SACW | Oct. 28-29, 2007 | After the Tehelka Sting on Gujarat 2002 / Dow Chemical / S. Subrahmanyam on Naipaul

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | October 28-29, 2007 | 
Dispatch No. 2465 - Year 10 running

[1] India: Following the Tehelka's sting 
operation on the perpetrators of Gujarat 
Massacres of 2002
   (i) Citizens Petition the President, Chief 
Justice, Election Commission and Prime Minister
   (ii) Moving from Moditva to Sanity: The stakes in Gujarat (Praful Bidwai)
  (iii) On Tehelka's Gujarat Sting (Mukul Dube)
  (iv) Can we resist fascism with indignation alone? (Jawed Naqvi)
[2] India and Dow Chemical in Bhopal: Dirty business (Darryl D'Monte)
[3] Book Review:  Where Does He Come From? (Sanjay Subrahmanyam)

______


[1]  INDIA: FOLLOWING THE TEHELKA'S STING 
OPERATION ON THE PERPETRATORS OF GUJARAT 
MASSACRES OF 2002

(i)

PETITION TO

- The President of India

- The Chief Justice Supreme Court

- The Election Commission

- The Prime Minister of India

October 29, 2007

It has been proved beyond doubt by the Tehelka 
investigations into the 2002 massacre of Muslims 
in Gujarat that Narendra Modi, the then Home 
Minister Gordhan Zadaphia, the then Ahmedabad 
Police chief P. C. Pandey actively colluded in 
killing Muslims and planning their mass murder 
and destruction of the property . The Chief 
Minister, Home Minister and their whole 
administration not only planned, provoked and 
encouraged the massacre of Muslims and 
destruction of their property but also ensured 
that mass murderers and rapists got a safe hiding.

Active subversion of the fundamental principles 
of secular governance is a continuous and running 
theme in the Gujarat governance as has been 
comprehensively demonstrated on camera that all 
the arms of the state of Gujarat willingly 
abdicated their constitutional responsibility to 
safeguard the life, liberty, dignity and property 
of the citizens even after the killings, rapes, 
loot and destruction subsided. What is even more 
reprehensible is that the whole system of 
Judiciary stands exposed as it has been claimed 
by the government counsels that the judges at 
different levels were actively subverting the 
course of justice.

The Tehelka tapes present incontestable evidence 
of the involvement of state machinery in the 2002 
Gujarat pogrom. It captures several confessions 
including that of

* The state prosecutor Arvind Pandya who stated 
that the "mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat 
should be celebrated every year as a victory day" 
and that "Every judge was calling me in his 
chamber and showing full sympathy for meŠ giving 
full cooperation to me, but keeping some 
distanceŠ the judges were also guiding me as and 
when requiredŠ how to put up a case and on which 
dateŠ because basically they are Hindus".

* Maza aata hai na, saheb [I enjoy it]Š I came 
back after I killed them, called up the home 
minister and went to sleepŠ Babu Bajrangi

* Another confession came from Babu Bajrangi who 
stated that "to get me out of jail, [Chief 
Minister] Narendra Modi changed judges thrice".

* Yet another MLA acknowledged that Modi gave him 
"three days to do whatever violence they wanted".

We the undersigned endorse the above statement 
are calling upon the The President of India, The 
Chief Justice Supreme Court, The Election 
Commission and The Prime Minister of India:

1. The immediate dismissal of the Narendra Modi 
administration and imposition of President's rule 
in Gujarat.

2. Cancellation of the present election dates as 
elections cannot be held in Gujarat in the 
present circumstances.

3. Requesting the Election Commission to ask the 
Supreme Court to constitute a CBI brobe under a 
supreme court judge and if there is prima facie 
case then BJP should be barred as a political 
party.

4. Govt of India should sign the Genocide 
convention and Modi needs to be tried by a 
tribunal

5. The immediate arrest of the all criminals who 
have confessed their crimes in the Tehelka tapes.

6. RSS, VHP , Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena be 
declared unlawful organizations and a high level 
enquiry under the aegis of the Supreme Court of 
India be set to uncover the designs of these 
organizations whose top leaders have proudly 
claimed on camera that they were involved in 
rapes, looting, making of bombs, rockets .

7. Re-investigate Nanded bomb blast case and 
following bomb blast cases where activists have 
pointed out the involvement of the RSS. Now there 
is clear evidence on tape that the Sangh is 
involved in large scale Bomb making exercise and 
killing innocent people.

It is a test case for the Indian state and if the 
Supreme Court and the Central Government fail to 
act they would sow a seed of destruction of 
secular polity.

Abha Bhaiya
Aditi Mangaldas
Ali Asghar
Amit Ashar
Amit R. Baishya,
Amit Sengupta-
Amrit Gangar, Mumbai
Anahita Sarabhai
Anand Patwardhan
Anil Mehta
Anil Nauriya
Anjali Monteiro,
Anupa Mehta
Apoorvanand
Arun Kumar Bidani
Arundhati Dhuru
Arunesh Maiyar
Asad Zaidi
Nalini Taneja
Ashok Chatterjee
Ashok Gupta
Ashok Vajpeyi
Astad Deboo
Betu Singh
Bipin Shah
C Vanaja
Chandra Shekhar Sinha
Chitra Sundaram
Daya Ram
Debal Das Gupta
Dhananjay Tingal
Dinesh Abrol
Dinesh Abrol
Dr. Angana Chatterji
Dr. Anwar Alam
Dr. Shaik Ubaid
Dr. Upendra Baxi
Feroze Mithiborwala
Former President
Fr Cedric Prakash
Francis Parmar
Gagan Sethi
Ghanshyam Shah
Gulamrasul Mansuri
Gulamrasul Mansuri
Habeeb Ahmed
Hannah Jayapriya
Henri Trifange
Himanshu Joshi
Himanshu Joshi
I.K.Shukla Writer
Imrana Qadeer
Iqbal Kumar
Irfan Engineer
Ishan loya
Jamal Kidwai
Javed Ameer
javed malick
Jaya Mehta
Jaya Prakash Telangana
Jayasankar K. P
Jyoti Puri, Director
Kaleem Kawaja
Kalyani Menon - Sen
Kamini Jaiswal
Kamla Bhasin
Kanchan Chander
Kannan Srinivasan
Kashif-ul-Huda, Editor,
Kingshuk Nag
Kiran Kamal Prasad
KSS Nair
Leena Abraham
M.H. Jawahirullah
Mallika Sarabhai
Nandini Manjrekar
Mamta Dalal Mangaldas
Maya Herzberger
Maya Shanker
Mira Kamdar
Miriam Chandy Menacherry
Mohamed Ashok
Mohammad Imran Ringwood , NJ, USA
Monica Mody
Morag Deyes
Mukul Dube
Nandita Das
Narinder Kapur
Nasreen Rustomfram
neeraj malick
Nilanjana Biswas
Nirveek Bhattacharjee,
Padma Velaskar,
Pooja Sood
Pradeep Esteves
Pradeep Esteves
Prashant Bhushan
Premola Ghose
RA Ravishankar,
Radhika Subramaniam
Raja Swamy,
Rakesh Sharma,
rakeysh omprakash mehra Sukriti Syal
Rakhi Sehgal,
Raksha Bhadaria
Ram Puniyani
Ranjana Padhi
Rathikant Basu
Ravi Shukla
Ritambhara Shastri
Ruchika
S. M. Shahed
Sahir Raza
Sameer Uppadhaya
Sandeep Pandey
Sanjoy Roy
Sejal Dand
Shabnam Hashmi
Shahjahan
Sharon Lowen
Shohini Ghosh,
Siddharth Dube
Smitu Kothari
Sohail Hashmi
Stalin K
Sujata Madhok
Sukriti Syal
Sumita Hazarika
Swaminathan Kalidas Ayyer
Uma Asher,
Uma Chakravarty
Veena Pani Chawla
Venkitesh Ramakrishnan
Vijay Parmar
Vijay Prakash Jani
Vineet Tiwari
Vipul Sangoi
Vrushali Pendharkar
Xavier Manjooran
Yadavan Chandran
Zafar Iqbal

o o o

(ii)

Kashmir Times
October 29, 2007

MOVING FROM MODITVA TO SANITY: THE STAKES IN GUJARAT

by Praful Bidwai

When Mr Narendra Modi walked out of an interview 
with the CNN-IBN television channel last week 
after being questioned about the Gujarat communal 
carnage of 2002, he probably didn't realise he 
was inflicting grave damage upon his image. The 
impact of the walkout, which showed Mr Modi as 
confused, shaky, arrogant and unreasonable, has 
since been magnified several-fold by Tehelka's 
exposure of the gruesome violence planned and 
encouraged by the Modi regime, whose barbarity 
has shocked the nation.
"The two episodes have dented Mr Modi's contrived 
image as a swashbuckling, super-confident leader 
who can ride out any adversity," says 
Ahmedabad-based activist-analyst Mukul Sinha. 
"The man is nothing. His larger-than-life image 
is everything. But he can longer maintain it. He 
comes across as a criminally minded, viciously 
communal leader."
As he readies himself for electoral battle in 
December, Mr Modi is likely to find that his 
deflated image extracts a high political price. 
Five years after his Bharatiya Janata Party won 
70 percent of all seats in the Assembly despite 
(or is it because of?) the communal violence of 
February/March 2002, it appears much more 
vulnerable than at any time during its 12 
continuous years in power in Gujarat. The 
vote-share gap between it and the Congress 
narrowed from 10 percentage-points to barely 3 
between 2002 and 2004, and may now get reversed.
Gujarat's Assembly elections are likely to be a 
national turning-point. If the BJP wins them 
under Mr Modi's stewardship, the result will 
greatly influence leadership succession within 
the party and strengthen its hard- Hindutva 
elements. More vitally, in conjunction with the 
Assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh-also due in 
December, in which the BJP is widely expected to 
displace the Congress-it'll prove a major 
morale-booster and help the party stem its losses 
in the next Lok Sabha elections. (A recent poll 
by NDTV-GfK-Mode forecasts a fall in the BJP's 
national tally from 138 seats to 116.)
If, on the other hand, the BJP loses Gujarat, 
it'll be a massive setback for it and a major 
gain for the secular forces. That'll set the 
stage for a long-overdue correction to the 
ghastly trend that brought about the communal 
violence of 2002, in which more than 2,000 
Muslims were butchered, many more raped, and 
150,000 rendered homeless. This could herald the 
BJP's relegation to the margins of politics, 
where it belonged until the Ram janmabhoomi 
campaign clicked in the late 1980s. This could 
transform Indian democracy qualitatively for the 
better.
Mr Modi, the chhote sardar who looked invincible 
just some months ago, now seems beset by 
adversity and enemies-ironically, mainly from his 
own sangh parivar . Not just Vishwa Hindu 
Parishad sadhus and RSS cadres, but even 
significant sections of the BJP, bitterly oppose 
him.
They comprise at least 11 MLAs and two MPs, 
including heavyweights like former Chief 
Ministers Keshubhai Patel and Suresh Mehta, 
former Union textiles Minister Kashiram Rana, and 
state ex-Home Minister Goverdhan Zadaphiya. Some 
of them are prepared to quit the BJP and work 
with or through the Congress to defeat Mr Modi. 
They have held about 80 anti-Modi rallies in 
different parts of Gujarat, including an 
unprecedented 300,000-strong one in Rajkot.
Beneath the leadership-level changes lie major 
shifts in the BJP's social support-base. Two 
large caste groups, the Kolis and Leuva Patils 
(Patidars), have moved away from it. The OBC 
Kolis are among the state's largest castes, 
comprised largely of small and marginal farmers, 
and landless labourers. Traditionally Congress 
voters, the Kolis gravitated towards the BJP in 
the mid-1990s and voted en masse for it in 2002. 
By the 2004 Parliamentary elections, however, 55 
percent of their vote went back to the Congress.
The prosperous Patidars dominate Gujarat's 
agriculture, small and medium-scale industries, 
and diamond polishing. Their vote is decisive in 
one-third of all constituencies. They account for 
37 of the BJP's total of 127 MLAs; its Koli MLAs 
number 15. Both groups are upset with Mr Modi 
because of his extremely abrasive style, 
readiness to humiliate, refusal to share the 
loaves and fishes of office, and his government's 
failure to allow the fruits of growth to trickle 
down.
No less significant is the anger among Gujarat's 
tribal community and civil society organisations 
(CSOs) with Mr Modi's rule. Adivasis comprise 15 
percent of the population-among the highest 
proportion in Indian states-and have 26 reserved 
seats. Earlier, they would vote overwhelmingly 
for the Congress, but in 2002, the Congress got 
only 11 tribal seats to the BJP's 13. Now, 
however, Lok Sangharsh Morcha, an Adivasi 
organisation, has decided to take on the BJP and 
contest seven Assembly seats.
Similarly, CSOs active among the victims of 
violence are preparing to confront the BJP and 
mobilise the Muslim community to go out and vote. 
The 2002 carnage, followed by constant 
harassment, persecution under anti-terrorism 
laws, and social intimidation, economic boycott 
and political marginalisation, ghettoised Muslims 
and pulverised them into submissiveness. But 
resistance to marginalisation is growing and 
groups like the New Social Movement are planning 
to put up solidly secular candidates.
All this offers the Congress and its allies a 
great chance to defeat the BJP and vanquish 
Moditva, that diabolical combination of rank 
communalism, blatant violation of human rights, 
and pursuit of extremely dualistic elitist 
policies in the name of "development".
Mr Modi, who mouths the "Vibrant Gujarat" slogan, 
boasts that the state is one big SEZ-where 'S' 
stands for spirituality, 'E' for 
entrepreneurship, and 'Z' for zing. India Today 
magazine and the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of 
Contemporary Studies have rated Gujarat a high 
performing state with all-round growth and Mr 
Modi India's most efficient Chief Minister.
In reality, Gujarat is a misgoverned state, with 
unbalanced growth and warped development. 
Eloquent proof for this comes from the fact that 
74.3 percent of Gujarat's women and 46.3 percent 
of its children are anaemic. Gujarat's 
macro-economic indicators are unflattering. It 
has a higher per capita debt-ratio than UP and 
Bihar. Agrarian distress has driven more than 500 
Gujarat farmers to suicide over the past four 
years. Sweetheart deals for business groups have 
sent the prices of basic services and inputs 
rocketing. Despite high tariffs like Rs 5.32 a 
unit, the power supply situation remains 
pathetic. Gujarat continues to attract industrial 
investment not because of its leaders' dynamism 
or policies but because of a historical 
accident-business groups invested there early on, 
and there's a big petrochemicals cluster around 
Baroda.
As the official Human Development Report (2004) 
points out, " Gujarat has reached only 48 percent 
of the goals set for human development". It lags 
behind in this thanks to "several distortions in 
[its] growth path", including agricultural 
stagnation. Its gains in literacy, education, 
health, nutrition, welfare and social security 
are much lower than its GDP growth. Recent 
"deceleration in [its] achievements", it says, is 
cause for "serious concern."
Gujarat's human development and gender 
empowerment ranks actually fell during the 1990s. 
Although it's Number 4 among all states in per 
capita income (down from Number 2), it has fallen 
to Number 6 in education, 9 in health, and Number 
12 in participation.
Gujarat's indices of patriarchy are frightening. 
The sex-ratio is an abysmal 487:1000 in the 0-4 
age-group and 571 in the 5-9 group (national 
averages, 515 and 632 respectively). Gujarat's 
health indices have since dropped relative to 
other states and are barely higher than Orissa's, 
HDR co-author Darshini Mahadevia told me. In 
social sector spending as a proportion of total 
public expenditure, Gujarat ranks a lowly 19 
among India's 21 major states.
The industries that have flourished the most in 
Gujarat are all highly hazardous or polluting: 
poisonous chemicals-Vapi is the world's fourth 
most toxic hub-, textile dyeing, shipbreaking, 
and diamond polishing, which turns people blind 
in their thirties. Gujarat hasn't still recovered 
from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s and 
1990s with its mill industry's wholesale closure. 
In Gujarat, labour rights are virtually 
nonexistent. On minimum wages, Gujarat ranks 
eighth among Indian states.
As for the claim that Gujarat is 
well-administered, its legislature's Public 
Accounts Committee has severely indicted the 
government for awarding contracts in the Sujalam 
Sufalam scheme without tenders, causing a loss of 
hundreds of crores. Tax breaks and shady deals 
have cost Gujarat some Rs 15,000 crores.
"Hindutva laboratory" Gujarat's law-and-order 
situation is appalling. Its religious minorities 
and Dalits suffer extreme discrimination and 
exclusion. Like Muslims, its Christians face 
persecution. More than 100 Dalits were murdered 
in Gujarat over the past three years. The 
harassment of hundreds of Muslims originally 
arrested under TADA and POTA continues 
unabated-although these laws stand repealed. The 
absence of the rule of law means a hollowing out 
of democracy
The Congress has a historic chance to inflict a 
stinging defeat on the BJP. To do this, it must 
offer an alternative vision, take a strongly 
secular line, build alliances with other 
anti-communal parties/groups, and run a spirited 
campaign with a wise choice of candidates, while 
keeping the BJP dissidents at an arm's length. 
The fight is winnable-and certainly worth winning.

o o o

(iii)

(To appear in Mainstream Weekly, New Delhi)

ON TEHELKA'S GUJARAT STING

by Mukul Dube

Shortly after the telecast of the Tehelka sting 
operation on Gujarat 2002, a friend telephoned to 
remind me of a discussion some of us had had in 
the middle of 2004. We had agreed that despite 
the dismal situation at the time, with the new 
government in Delhi making no effort to do 
anything about the Gujarat massacre, sooner or 
later the truth would come out. What we counted 
on was the certainty that at least some of the 
many functionaries of the Sangh Parivar who must 
have been involved would boast about their 
exploits and about their closeness to those at 
the top of their hierarchy.

As we had predicted, mean-minded braggarts have 
emerged to describe how well organised and 
blood-thirsty they had been, how they had had the 
support of the police and the administration, and 
how they had won the praise of Emperor "Nero" 
Modi himself. We had expected such boasting in 
dribs and drabs, and it is to the credit of 
Ashish Khetan of Tehelka that he managed alone to 
open so many mealy mouths.

As was to be expected, the Sangh Parivar 
immediately began attempts at a cover-up. For 
example, the man who had gloatingly described, on 
camera, how he cut open the stomach of a pregnant 
woman now says that he was only quoting from the 
charges made against him.

Predictably, the BJP's spokesman attacked 
Tehelka. All he could do, however, was weakly to 
ask why Tehelka had not so far launched a sting 
operation against the Congress party. State level 
elections are due in Gujarat, so naturally the 
timing of the revelations was questioned: as if 
that has anything to do with their substance.

In Gujarat, where the ideology of Hindutva is 
pervasive and its hold is seemingly absolute, the 
Parivar should not find it difficult to twist the 
Tehelka revelations to its advantage. How this 
will be done remains to be seen, but many have 
already voiced the fear that a damning indictment 
will be turned into an electoral trump card.

The first step, of course, was seeing to it that 
the Tehelka revelations did not reach the people 
of Gujarat. Cable TV operators across the state 
are said to have blocked the report, and in 
Ahmedabad the District Magistrate issued an order 
banning the broadcast of material which was "not 
as per programming code." This is precisely the 
kind of control over the media that was exercised 
in Gujarat in 2002 and later. The "friendly" 
press of the state is sure to join in, putting 
out its lies and poison.

Over seven years after the Gujarat genocide, it 
looks as if a beginning has been made to bring to 
book those who were responsible for it. It would 
be premature, though, to think that the battle is 
won. Our legal system is well known for its slow 
functioning. Worse, while the recorded admissions 
of criminals damn them personally, the evidence 
that Tehelka's work has brought out against Modi, 
for example, must be described as hearsay.

It is probable, however, that Tehelka has a great 
deal more material than was shown on television. 
It is also probable that that material is much 
more incriminating than what was telecast. In 
particular, it is to be hoped that material yet 
to be made public will be of the kind that can be 
used in courts of law. For example, the statement 
of "Babu Bajrangi" that Modi hid him for months 
in Gujarat government accommodation in Rajasthan 
and, after his arrest, changed three judges 
before one was found who was amenable to giving 
him bail, can be verified from records.

In May 2005, commenting on the criticism made of 
the handling of the "riots" by former Gujarat 
governor (and long-time RSS member) S.S. Bhandari 
and BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, and on the 
reactions this brought from sections of the Sangh 
Parivar, I wrote, "It is not only that the rats 
have begun to scurry madly among their lies now 
that the truth is coming out. The rats are also 
attacking one another."

Once again we can expect the brave soldiers of 
the Sangh Parivar to push forward others from 
among their fellows to face the law. Narendra 
Modi himself will have many to point to, if it 
comes to that, for he cannot have handled such a 
massive operation by himself. The names of many 
of the top organisers have long been known, as 
was most of what Tehelka has now presented on 
tape.

o o o

(iv)

Dawn
October 29, 2007

CAN WE RESIST FASCISM WITH INDIGNATION ALONE?

by Jawed Naqvi

SUPPOSE Narendra Modi, the chief minister of 
Gujarat, is called a fascist, which he is, and it 
translates into more votes for him in the coming 
state elections. How does one respond to this 
possibility, which, as many have concluded, is in 
fact the bitter truth? This is the backdrop we 
have to keep in mind about Tehelka's otherwise 
skillful and daring expose with concealed cameras 
of the manic Hindutva hordes that raped and 
killed at will in Gujarat in 2002, and their 
cheerleader, the chief minister himself.

Suppose all the gory revelations captured on the 
camera by the grittyjournalist Ashish Khetan are 
turned into a vaudeville, which can happen to any 
burning issue in India today with generous help 
from the corporate media. What happens next? 
Remember the lines of the woman inmate in a 
Chicago prison in the movie of that name? The 
woman, June, was one of several female prisoners 
serving sentences for killing their boyfriends, 
husbands, lovers and so on. June's lines in a 
song drenched in black humour went thus: " I'm 
standin' in the kitchen, carving up a chicken for 
dinner, minding my own business, when in storms 
my husband, Wilbur, in a jealous rage. 'You've 
been screwing the milkman,' he said. He was 
crazy, and he kept on screaming, 'You've been 
screwing the milkman.' And then he ran into my 
knife... he ran into my knife ten times."

June's lines were relived the other day by a key 
character caught in the Tehelka expose. Gujarat 
government counsel Arvind Pandya resigned from 
his post and has filed an FIR against the 
reporter who conducted the sting. But he needs to 
be heard to be believed. "They came to me and 
said they were making a serial. And to give a 
touch of reality, they wanted me to play a role. 
I would initially be portraying a negative role 
and later a positive one. I was given a script 
with all dialogues and I just had to read them. 
They also made me practise my lines,'' he 
complained.

What did Pandya's 'rehearsed' lines say in the 
role he says was assigned to him by Tehelka? 
Remember he is the man representing the state 
government in the commission of inquiry headed by 
Justices Nanavati and Shah. In fact Pandya is 
Gujarat's Advocate General.

Tehelka: Who was at the forefront during the riots?

Pandya: It will be wrong to say some were there and some were notŠ

Practically everybody who went to the field was 
from the Bajrang Daland the VHPŠ

Tehelka: Did Jaideepbhai (VHP vice-president Jaidee Patel) go to the field?

Pandya: Jaideepbhai had also goneŠ Which leaders 
went where, who had a role, who had a suspected 
role - we have before the Commission all these 
details, all the mobile numbers, who went whereŠ 
We have the locationsŠ

Tehelka: Yes, some controversy also took placeŠ

Pandya: It's still onŠ And I know whose mobile 
numbers were thereŠ who talked to whom, from 
which locationŠ I have the papersŠ

Tehelka: So can there be some problem for the 
Hindus because of thatŠ for Jaideepbhai etcŠ

Pandya: Arrey bhai, (Hey fellow) I am the one who 
has to fight the caseŠ don't worryŠ don't worry 
about this, there will be no problem here. If 
there will be a problem I'll solve itŠ I have 
spent all these years for whomŠ for my own blood.

Tehelka: Can the commission's report go against the Hindus?

Pandya: Nahi, nahi (no no)Š it can create some 
problems for the policeŠ it can go against themŠ 
see, the judges who have been selected are from 
the CongressŠ

Tehelka: Yes, NanavatiŠ and Shah

Pandya: That's the only problemŠ our leaders at 
the time got into a controversy in a hurryŠ what 
they thought was that since Nanavati was involved 
in the Sikh riots... that if they use a Congress 
judge there will be no controversyŠ

Tehelka: So is Nanavati absolutely against you people?

Pandya: Nanavati is a clever manŠHe wants 
money... Of the two judges, KG Shah is 
intelligentŠ woh apne wala hai [he is our man]Š 
he is sympathetic to usŠ Nanavati is after moneyŠ

Pandya: I have been the government's special AG 
(Advocate General) in these riotsŠ I kept note of 
just two thingsŠ I told the VHP that none of you 
have to come to the Commission everŠ you keep in 
touch with me, that's allŠ I told the BJP too to 
keep in touch with me, that's allŠ I have also 
told the Sangh that whenever I hold camps at 
various places don't come there with a big 
strength and don't bring a known face. You keep 
in touch with me on phoneŠ If I'll need anything, 
you'll just receive a call, not moreŠ I also went 
to all the places where the camps were held. I 
also held my own camps. I went to the camps to 
win the local people's favourŠ how it should be 
done, what is to be done.

Pandya's comments captured on camera are of 
course not greatly revealing beyond a point. If 
anything they are a reaffirmation of what we 
mostly know about the way judiciary works in 
cahoots with the state, including a rogue state 
or a fascist one for that matter. What is 
significant is that fascism stays and flourishes 
in Gujarat, regardless of any expose and the 
moral indignation it brings about.

Why it has struck roots in Gujarat and not in 
other BJP-ruled states like Rajasthan or Madhya 
Pradesh is a valid question. The answer perhaps 
lies in the corporate support fascism enjoys in 
one of India's most prosperous regions, not too 
different from the role assigned to the Shiv Sena 
in Mumbai, India's financial capital. Like Bombay 
of yore, Gujarat was the hub of leftist labour 
unions. They have been smashed and decimated. 
Instead we now have politically influential 
corporate clubs whose roots go right up to the 
Indian expatriates in the United States. The 
India-US business partnership launched by Prime 
Minister Manmohan Singh features tycoons like 
Ratna Tata and Mukesh Ambani, both viceforous 
public supporters of Modi, their model chief 
minister.

But the Tehelka expose never aimed to tackle the 
corporate support for insidious fascism inherent 
in Gujarat's economic progress. At the same time 
it is equally true that the nation's ruling 
party, the Congress, which had the potential to 
challenge Modi's sway has a problem of its own to 
tackle - its own economic planners have 
themselves declared unalloyed affection for 
Modi's growth model for the state.

Moreover, the strategy to fight religious fascism 
in the framework of a still breathing (or 
gasping) democracy is to go to the people with a 
secular agenda. The Congress has done just the 
opposite. It has gone about poaching BJP's 
leaders, wooing them to swell its own ranks, 
including people who are known to have led the 
wild mobs against Muslim women and children. This 
method is expected to deplete the electoral 
resources of Modi. Can you imagine Churchill 
planning to undercut Hitler by wooing Goering, 
Himmler etc to his side?

Be that as it may. The Tehelka expose, available 
in detail on the website , deserves to be seen 
and read and discussed widely, not because it 
will bring down Modi's fascist rule in Gujarat. 
Nor is the expose important for bringing out all 
the gory details of the rape and macabre murder 
of many innocent victims, the way Ehsan Jaffrey 
was cut to pieces, or a woman disembowelled and 
her foetus smashed in the womb. It is also not a 
revelation that Hindutva activists are imbued 
with the same sense of missionary zeal as any 
suicide squad among Muslims or any other faith.

The expose is important because the rape of 
Gujarat failed to budge the conscience of the 
great patron of democracy, the United States. We 
had to pointedly ask Assistant Secretary of State 
Christina Rocca to comment on the violence before 
she gave a grudging lukewarm disapproval of the 
mayhem there. Later Ms Rocca told the US Congress 
that Gujarat's legal authority was robust and was 
pursuing the criminals of the violence.

That was before Pandya slipped up before the 
hidden cameras of the Tehelka reporter. Ms Rocca, 
are you there?


______



[2]


Hindustan Times
October 28, 2007

DIRTY BUSINESS

by Darryl D'Monte

There is déjà vu about the report that the 
government is preparing to remove the hurdles to 
the entry of Dow Chemical, which has bought Union 
Carbide  into India in a big way. Victims of the 
world's worst industrial accident in Bhopal in 
1984 have filed a case in the Jabalpur High Court 
asking for more compensation. The Chemical & 
Fertilisers Ministry has also filed an affidavit 
in the case, seeking Rs 100 crore as initial 
compensation for Union Carbide India's liability 
for cleaning up the contamination at the factory 
site. But, the Industries Department wants an 
out-of-court settlement and a withdrawal of this 
affidavit.

Rajiv Gandhi had similarly compromised on an 
out-of-court settlement with Carbide for $ 470 
million 20 years ago, dashing the hopes of the 
survivors of some 2,500 victims who died in the 
accident overnight and many thousands 
subsequently, as well as those who continue to 
suffer from respiratory and eye ailments, not to 
mention the severe trauma of losing loved ones to 
an invisible gas. The Law Ministry has taken the 
view that Dow has not inherited the liabilities 
of Carbide, which is what Dow has been claiming 
all along.

There is a consensus in the highest echelons of 
the Congress that it is India's best interests 
for the US chemical multinational to invest in 
the country by getting rid of the obstacle that 
is Bhopal. This was the view of the then Cabinet 
Secretary in April, which is obviously echoing 
the position of the high command. Dow has 
promised to make major investments in India. No 
stranger an interlocutor than Ratan Tata himself 
had intervened with the Finance Ministry and 
Planning Commission, advocating an out-of-court 
settlement.

There are several issues which this denouement 
raises. The first is the moral and legal 
liability for causing the deaths of and damage to 
thousands of people. In the much earlier 
protracted debate over where to try the parent 
Union Carbide company, Nani Palkhivala, the legal 
luminary, and other eminent experts had felt that 
India's laws regarding such damages were more 
than sufficient to hold the trial in this 
country. They turned a blind eye to the lack of 
precedents here regarding punitive damages for 
industrial accidents. The Environment 
(Protection) Act itself was only introduced in 
1986, obviously as a knee-jerk reaction to Bhopal.

During the trial, Carbide's lawyers had argued, 
shockingly, that an American life was worth more 
than an Indian life. They estimated the annual 
earnings of most of the victims, poor shanty 
dwellers who lived cheek by jowl with the 
pesticide plant, and came up with a multiple of 
this sum which was risible, to say the least. 
Contrast this with Karen Silkwood
- subject of a Hollywood film - a chemical 
technician in a plutonium fuels plant in Oklahoma 
who was exposed to radiation and died 
mysteriously while exposing the negligence of the 
company. One US court awarded her family $ 10.5 
million for personal injury and punitive damages, 
which was reversed and later settled out of court 
for $ 1.5 million. Depending on how many are 
estimated to have died in Bhopal subsequently - 
activists put the number at 20,000, ten times the 
immediate number, and 120,000 suffering from 
ill-health - the compensation works out to a few 
US cents a head per day in the 23 years since the 
accident.

There is a complex legal issue, about whether Dow 
is liable for damages which occurred when the 
Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide leaked a 
deadly gas. It concerns the agreement which 
Carbide entered  into with Dow six years ago to 
sell its assets without its liabilities. The $ 
470 million settlement package did not include 
funds to clean up the contaminated site, nor did 
it include compensation for the tens of thousands 
of "second-generation victims" who were born 
after the disaster but suffer from severe birth 
defects and other developmental and psychological 
problems caused by exposure to the gas. Whatever 
the legalities, there is a moral question: of 
compensating innocent people who were harmed due 
to the criminal negligence of the company. During 
the trial, the parent company tried to distance 
itself from the culpability of its Indian 
subsidiary, but the fact that it held the 
majority of the shares speaks for itself.

It is not as if Dow Chemical has an impeccable 
record when it comes to manufacturing lethal 
chemicals. It was the sole supplier of the highly 
inflammable chemical, napalm, which the US used 
in Vietnam. For some years, despite widespread 
protests in the US and elsewhere against the use 
of this deadly weapon, Dow continued production 
of this profitable product, arguing that the US 
Department of Defence had to take responsibility 
for its deployment.

As controversially, it (and Monsanto) produced 
Agent Orange - the toxic defoliant which was 
dropped widely over Vietnam to flush out the Viet 
Cong. It derived its name from the orange-striped 
barrels in which it was shipped out and is a 
cocktail of different herbicides. When it 
degrades, it produces dioxin, one of the most 
toxic substances ever known. In 1976, a chemical 
plant in Seveso, Italy, suffered a leak and a few 
kilograms of dioxin were released. The town has 
gone down in environmental history as one of the 
worst cases of accidents, along with the Sandoz 
chemical plant warehouse fire in Basel, 
Switzerland, the Three Mile nuclear incident in 
the US and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union.

US Vietnam war veterans, who were exposed to 
Agent Orange, have received as much as $ 180 
million as interim out-of-court compensation - 
without admission of liability by the chemical 
companies. In 2004, the Vietnam Association for 
Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA), filed a 
lawsuit in a US court against several US 
companies for liability in causing personal 
injury by developing the chemical. The case was 
thrown out of court. Vietnam has established 
'Peace villages', which each host between 50 to 
100 victims of Agent Orange, giving them medical 
help. US veterans and individuals have also 
supported these programmes in Vietnam.

In a curious twist to the US veterans' case 
against Dow and others, a judge dismissed the 
suit in 2005, ruling that there was no legal 
basis for the plaintiffs' claims. The judge 
concluded that Agent Orange was not considered a 
poison under international law at the time of its 
use by the US; that the US was not prohibited 
from using it as a herbicide; and that the 
companies which produced the substance were not 
liable for the method of its use by the 
government. The US government is not a party in 
the lawsuit, claiming sovereign immunity.

In Bhopal, the Tata group has suggested setting 
up a "remediation" fund to clean up 8,000 tonnes 
of toxic material, which is still lying at the 
site. US senators and Dow executives have been 
lobbying with the Prime Minister too, which 
explains the current rapprochement. It will be a 
tragedy if, in the attempt to be pragmatic in 
seeking a massive US investment, the government 
caves in and lets Dow off the hook. If Rajiv 
Gandhi's earlier act was seen as a capitulation, 
this will be seen as another, under the aegis of 
his wife who heads the Congress.

Darryl D'Monte is Chairman, Forum of Environmental Journalists of India.

______


[3]

London Review of Books
1 November 2007

WHERE DOES HE COME FROM?
by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul


In a wonderful short story called 'Haha Huhu', 
written in Telugu in the early 1930s, Vishvanatha 
Satyanarayana (1893-1976) describes an accidental 
traveller to England: a gandharva, a flying 
half-man half-horse from classical India, who 
loses his wings and crash-lands in Trafalgar 
Square. His encounter with English society as he 
lies captive in his cage and waits for his wings 
to grow back is an occasion for Satyanarayana to 
comment wryly on many things: among them, 
cultural difference, the nature of scientific 
progress, and the resources that Indian culture 
may still possess even though under colonial 
rule. It is not a romantic text, nor is it a 
militant call for the revival of old Hindu 
values. But Satyanarayana, who had a distinctly 
modern literary sensibility while still being 
wholly immersed in the long literary tradition of 
Telugu and Sanskrit, is not much read today 
outside Andhra Pradesh. His gandharva ends the 
story by soaring off into the sky, destination 
unknown, calling out to his perplexed English 
captors that he'd never seen a 'more childish 
race'. It's a subtle piece of work, but 
Satyanarayana's version of the encounter between 
the West and the non-West has nearly been lost to 
us.

The fame that eluded Satyanarayana has been 
granted of late to other authors from India and 
of Indian origin, mostly writing in English. In 
their forefront is the author of this collection 
of opinion pieces and reminiscences. A quarter of 
the way into it, V.S. Naipaul offers the reader 
an insight into his thinking:

I had criticised others from my background for 
their lack of curiosity. I meant curiosity in 
cultural matters; but the people I criticised 
would have had their own view of the relative 
importance of things and they would have been 
astonished by my lack of political curiosity. As 
soon as I begin to examine the matter I see that 
this ignorance of mine (there is no other word 
for it), this limited view, was an aspect of our 
history and culture. Historically, the peasantry 
of the Gangetic plain were a powerless people. We 
were ruled by tyrants, often far off, who came 
and went and whose names we very often didn't 
know. It didn't make sense in that setting to 
take an interest in public affairs, if such a 
thing could be said to exist.

Naipaul is here using history to explain the 
difference between his own sensibility in the 
mid-1950s and a half-century later. In his youth, 
Naipaul recounts, he believed that 'things ran 
their course; elections took place, and the 
United States and Great Britain continued much as 
they had done.' This otherwise incomprehensible 
indifference to current events is seen by him in 
2007 as possessing one major virtue: 'When I 
began to travel I saw places fresh.' But has he 
seen 'places fresh', as he claims? Or is he no 
more than a prisoner of his history and heritage? 
It is a question worth asking.

Many people have strong opinions about this 
Trinidadian expatriate, including the reviewers 
and interviewers he regularly deals with. The 
dividing line is essentially political, a fact 
that might be disquieting for a creative writer. 
In this respect Naipaul is more like Solzhenitsyn 
than, say, Joyce, whose appeal can transcend (or 
confound) traditional political divides. In the 
case of Naipaul, those on the left, especially 
defenders of the 'Third World' and its hopes, 
from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael 
Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his 
attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is 
portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a 
product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon 
diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative 
writers - those who might see Ayaan Hirsi Ali as 
a major intellectual figure - who celebrate 
Naipaul as an original voice, a writer who 
provides a searing, politically incorrect 
indictment of all that is wrong in the modern 
world: Islam in its various manifestations, the 
grotesque dictatorships of Africa, the squalor 
and self-inflicted misery of much of the Third 
World, the failure everywhere of projects of 
métissage between the West and non-West. A few 
fence-sitters meanwhile play down the 
significance of his non-fiction and praise his 
fiction, his pared-down style and capacity to 
write precise, economical, somewhat repetitive 
English. Naipaul is a prototype that has now been 
cloned many times over in the Indian 
subcontinent: the fiction writer who is also a 
travel writer. One can see why Pankaj Mishra may 
read and review Naipaul with an Oedipal frisson. 
Vatermord or ancestor worship? It can be a hard 
choice.

The five essays in this volume mostly revisit 
earlier moments in Naipaul's work. The first 
essay refers back to the Caribbean of Naipaul's 
childhood in the late 1940s and is largely 
concerned to deflate the reputation of the poet 
Derek Walcott through a clever exercise in 
condescension and faint praise. Walcott and 
Naipaul, both Nobel Prize winners, have long been 
rivals, in both a literary and a political sense, 
and clearly bitterness remains. Walcott has 
referred to Naipaul as 'V.S. Nightfall', while 
Walcott for Naipaul is a 'mulatto, of old mixed 
race', who has chosen to 'put himself on the 
black side'. His poetry is seen as deliberately 
giving matters 'a racial twist'; it would seem 
that his talent quickly ran out and that he had 
to be 'rescued by the American universities'. The 
black or 'Negro' culture of the Caribbean is one 
for which Naipaul has no sympathy; he tells us, 
for example, without citing a source for the 
incident (he does not seem to have been present), 
that 'in 1945, when newsreels of 
concentration-camp sufferers were shown in Port 
of Spain cinemas, black people in the cheaper 
seats laughed and shouted.' Why? Was it 
schadenfreude because they were black and poor? A 
case of Louis Farrakhan avant la lettre? A simple 
lack of empathy with their fellow man? No answer 
or analysis is provided. We are meant to conclude 
that even the English - whatever their colonial 
past in the Caribbean and India - would not have 
been so cruel.

The second essay, 'An English Way of Looking', 
moves on logically and chronologically, to the 
moment when Naipaul began his writing career in 
England after getting a degree from Oxford (where 
he had been sent on a scholarship from Trinidad 
in 1950). In 1957, Naipaul was befriended by 
Anthony Powell, who helped set his literary 
career on a firm footing. After Powell's death in 
2000 at the age of 94, Naipaul was asked by the 
editor of an unnamed literary weekly to write 
about him. Naipaul notes that in spite of their 
long friendship he was not acquainted with most 
of Powell's work, and adds, characteristically: 
'It may be that the friendship lasted all this 
time because I had not examined his work.' When 
he began to read Powell, he 'was appalled . . . 
There was no narrative skill, perhaps even no 
thought for narrative.' The indictment presented 
as an exercise in fairness, precision and 
truth-telling, continues for page after page. 
There is again a hint of condescension; it turns 
out that Powell's book reviews were at least 
better than his fiction. But at the end of the 
chapter, Naipaul performs a rather deft trick. He 
attacks - on moral grounds - those who attacked 
Powell in the past, thus deflecting attention 
from his own moral position. One of these unnamed 
critics, who, Naipaul says, called Powell 'the 
apotheosis of mediocrity', is accused of being a 
'false friend', full of 'rage or jealousy'. 
Philip Larkin's unkind remarks about Powell are 
summarised and termed 'the most awful abuse'. 
Auberon Waugh's review of one of Powell's 
collections of essays is called typically 
'cruel'. These, then, are all apparently the acts 
of Powell's 'enemies'. But Naipaul does not tell 
us what motivates the cold and sneering regard of 
a friend like himself.

I myself have no great enthusiasm for Powell's 
fiction, though it may be rather too harsh to 
call him a mediocre writer. It is the lack of 
self-awareness in Naipaul that is troubling. How 
is his attack so different from that of others? 
Naipaul's subtitle is 'Ways of Looking and 
Feeling': are lucidity and self-awareness not a 
part of 'looking' and 'feeling'? These questions 
are not answered in the third essay, entitled 
'Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way'. This is 
a long chapter, and clearly meant to be the heart 
of the book. It sets out a thesis of sorts, 
though Naipaul would be horrified to think that 
anyone might accuse him of something as 
contemptibly academic as a thesis. The chief 
problem with Powell, the chapter seems to 
suggest, was that he wrote about a society 'at 
once diminished and over-written-about', and he 
could not rise above it. There is only one kind 
of narrative fiction that Naipaul understands to 
be properly modern: a sort of late Victorian, 
realist, slightly constipated fiction with a 
thoroughly old-fashioned narrative, an economical 
use of words, plenty of natural description 
(countryside, gardens, townscapes) and so on. The 
nonsense of post-Joyce, post-Svevo, post-Musil 
narrative, the 'literature of exhaustion' once 
celebrated by John Barth, can and should be 
flushed down the 'latrine' (one of Naipaul's 
favourite words). Naipaul then sets his ideal 
against his imagined enemy: what he terms 'the 
self-serving "writing schools" of the United 
States and England'. He attempts to parody the 
writing school technique in one of the least 
humorous passages of this rather solemn book:

You begin (at the risk of using too many words, 
like Hemingway) with language of extreme 
simplicity (like Hemingway), enough to draw 
attention to your style. From time to time, to 
remind people, you can do a very simple, verbose 
paragraph. In between you can relax. When the 
going gets rough, when difficult or subtle things 
have to be handled, the clichés will come 
tumbling out anyway; the inadequate language will 
betray itself; but not many will notice after 
your very simple beginning and your later simple 
paragraphs. Don't forget the flashback; and, to 
give density to a banal narrative, the flashback 
within the flashback. Remember the golden rule of 
writing-school narrative: a paragraph of 
description, followed by two or three lines of 
dialogue. This is thought to make for realism, 
though the dialogue can't always be spoken. 
Chinese and Indian and African experience sifted 
down into this writing-school mill comes out 
looking and feeling American and modern.

The problem is that all this - save the 
'American' - looks and sounds more like Naipaul 
himself than, say, Arundhati Roy or Vikram Seth. 
Do the Indian Naxalites in Naipaul's novels not 
sound as though they have been ground and 
thoroughly sifted through his own authorial mill? 
Is this not another case of a lack of 
self-awareness?

It would appear that for Naipaul there is only 
one way to be modern, and that is to be Western. 
All other societies have failed in this respect - 
the Enlightenment is not mentioned but it lurks 
offstage - and therefore can only look; they 
cannot see. Further, as we must recognise through 
the case of Powell, being Western is necessary 
but not sufficient. And for people from 
non-Western societies, the task is far more 
difficult. Naipaul devotes a good twenty-five 
pages of his third chapter to the only real 
exercise in empathy and affection in the book 
(aside from the passages mentioning his own 
father), and these pages are to do with Gandhi. 
He sees Gandhi as a sort of village idiot and 
incompetent in the first years of his life in 
Gujarat: coming to England to study law saved him 
and gave him a critical perspective on India, 
which he then sharpened in South Africa. 
Expatriation was the key to seeing. Naipaul thus 
admires Gandhi because he imagines him as a 
version of Naipaul: a man from a traditional, 
non-Western society who escaped that society and 
its blinkers to produce a critique of it (and a 
political movement to implement that critique). 
By these means he learned to see. Like Naipaul, 
he rose above the prison of his origins to 
imagine an India that was hygienic, cleansed and 
reformed.

To make this point more dramatic, Naipaul summons 
up a contrasting figure: a man who left India and 
yet saw nothing. This is in order once more to 
support his thesis: leaving India (or Trinidad) 
is necessary but not sufficient. This other man 
is to Gandhi, in short, what Derek Walcott is to 
V.S. Naipaul. The man Naipaul chooses is Munshi 
Rahman Khan (1874-1972), a Pathan and Muslim from 
northern India who emigrated to the Dutch colony 
of Suriname at the end of the 19th century and 
wrote a multi-volume autobiographical work called 
Jivan Prakash (loosely: 'The Light of Life'). It 
has never been published in its entirety, and it 
appears to be in a mix of various dialects of 
western Hindi, such as Bundeli and Awadhi. What 
seems to be a radically abridged Dutch 
translation has recently been translated into 
English, and it is only to this last version that 
Naipaul has access; it is as if a reader in 
Gorakhpur were reading Naipaul in Maithili after 
the text had passed through a Japanese 
translation. Naipaul seems confident nonetheless 
of the soundness of the conclusions that can be 
drawn from this double-distilled translation, 
even on matters of style, while scholars such as 
Mohan Gautam at Leiden University continue to 
pore over Rahman Khan's complex manuscript.

Naipaul is deeply disappointed, but also 
manifestly satisfied, by the poverty of this 
autobiographical narrative. He finds Rahman Khan 
to be a narrow-minded, semi-literate character 
incapable of producing a real modern narrative. 
'He has no feeling for the physical world about 
him,' Naipaul complains. When Rahman Khan is 
moved as a potential indentured labourer from one 
depot to another in northern India, 'he gives no 
description of these depots.' The problem is that 
Naipaul has little purchase on Rahman Khan's 
world, which he simply assumes was very similar 
to that from which he believes his own 
grandparents came, in the northern Indian state 
of Uttar Pradesh (earlier the United Provinces). 
This is the world that he evokes in the passage 
about the 'peasantry of the Gangetic plain', 'a 
powerless people . . . ruled by tyrants, often 
far off, who came and went and whose names we 
very often didn't know'. These distant tyrants 
might be British, but I suspect that they are 
really meant to evoke Muslim sultans. The use of 
'we' is also disingenuous, as if intended to 
suggest that Naipaul has some sort of unmediated 
access to the world of the Gangetic plain when, 
in fact, his knowledge of even standard Hindi is 
rudimentary. Nor need we credit the clichéd 
vision of an apathetic peasantry, indifferent to 
the march of history that he describes.

Rahman Khan was the author of two brief but well 
regarded collections of poems, Doha Sikshavali 
('A Didactic Collection of Couplets', 1953) and 
Jñan Prakash ('The Light of Knowledge', 1954), 
and was a respected figure in Hindi-speaking 
literary circles in Suriname. He began writing 
Jivan Prakash in his late sixties, and it seems 
that a political agenda lay behind it. He saw 
himself as an apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity, and 
buttressed his claims through his knowledge of 
the Tulsidas Ramayana, a 16th-century retelling 
of the Sanskrit epic that was very popular in the 
Caribbean. Rahman Khan presented himself 
explicitly as an exegete of this text, and even 
wrote verse in its broad style. One of these 
poems runs:

Two groups came from India,
They were called Hindu and Musalman,
Both of them were full of affection,
Like two brothers born of the same mother.

This was wishful thinking and hardly the entire 
tale of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Caribbean. 
But the point remains that Rahman Khan was deeply 
immersed in regional Hindi culture, and this 
included the so-called Hindu epics, many of which 
are regularly acted and recited even today by 
Muslim performers in popular theatre such as the 
annual Ramlila. This is not Naipaul's view, 
however. Rahman, he tells us, may have 
participated in 'a composite Hindu-Muslim culture 
of the region' (the Gangetic plain), but we can 
be certain that 'this composite culture has now 
vanished.' Even more extraordinary is his claim 
that 'Rahman, remarkably for a Muslim, knew Hindi 
very well.' As Naipaul sees it, Muslims must 
speak something called Urdu; Hindi is for the 
Hindus. Which makes Rahman Khan incomprehensible 
for him rather than a fairly common, if unusually 
articulate, type.

It is clear, then, that the deeper world of 
Rahman Khan, born in the Hamirpur district of 
western Uttar Pradesh, is not as familiar or 
accessible to Naipaul as he would have us 
believe. He repeatedly suggests that Rahman's 
whole account is nothing more than a 'brightly 
coloured, Arabian Nights world', full of holy 
men, magic potions and gilded kingdoms. It is 
certainly not realistic, and does not meet the 
imagined standard that Naipaul has in mind. But 
historians and observers of Indian society have 
never taken the view that Gandhi's autobiography 
was the measure of all first-person writings. 
This is why others will make more of Rahman 
Khan's writings than Naipaul can, since they will 
want to read them for what they are rather than 
what they are not.

The fourth essay, 'Disparate Ways', takes us on a 
detour before returning once again in the 
concluding pages to India and Indians. At first 
sight, it seems out of place. An initial, fairly 
tedious section is devoted to a bald contrast 
between Flaubert's deft narrative technique in 
Madame Bovary (this for Naipaul is the good 
realism that Rahman Khan lacks) and the 
clumsiness he thinks he finds in Salammbô. There 
is nothing that need detain us here, since the 
florid Orientalism of the later novel has been 
mocked often enough. The second part of the essay 
is more intriguing, and finds Naipaul embarking 
on the reading of a set of Latin texts from the 
Roman Empire, including Caesar, Cicero and a poem 
by the pseudo-Virgil. It turns out that the 
purpose of this exercise is linked to the purpose 
of the book as a whole; in the end, we're told, 
men in the Roman Empire, like those in India or 
the Caribbean (or indeed anywhere other than the 
modern West), 'use words to hide from reality' 
rather than in order to reveal it - as Naipaul 
believes he himself does. The Roman writers 
cannot face up to the ugliness of their own 
world, its violence, slavery and sordidness, just 
as most Indians cannot face up to caste and 
filth. So, 'in this world without balance' - 
which means Rome or the Third World - 'people 
need more than ever the classical half view, the 
ability to see and not see.' In sum, Naipaul is 
reproducing a conceit set out and demolished at 
length by historians of anthropology such as 
Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other: the rest 
of the world is still located in the ancient past 
of the West, the only difference being that the 
West was able to redeem itself and become modern.

That hope is not entirely given to India. The 
final essay concludes with particular sourness, 
affected by the aftertaste of some of Naipaul's 
recent (post-Nobel) visits to India, where he has 
sometimes been lionised but also criticised and 
even heckled. 'India has no autonomous 
intellectual life,' Naipaul declares, and adds: 
'India is hard and materialist. What it knows 
best about Indian writers and books are their 
advances and their prizes. There is little 
discussion about the substance of a book or its 
literary quality or the point of view of the 
writer.' No writers or critics are mentioned by 
name, and the one attempt at parody seems more 
directed at Ved Mehta than at any of the younger 
crop writing in English. The world beyond 
English, of course, the world of Vishvanatha 
Satyanarayana, does not exist for Naipaul. It is 
predictable that the only writer from the 20th 
century he finds worth discussing at length is 
Nirad Chaudhuri, whose Autobiography of an 
Unknown Indian is carefully dissected and 
appreciated for its largely positive evaluation 
of the British Empire. Again, the possibility 
that Chaudhuri and his Anglophilia might be a 
mirror held up to Naipaul is never considered. A 
book that is as full of certainty as Naipaul's 
can have no place in it for self-reflection. At 
the end of the book, India stands pretty much 
condemned: 'As much as for Gandhi, born in 1869, 
and for Chaudhuri, born in 1897, India's poverty 
and colonial past . . . continue to stand in the 
way of identity and strength and intellectual 
growth.'

At least that is the way it appears to Naipaul, 
born in 1932. What would happen if he were to be 
analysed as an actor in history, the spokesman 
for a point of view? What does he really 
represent, and where does he come from? We can do 
without the materialist presumption that all men 
are merely creatures of their circumstances, even 
if Naipaul seems determined to be one. He is a 
prisoner by choice, and also as a matter of 
taste. But of what is he a prisoner? Clues can be 
found in his own writings, including this book, 
though they are at times obscured by his manner 
of presentation. Naipaul is, first and foremost, 
a child of the Indian diaspora, but not the one 
that exists today of Telugu software engineers 
and Punjabi fast-food millionaires. The diaspora 
to which he belongs and by which he is marked is 
the 19th-century diaspora that emerged in the 
immediate aftermath of the British abolition of 
slavery in the 1830s. The first Indian indentured 
migrants to Trinidad (and the Caribbean more 
generally) arrived shortly thereafter, and the 
trickle became a flow after the Indian uprising 
of 1857-58. Between 1845 and 1917, official 
statistics suggest that Trinidad received about 
144,000 Indian immigrants, and in 1980 they and 
their descendants formed about 41 per cent of the 
island's population of more than a million. The 
Caribbean was only one part of the story; other 
labouring migrants from India went to Fiji, 
mainland South-East Asia, Sri Lanka, Mauritius 
and East Africa. Many parts of India contributed 
to these flows, and even today Sylhetis (from 
eastern Bengal) may dominate Indian migration in 
one part of the world and rural Sikh farmers in 
another. The two most significant areas of 
emigration (or 'labour catchment areas') for the 
late 19th century were the east-central Gangetic 
plain and southern India, and the migrants had 
significantly different profiles. The latter were 
often Tamil-speaking, belonged to the middling 
and lower castes, and carried with them a popular 
Hindu religiosity that had a very thin overlay of 
Sanskritic and Brahminised culture. This is what 
we see today in Malaysia or Singapore, and it is 
surely no coincidence that they have not produced 
a Naipaul.

The migrants to the Caribbean - and to an extent 
Mauritius and Fiji - were of a different order. 
After an initial phase in which southern India 
was well represented, it was the Gangetic plain 
that eventually came to dominate. Whether or not 
they were truly peasants in their origins - 
Brahmins and high castes like the Naipauls in 
fact represented 14.3 per cent of migrants to 
Trinidad between 1874 and 1917 - these migrants 
had often felt the impact of the great Hindu 
reform movements of the 19th century, which were 
themselves a reaction to the claims and insults 
of Protestant missionaries. Thus, mixed with the 
residues of pre-colonial religiosity of the type 
favoured by men like Rahman Khan, there existed a 
more muscular neo-Hinduism, itself based on a 
strategic imitation of Protestantism. It was the 
sort of religiosity and culture eventually made 
popular in the 20th century by explicitly 
reformist groups such as the Arya Samaj, but also 
- already by 1881 in the case of Trinidad - by 
rival neo-traditionalists who came to define 
Hinduism using the disguised neologism of 
'Sanatan Dharam'. This was ostensibly a hoary 
phrase from the Sanskrit epics; it had once meant 
no more than 'ancient way' or 'age-old custom' 
but it now came to stand for a stripped-down 
Hinduism with a distinct preference for ur-texts 
(which were meant to be read directly, as with 
the Protestant Bible) and a largely Vaishnava 
form of expression. It was into this expatriate 
culture - envious of the West and its 
superiority, suspicious of Islam and Muslims, 
often with a healthy contempt for many of the 
practices and 'superstitions' of the old 
motherland that had been left behind - that 
Naipaul was born. It is here that one finds the 
disgust of India that Naipaul evokes in 
describing his own mother's visit there, as she 
nervously hides her Guiana gold, looks at the 
food with fear and turns bilious as someone stirs 
her tea with a grubby finger. By leaving India, 
the Naipauls had reformed; the old country, it 
seemed to them, had stayed just as it was.

It is the ghost of this neo-Hinduism of the 
diaspora that lives on in this book, and which 
also inhabits hundreds of websites posted by 
other expatriate Indians who find themselves 
caught in the trap of in-betweenness. Naipaul is 
wide of the mark in his claim that most Indians 
today in the US 'wish to shake India off' and 
would rather 'make cookies and shovel snow' than 
deal with their Indian past. On the contrary: 
these are communities which often greatly admire 
Naipaul, share his roots in various sorts of 
neo-Hinduism, claim insistently that Islam is a 
worldwide threat, agitate over school textbooks 
in California which state that Hinduism is 
chaotically polytheistic, and wear surgical masks 
when they visit India and their relatives, who 
stir tea with their forefingers. For, ironically, 
'Indianness' is the chief element in the cultural 
capital of such groups, as it is for Naipaul 
himself. On the distant other side, Protestantism 
beckons, but most Protestantism does not go 
together with cultural métissage; it is pretty 
much an all-or-nothing deal. Further, Indians 
living outside India have, it is well known, been 
rather racist when it comes to other people of 
colour, and the anti-black rhetoric that pervades 
Naipaul's writings (including the first chapter 
of this book) is once again only symptomatic of a 
larger malaise that extends from East Africa to 
New Jersey. So, in the end, there is a reason why 
we should be grateful that Naipaul exists. With 
his clarity of expression and utter lack of 
self-awareness, he provides a window into a world 
and its prejudices: he is thus larger than 
himself. This book, like his others, should be 
read together with those of Munshi Rahman Khan 
for a deeper understanding of the Indian diaspora 
and its ways of looking, feeling and suffering.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam teaches history at UCLA. He 
should not be confused with a Carnatic musician 
of the same name.

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Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
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