperation of the very same politicians whose power and influence would be undercut by the legislation!

To cover the second section of the book, let's go back in time.

To 1975. But before we do that, let us also establish a frame of reference from the current, so that what we talk about what happened in 1975 can be put in proper perspective. In 2011 the country was rocked by nationwide protests - all peaceful, where millions of middle-class Indians, typically pilloried as the most apathetic among all voting classes in the country, took to the streets in support of Gandhian Anna Hazare's call and to protest the rampant corruption and scandals that had rocked the country and the establishment of a strong and independent Lokpal (legal ombudsman) authority. During debates and arguments that ensued in the print and television media, several politicians, mostly from the ruling UPA alliance and the Congress party, made the argument that Parliament was supreme. Parliamentarians were therefore supreme. To pressurize Parliamentarians into passing a law to curb corruption was therefore tantamount to challenging the supremacy of Parliament. Citizens could request, they could petition, they could plead, but they could not demand. The voice of the citizenry should cease, in a manner of speaking, to be vocal after it had cast its  ballot. To oppose Parliament, and its elected representatives, was to oppose the country and democracy itself.

Therefore, let us go back in time, to 1975.

On 12 June 1975, Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court held Mrs. Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, guilty of corrupt electoral practices on two counts. The Supreme Court granted her a conditional stay on 24 June 1975, permitting her to continue as Prime Minister. The appeal was to be heard on 11 August 1975.
"On 4 August 1975, members of the Lok Sabha suddenly received 'Election Laws (Amendment Bill)'." The bill was specifically worded to save Mrs. Indira Gandhi from the High Court's judgment.  "... to nullify the ground in Justice Sinha's judgment." Furthermore, Parliament "was asked to legislate that these 'clarifications' shall apply with retrospective effect in regard to any election that has been held before the commencement of the Act." [pg 117]
Furthermore, these 'clarifications' were put out of reach of the courts altogether by putting them into the IXth Schedule.

"Hence, from now on, even after a person has been pronounced guilty, the matter will go to the President. he shall decide whether the infraction is grave enough to merit disqualification."

A lone voice of dissent arose from Mohan Dharia, who, despite being shouted down by fellow Parliamentarians, gave voice to his concerns:

"... there is no doubt in my mind that the Bill in the amended form has been brought forward ... to circumvent the issues which have been held by the High Court in favour of the petitioner and against the Prime Minister.
You cannot cow me down that way. So, my submission to the House is that this Bill is nothing but surrender of parliamentary democracy to the coming dictatorship and therefore I oppose this Bill vehemently."

Mohan Dharia's protests were dismissed as "completely irrelevant and besides the point" by Gokhale. "Parliament is supreme," said communist leader Indrajit Gupta.

These chilling words were spoken by Gokhale, words that were to find echo almost forty years later (emphasis mine).

"I agree that we might have to have an overall look, may be, even at the Constitution itself, to see that no future situations arise where the final word of Parliament itself is challenged." [pg 121]

A cynic may argue that the failure of the Congress Party to act out its noble intentions in 1975 are what led to the needless disparaging of Parliamentarians in 2011!

The debate that followed in Parliament has to be read to be believed. The faces may change. The style of the language may change. The content does not. The servility does not. The demand for complete subservience from the ultimate One does not diminish. The craven desire from the sycophants to outdo each other in their show of truckling to the One does not change. Each Congress parliamentarian was louder than the other in proclaiming his support for the Bill, and each more vituperative in voicing their contempt for the judiciary.

"It is a joke that the Prime Minister of a country was sought to be removed from office and debarred from contesting an election because of what a single judge said in one of the High Courts of the country and simply because he has held her guilty of corrupt practices under an Act which was passed 22 years ago? Are we to accept that position?
...
To my mind it is a ridiculous machinery under which they are subjected to judicial scrutiny while they are elected by a vast majority of the people and electoral colleges..." [H.R Gokhale, Law Minister, Rajya Sabha, 6 August 1975]

Lest some members from the left of the political spectrum claim that they have always been in favor of a democracy and the supremacy of the law of the land, here is something to consider, from the mouth of Indrajit Gupta, esteemed leader of the Communist Party of India:

"In many other matters, the jurisdiction of the court should be taken away ... We cannot leave it to the vagaries, prejudices, biases, the learning and knowledge of these judges, or for that matter, the collective body of judges." [Indrajit Gupta, CPI Leader, Rajya Sabha, 6 August 1975]

The speeches that were made in the august house of Parliament, by the even more august members of Parliament, when debating this Constitution Amendment bill, should be prescribed readings for every student of Civics.
"Speakers were soaring higher and higher, both in proclaiming sovereignty of the people, as well as in demonstrating loyalty to the highest symbol of those people, the emodiment of sovereignty, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. The next speaker outdid them, doubly so."

'kya constitutional framers to yeh pata tha ki aises ghatiya aur kamine judge bhi is desh mein ho sakte hain?' (क्या constitutional framers को यह पता था कि  ऐसे घटीया और कमीने judge भी इस देश में हो सकते हैं?)
...
'In fact, I am of the opinion that this judge could be an agent of the CIA or he is mad. Either his place is in America or in the lunatic asylum in Agra.'
"

Such fecundity, clarity of thought, and preciseness of delivery has rarely been seen or heard in Parliament. Arun Shourie, regrettably, omits the name of the distinguished parliamentarian.

Swaran Singh, a mild mannered person, was equally mild-mannered in his prose.

" 'If the Constitution stands in the way, or anybody stands in the way that person would be wiped out, that institution would be wiped out, but the things must change.' " [Pg 157. Parliament, 26 October 1975]

No one should accuse our parliamentarians, or at least those belonging to a certain party, of not being capable of acting with alacrity. Should the occasion, and more importantly, the need, arise, they are not averse to moving with a speed that can only be called 'greased lightning', to use a hackneyed phrase.

"Mrs. Gandhi's appeal was to be heard by the Supreme Court on 11 August 1975. The "Government rushed the 39th Amendment to the Lok Sabha. This sweeping Amendment was passed within two hours. The very next day, it was rushed to, and passed by that other limb of sovereignty, the Rajya Sabha, The next day was Saturday. No problem. State legislatures were summoned for emergency sessions. They endorsed the amendment! On 10th August 1975, the President gave his assent. So, literally a day before the hearing was to begin, not just the law on the basis of which the Supreme Court was to judge the appeal was changed, the Constitution itself was changed ruling the Supreme Court to be completely out of court!" [pgs 126, 127]

Among the surfeit of Constitution Amendment Bills that were brought to Parliament, the common refrain was the same (emphasis mine, on top of the Congress Party's emphasis)

".. we are reasserting with all emphasis that the Parliament is supreme and there are no limitations on Parliament in respect of the amendments of the Constitution." [pg 152]

Not to be left behind was the "ever-law-abiding A.R. Antulay" - "Why should there be the power for the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution? why should they have the power of judicial review even of ordinary legislation." [pg 167]

The icing on the cake to this charade was provided by the Supreme Leader, the Chosen One, Mrs. Indira Gandhi herself. Note her words carefully, and compare them with the words used by Congress Parliamentarians and several in the media when complaining about the audacity of the common man to question its elected representatives.

"To non-cooperate with Parliament is to non-cooperate with the people." [pg 158]

The justices of the Supreme Court of India, who heard the appeal against these Constitution Amendments, were however made of sterner stuff.
Justices K.S. Hegde and A.K. Mukherjea pointed out, "... one cannot legally use the Constitution to destroy itself." [pg 181]

" 'Two-thirds of the Houses of Parliament need not necessarily represent the even the majority of the people of this country. Our electoral system is such that even a minority of voters can elect more than two-thirds of the members of the either House of Parliament.
...
Therefore the contention on behalf of the Union and the states that the two-thirds of the members of the two Houses of Parliament are always authorized to speak on behalf of the entire people of the country is unacceptable.' " [pgs 181, 182]
" were ... the President to sign his approval of these amendments, he would be violating the oath he took upon entering office, the judges reminded all concerned. For when he enters office, the President takes the oath to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.' 'Does the oath to merely mean that he is to defend the amending powers of Parliament?' the Judges asked. [pg 182]

The betrayal to democracy of the Congress Party and the Parliament of 1975 that went along with the subversion of democracy and the shameful attempts at emasculating the Indian Constitution represented little more than depriving India and Indians of their independence, less than thirty years after she had gained it from the British.
Dr. Ambedkar's words, as he delivered this closing speech as the Constituent Assembly met for its last session, are worth reproducing from the book in some detail here (bold emphasis added).

"The point is that she once lost the independence she had. Will she lost it a second time? ... What pertubs me greatly is the fact that not only India has once before lost her independence, but she lost it by the infidelity and treachery of some of her own people. In the invasion of Sindh by Mohammed-Bin-Kasim, the military commaders of King Dahar accepted bribes from the agents of Mohammed-Bin-Kasim and refused to fight on the side of their king. It was Jaichand who invited Mohommed Gohri to invade India and fight against Prithvi Raj and promised him the help of himself and the Solanki kings. When Shivaji was fighting for the liberation of Hindus, the other Maratha noblemen and the Rajput Kings were fighting the battle on the side of Moghul Emperors. When the British were trying to destroy the Sikh Rulers, Gulab Singh, their principal commander sat silent and did not help to save the Sikh kingdom. In 1857, when a large part of India had declared a war of independence against the British, the Sikhs stood and watched the events as silent spectators." [pgs 70-71]
['Constituent Assembly of India Debates', 35 November, 1949, Book VI, Volume X, og 977-78]

It could be argued, by a a miscreant of a mischievous bent of mind of course, that in the last few decades, the only President to have truly upheld the dignity of the post of President would have to be Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. But we won't say that. Nor would it be appropriate to claim that Mrs Pratibha Patil has been more loyal to the party than to the post of President. These claims would simply not hold up to the close scrutiny of the loyals.

Even the Supreme Court has been manned by judges who have questioned the validity of the argument that the Indian Constitution has a "basic structure" that cannot be tampered with. "... there has been a continuous stream of judges, all of them happen to have been hailed as progressives, who have scoffed at the very notion that the Constitution has a Basic Structure which cannot be violated." [pg 201]

This is third part of the book, and I am not going to cover that in this review, long enough as this review has become. Perhaps in the future.

Book Details:
Hardcover: 265 pages
Publisher: Rupa (February 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 8129111926
ISBN-13: 978-8129111920

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Eminent Historians - Their technology, Their Line, Their Fraud
Only Fatherland

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© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.