Sharad Bailur writes commonsense

Sharad Bailur writes commonsense

Arthakranti by Anil Bokil - An assessment

Arthakranti by Anil Bokil

An assessment

By Sharad Bailur

Over the last several decades we have had a number of attempts to consider radical measures to revamp the tax structure with the aim of containing black money and to give taxation a more equitable face, if not form. All have failed or not lived up to their promise up to now. Among them:

1. Abolish all personal taxation. Make Excise and indeed all indirect taxes progressive.

2. Have a system to tax expenditure instead of income.

This attempt by Chartered Accountant Arun Bokil, must fall into the same category of instant solutions and that itself makes me suspicious. Among the things that it does not address:

1. If transactions below Rs 2000 are to be permitted in cash, what is to prevent everyone from treating every transaction above Rs 2000 as more than one transaction? To give just one example: My wife goes to buy herself a sari which, she is told, is worth Rs 2015/- Under the Bokil law she cannot pay for it in cash. She must pay for it either by cheque or by credit/debit card. What is to stop her paying Rs 20/- in cash and the remaining Rs 1995/- also in cash since now the price of it is below Rs 2000/-? How many billions of such transactions will take place all the time to circumvent the transaction tax?

2. The whole panacea does not take into account the huge unorganized sector. How are the transactions in this sector to be accounted for in the case of all those billions of transactions above Rs 2000? The Bokil panacea seems to have been created by those who live in the cities and are totally unaware of the realities of commerce or what goes for commerce in Kalahandi or Santhal Parganas.

3. And what about the billions more below Rs 2000. Remember, we are a large country and the villager understands the value of money just as well as his city cousin.

4. The reason for bringing out Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes now has been the inflation. The falling purchasing power of the rupee makes for transactions at an increasingly faster speed to take place in the marketplace. The Rs 1000 note which was demonetized in 1978 has therefore had to be brought back. But that again is taking a different tack. How will demonetising currency notes of smaller denomination help?

5. If the number of transactions have to multiplied in proportion to the amount that is to be spent to avoid tax, this involves that much more effort. Will this not fuel inflation at a runaway best?

6. Since all taxes other than the transaction tax are supposed to be abolished, this will bring into the legitimate marketplace a large amount of spending money, now legal, which will add fire to the inflation.

7. The storm of paper that will result in the banking system will bring it to a grinding halt.

8. The entire monetised economy will come to a halt, with all transactions in cash above Rs 2000 being made illegal.

Islam under siege by Akbar Ahmed - book review

Book review

Islam Under Siege by Akbar S. Ahmed

By

Sharad Bailur

The day after the second series of bomb blasts in London on July 21^st, General Musharraf, in a televised address to his captive nation said, in the part directly addressed to Mr.Tony Blair that, while he unequivocally condemned “terrorism” in all its forms, Britain should look after its own home grown terrorists and not point fingers at Pakistan. This sort of mealy-mouthed “defence” has had a patent applied for by Musharraf. But he added something that I wholeheartedly agree with. The word “Ilm” (meaning knowledge) is the second most frequently found word in the Quran after “Allah”. If Islam is to become a religious force in this modern world it should concentrate on “Ilm” and modernise itself to meet the demands of today’s world. This is precisely the point that is also made by Mr. Akbar S. Ahmed in his extremely readable book, Islam Under Siege (Vistaar Publications, New Delhi).

First some facts: Mr. Ahmed is a former High Commissioner of Pakistan in London and presently holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, Washington DC. Ibn Khaldun was one of the greatest liberals in the history of Islam, which speaks a lot for Mr. Ahmed himself. He is a former Pakistan Superior Civil Service Officer who won his spurs in an open competitive examination – the Pakistani equivalent of the India Foreign Service and a former Iqbal Fellow at Cambridge. These, I think, are qualifications formidable enough not to be easily challenged as far as the book is concerned, to establish his credentials

Mr. Ahmed assumes that Islam is a religion that preaches “peace and goodwill towards all men”. It is here that I have a bone to pick with him. But first a small aside: Mr. Ahmed approvingly quotes the speech in favour of a secular Pakistan made by Mr. Jinnah in the Constituent Assembly, latterly made controversial by a reference to it by Mr. Advani during his recent visit to Pakistan. The BJP’s theatrics were unnecessary because all Mr. Advani was telling the Pakistanis was that the founder of their nation was secular and so should they be. They of course politely ignored him, at least publicly.

The fact however was, like Mr. Advani, Mr. Jinnah was a political opportunist with an eye on the main chance. He found it when some undergraduate at an English university coined the term “Pakistan”, and decided that he would go for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India, more to perpetuate his own greatness than, in fact, to do anything for Islam. The Muslims of Pakistan realise this, though openly stating it would be considered “blasphemous”, much as criticism of Mahatma Gandhi is today in India. (We on the subcontinent love our idols, the Pakistanis just as much as us; hence the Quaid’s likeness on every Pakistani currency note which goes against Islamic injunctions.) Luckily for him, like Gandhi, he died early enough for his greatness to be safely mummified for perpetual veneration. Advani, likewise found his main chance in Ayodhya. He is now looking for chances to perpetuate his own greatness. Whether it will do the Hindus any good here or hereafter is a matter of doubt. Whether it will afford the same greatness for Mr. Advani is a matter of much greater doubt because of the secular traditions of the society he lives in.

It is much better to quote Mr. Ahmed quoting the Quran to make something out of what that says. The reason for this is that for every amenable platitude that the Quran decrees, it almost always also decrees diametrically opposite injunctions to its followers. Mr. Ahmed himself stresses this at the beginning of the book:

“The answer is that both Muslims and non-Muslims use the Quran selectively. The Quranic verses revealed earlier for example, Surah 2: Verses 190-4 emphasise peace and reconciliation in comparison to the latter ones like Surah 9: Verse 5. Some activists have argued that this means an abrogation of the earlier verses and therefore advocate aggressive militancy. In fact the verses have to be understood in the social and political context in which they were formed. They must be read both for the particular situation ion which they were revealed and the general principle which they embody.” He goes on to add, “What is important for Muslims is to stand up for their rights whoever the aggressor: “Fight against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities”, the Quran tells Muslims (Surah 2: Verse 190).”

What does an impartial reader make of this when Mr. Ahmed also says the following: “The first warrior to make a name for and in South Asian Islam was the young commander Mohammad bin Qasim. He landed on the coast of what is now Karachi and conquered what is now the Pakistan province of Sind for Islam in the early years of the 8^th century. He was defamed by his enemies and without a proper trial he was sent back to Baghdad, the seat of the Islamic kingdom. He suffocated to death…. It was not the accusation of sexual harassment by the Indian princesses, which they later recanted, but the arbitrary manner of the punishment.”

Mentioning Mahmud of Ghazni on page 147 he says this: “For most Muslims he is one of the greatest heroes of Islam, bringing their faith to the region and carrying it with the power of the sword….Smashing idols is thus a powerful symbol of faith for those who believe their monotheistic God is jealous of any images that distract from His worship. Even today Muslims thorough out South Asia – not only in Afghanistan – quote Iqbal’s popular verse, proudly declaring that a true Muslim is an idol breaker not an idol seller.” (emphasis mine).

The Quran contains fairly liberal and conciliatory statements made during the Prophet’s early years during which he received revelations in Mecca. After his flight to Medina the revelations gradually started to become less tolerant as I quote below from Akbar Ahmed’s book and from other sources:

1. Recite O Unbelievers, I worship not what you worship and you do not worship what I worship. I shall never worship what you worship. Neither will you worship what I worship. To you your religion, to me my religion. Surah 109).
2. There is no compulsion in religion. (surah 2.256)
3. We well know what the infidels say: but you are not to compel them ( Surah 50.45)
4. Killing a single innocent person is like killing all of humanity, warns the Quran (surah 5: verse 32) (Ahmed)
5. Forgive and be indulgent (to the people of the book, Jews and Christians (Surahs 2 and 109) (Ahmed). Apparently this does not apply to that third of humanity that does not subscribe to these three religions.

Against this:

6. Slay the idolators wherever you find them. (Surah 9.5).
7. Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them. ( Surah 9.5-6)
8. I will instil terror into the hearts of the Infidels,strike of their heads then, and strike of from them every fingertip. (Surah 8.12).
9. Say to the Infidels: If they desist from their unbelief, what is now past shall be forgiven them; but if they return to it, they have already before them the doom of the ancients! Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s. (Surah 8.39-42).

Akbar Ahmed attributes the feeling of “Islam under siege”to “hyper-assabiya” which he defines as exaggerated tribal and religious loyalties and to the impression gathered by the Islamic world that it has entered a “post-honour” world – a situation that must be set right. This clearly applies as much to other white and non-white populations irrespective of their different religious convictions, but they do not feel that they are under siege. That a “siege mentality” exists, is felt most keenly by orthodox Muslims, that it is being encouraged and attempts are made to persuade/force (pace bin Laden) the non-Muslim world to “lift the siege”, there is no doubt. But a careful analysis shows that it has nothing to do with post-honour or hyper-assabiya.

The fact is that the communications revolution has become the greatest and most insidious enemy of all forms of absolutist thought. It was primarily responsible for the destruction and fall of communism all over the world. This revolution is seen in Muslim countries and by Islamic authority in general as having originated in the degraded (read post-honour) West. The communications revolution is quintessentially anti-Islamic because it encourages free thought and critical enquiry by the mere fact of encouraging curiosity. It thereby “attacks” the very essence at the core of Islam – that it is the last and final world of God.

But the feeling of siege cannot be attributed to the communications revolution publicly, since that would amount to acknowledging the illiberality of orthodox Islam. A roundabout way has to be found to explain the siege mentality. Hence hyper-assabiya and the post-honour world. (Tell me, how does it concern orthodox Muslims in say, Saudi Arabia, what Bill Clinton does with Monica Lewinsky in the privacy of a room in Washington – something about which Akbar Ahmed expresses unctuous outrage?).

Throughout his book Mr. Ahmed’s humanism shines right through. He comes across as a broad minded, liberal author who has understood and empathises with the problem of Islam faces the world over. The task of showing how Islam is under siege therefore is not easy. But he does make a valiant attempt. Unfortunately for him, the more humane, moderate, modern, broad-minded and “inclusivist” (his own word) Mr. Ahmed sounds, the less Islamic he sounds. It is a warning to signs of liberalism within Islam. As a result, condemning the fate of other liberal authors, Mr. Ahmed writes from the safe confines of Washington.

Post Facto rationalisation in Iraq

Post Facto Rationalisation in Iraq

By

Sharad Bailur

There were deep suspicions that the war in Iraq came about because Iraq had opted to have its oil exports valued in Euros rather than American dollars. The euro which had started smartly well above the dollar in value progressively fell to about 80 cents and then started its slow painful climb upwards. It gathered momentum the moment Saddam announced his decision, and today trades at about a dollar and a few cents.

All along both Mr. George W. Bush and his partner in this entire ugly business Mr. Tony Blair had maintained that it was necessary to bring Iraq to heel because it possessed weapons of mass destruction. None were found. None have been found to date despite the best unfettered efforts of American weapons specialists. I am deliberately using the word unfettered because the earlier complaint was that Saddam’s minders prevented UN weapons inspectors from doing their job.

Then George W. Bush and Colin Powell “proved” that Saddam has accumulated WMDs. It turns out that the report was plagiarised from a PhD paper written by a university student. It was not based on hard intelligence at all. Then the story leaked out that the British Secret Service had “sexed up” the report to “prove” that Saddam had WMDs. Tony Blair denied it.

Next Tony Blair came out with a House of Commons speech saying that Saddam could start a WMD attack in 45 minutes. And after the war is over and Saddam is ousted, he backed down. Then Dr. Kelly was summoned to give evidence before the House of Commons Committee of Inquiry. He was heckled and harassed by some harsh questioning right in front of the TV cameras of the world. We saw the whole thing here in India. Four days later Dr. Kelly is found dead in dubious circumstances. For good measure there was also a report blaming the Italian Intelligence Service of having originated the story. Apparently the SIS and the CIA can never make mistakes, and, if they do, never admit them either to their masters or to the world, when caught out.

Then there is the story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger. What exactly could Niger have given Saddam even if he had sought uranium from it? Niger is such a backward nation that it can, at best, sell uranium ore and nothing else, provided it identifies the rock it digs out as uranium ore in the first place. Let us suppose Saddam does get hold of uranium ore from Niger. Purifying it to get yellowcake is a huge task for which the ore needs to be transported to Iraq. Did Saddam have the means to do this, in the face of all those international sanctions? Next a ton of ore yields yellow cake which can fit under a single finger nail. How many thousands of tons did Saddam import to make enough yellowcake? Did all this go unnoticed?

Let us go a step further. Even if he did, he had to put this yellowcake through centrifuges to get fissile uranium, that is to separate the U238 from the U235. This again is a tiny proportion of the yellow cake. How much ore would Saddam need to make a single suitcase sized bomb using a mere 35 kilos of U235? And they were talking of weapons of mass destruction in the plural. This does not mean that Saddam’s scientists and engineers did not know how to do it. Just that if the sanctions were effective it would not have been possible for him. Yes. If the sanctions were lifted he might still have made the bombs. But that is another story. Would all this activity not have been detected by all those spy satellites, or by the UN inspectors who were let in just before the invasion? What does Hans Blix who incidentally is a world authority on nuclear bomb making in his own right, have to say about all this?

George Bush says now that he is willing to take full responsibility for all his actions including misleading the American public into a war it did not know if it needed in the first place. What is this supposed to imply? A mere acceptance of responsibility means very little unless it is accompanied by self inflicted pain of some sort. What sort of penitance is Bush willing to perform for having willingly and deliberately misled his people?

It is in these circumstances that we must reconsider the reasons for the opposition from Germany, France and Russia, France in particular. If there is one country that understands and probably has much better assets in Africa than either the CIA or the SIS it is the French Secret Service. Should the French have not been consulted in this matter? What are they members of NATO for? Or were French interests regarding the valuation of Iraqi oil in Euros of such importance, considering what it was doing to the almighty dollar that they could not be taken into confidence regarding Saddam’s nuclear ambitions and efforts?

Writing from an Indian perspective, India decided to avoid sending troops to Iraq for a number of reasons, chief among which was the fact that there was no explicit UN mandate for peace keeping. India is the only non-Muslim country to be rated by the Iraqis as among its better friends. This is a perception that goes deep in the minds of the ordinary man in the street in Baghdad. Helping them to keep the peace should therefore have been a good enough reason to send troops. But if sent at the request of the United States, the Indians would go in and be perceived as substitute occupiers. They don’t need that. Hence the decision to stay away, at least till the UN clears the way.

Wines and spirits in India - Humour

				Let us start this on a serious note. India’s Constitution has something funny in it. It is called the Directive Principles of State Policy. This crazy document, apparently inspired by something similar in the Irish constitution, tells us Indians how to all be good boys, brush our teeth and go to bed when we are told. For instance, it tells us not to drink. So let us have prohibition, pray to God, be good vegetarians, spin our own cloth and live the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Never mind that the Directive Principles also say that we should have a family planning programme. The Old Man produced half a cricket team of third-raters and then, in high dudgeon, told the world, not his wife, that he did not want sexual relations with her. In his old age he tried screwing young women old enough to be his granddaughters (without success) and made a virtue of his failure by talking about moral self-restraint. But then let us get back to the main subject—booze. As a result of the Directive Principles, the states of the nation under whom, mercifully, the subject of Prohibition comes were told to make a law to enforce prohibition. Some states, smarter than others, refused to touch Prohibition with a sterilised pole. But the old Bombay State was made of sterner stuff. It then had a Chief Minister who drank Pisskey (he drank his own urine as a part of some obscure so-called therapy) and this character applied the new law with full force. The howls of protest started at once. First the Armed Forces said that since they adhered to Central law, and the Central law did not specify prohibition, it should not apply to them. So the Armed Forces continued to have their tipple. And they started selling it on the black to people like you and me. Then the rich said they needed it for their health. So a system of permits for medical purposes was introduced. Then, finding that it was impossible to corrupt the police any further, the government relaxed the law and allowed people to get liquor permits without medical certificates. The police became fat and indolent and incapable of arresting anything other than a double decker bus. Today in Mumbai the prohibition law remains on the statute books. Technically you can be arrested for possessing liquor. And yet the dry state of Muharashtra floats on a sea of booze. Bengal incidentally uses the word, “dry,” to mean anything that is prohibited. The famous poet Dom Moraes once told me that he ordered eggs and bacon for breakfast in Calcutta only to be told that that day was a dry day. He could not make sense of it till it was clarified to him that on that particular day he could not get pork. Hence "dry." No bacon. Gujarat broke away from Maharashtra (the old Bombay State) to form its own state in 1960. But the incubus of being a state to which Old Man Gandhi belonged is a burden it will continue to have to bear, at least till all those who had anything to do with him are well and truly dead. And therefore it is a dry state. Save for the fact that Scotch brought to India in barrels and packed in bottles in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan is sold in Gujarat with a tell-tale label: For sale in Gujarat only. And Gujarat practises strict Prohibition. And, in spite of the fact that Gujarat is the milk centre of India it floats not in milk locally produced by its excellent cows but in hooch locally brewed by its equally excellent and businesslike illicit liquor barons. If the policy of prohibition continues it is because these fellows don’t want it repealed—they’d end up losing their market. Not a single day passes in which a party is held by high government officials in which Scotch does not flow like the Ganges. And often it is equally dirty because it isn’t really Scotch at all. Which brings me back to the bad old days of prohibition in Bombay and its echoes today. Three types of prohibition-related characters flourished in those days. They were all called either Pascal or Michael or if it was a woman she was affectionately known as the local Aunty. The best-known speakeasy in Bombay then was a joint called Pascal’s in Khar, a Bombay suburb. Pascal’s had two huge photographs in his den that in fact was a large hall. One was of President Kennedy. For some unfathomable reason all the low life from hooch sellers to prostitutes to barbers and cobblers acquired an unreasoning affection for the American President. Pascal ceremoniously garlanded the picture every day. It was the fashion of the day, like the stickers of “Billboard” that are sported by every third taxi today. Pascal had another and still grander picture also ceremoniously garlanded with an even grander garland. It was of that very same aforementioned Chief Minister of Bombay who drank Pisskey. And correctly, too. Pascal’s fortune was made by paying obeisance to that epitome of Prohibition, the Chief Minister. And of course the police unctuously studied their nails, dirty as they were, and caught unfortunate pedestrians for walking on the road. And to this day, whenever the government gets into one of its prohibitionist moods and declares a dry day, it is still to the Aunties, the Pascals and the Michaels that we turn for spirituous sustenance. The simplest way of finding a Pascal or a Michael is to look for a roadside seller of boiled eggs. Since boiled eggs are usually eaten with illicit liquor (it apparently damps down the strong fumes) it is easy to find innocuous little homes off wide-eyed innocent-looking people who sell you all the liquor you want – of course at a premium. It is also fun looking at a shop that sells “legitimate” liquor, particularly in Mumbai. It is often likely to proudly flaunt a board as follows: Harry Pinto Wine Shop. All old Harry sells is different brands of some transparent brown liquid locally called whisky, about six brands of beer, a couple of brands of gin, vodka and rum each. He has never ever seen anything called a wine and he does not know if there is such a thing. Wine apparently means liquor in India and not Wine. The board atop his shop also has some mysterious other hieroglyphs printed on it. It could for example say: IMFL No 3460 and CL NO 325608. CL stands for Country Liquor. This stuff, highly potent, is made from oranges and other fruit. But if you want it to kick like a mule there is a brand called Double Ghoda (Double Horse). IMFL is something else again. It stands for “Indian Made Foreign Liquor.” Apparently only foreigners, preferably white-skinned ones, make whisky, gin, beer, vodka and such. We Indians are too high-minded and above such ugly occupations. Therefore, even if we do make them, they are “foreign liquor,” but since they are made by Indians they are called, naturally, Indian Made Foreign Liquor. Since whisky is the Indian drinker’s favourite tipple let us see what Indian whisky consists of and how most of it is made. There is this venerable old liquor-distilling organisation which started off making tolerable whisky in Kasauli back in the early days of the last century. It was then owned by an Englishman. The Englishman left India in the first wake of its Prohibitionist nightmare and sold out to a retired captain of the Territorial Army. This man’s talents lay not in distilling whisky but in what he thought was singing. He inflicted hapless audiences with impromptu renditions of film songs. They say that two minuses make a plus. Never was this more untrue than in his case. Bad film songs sung badly do not a good musical performance make. But we are going off the track. Back to whisky. I have actually seen it done in their distillery. They get a huge quantity of ethyl alcohol (100% pure). To this is added a huger quantity of water. Two-thirds water to one-third alcohol. Then is added colour, mostly molasses from the nearby sugar factories. Premium brands are treated with synthetic flavouring agents. Other brands can take their comeuppance. The whole thing is bottled and a label is slapped on. And that is Indian whisky – or most of it. To make it attractive, fancy names are given and often fancier bottling is provided. So you have everything from Single Malt and Peter Scot (two of the more tolerable brands), to Queen Anne, Diplomat, President and so on. Some one is yet to name a bottle Prime Minister or Chief Justice but it will not be very long. Then we have Indian whisky “blended with the choicest imported Scotch.” The procedure is as follows. The whisky made in the traditional way mentioned “hereinabove” (a legalistic Indianism so fondly resorted to by most of us) is given special treatment. A small toothpick has its tip dipped in real Scotch. Then this wet end is transported to this huge vat of Indian spirit and ceremoniously dipped in it. Voila! Indian whisky blended with Scotch. It would have been simpler to just whisper “Scotch” over the Indian vat, which is what I suspect most of them actually do. As for other Indian liquor what is surprising is that most of them are actually good. The rum comes close to good Jamaican rum, the gin to some of the better English gin, the vodka is actually better than Stolichnaya and the beer is far better than anything made in the US. Where Indians score is in their own liquor, which for some strange reason they refuse to name. The people of Kerala produce a potent rice spirit that they call Arrack. The people of Goa make something from the cashew fruit called Fenny. It smells to high heaven but the Goans swear by it. In Madhya Pradesh the tribals produce another highly potent liquor from the Mahua flower. No name and no marketing. You either go there and drink it or you don’t get it. It is probably the best of the Indian spirits. No hangover and the kick of a regiment of mules. And it tastes good. Smooth as silk and a mild undefinable flavour of flowers rather like Carlsberg freshly brewed. Tequila would lose in any competition with Mahua. We also observe “fasts.” These are not necessarily to improve our digestion or our health. They are a religious observance. They consist not of avoiding food. They consist of eating perhaps more entertaining, if vegetarian food. You abstain from not just the normal food of grain and cereal. You also abstain from meat and fish. In other words you don’t eat meat and fish or drink just because it happens to be a particular day of the week. Apparently drinking or eating meat on other days is not sinful. Then there is this peculiar New Moon observance called “Gatari Amavasya,” which is followed with much fanfare here in Maharashtra where I live and particularly so in Mumbai. Till this particular New Moon, which means till the beginning of the month of Sravan, there is no religious restriction on food or drink. The day of Gatari Amavasya signals the last day of indulgence. You are supposed to drink till you drop into a gutter. Hence Gatari Amavasya. From then onward for a month you abstain from meat or fish or liquor. The moment the month is over you are at it like a deprived animal unlocked from his zoo cage. I have never understood how all this offers a greater closeness to God or whatever. But then we are all Prohibitionists. We believe in simple living and high thinking. The appeal to vegetarian food, to teetotalism and to ceremonious adherence to religious ritual I suspect began with the helplessness of a Hindu population put upon by Muslim rulers and later by the British or their Indian vassals who had by then become degenerate yet tyrannical dinosaurs. It resulted in extreme levels of poverty (hence the vegetarianism), a feeling of helplessness that had lasted hundreds of generations (hence the pursuit of religion as a form of escapism) and the inability to band together resulting from extreme economic deprivation. This deprivationist approach could not have succeeded ordinarily but it had to as a result of the loss of self-confidence that must have been the norm. The only way this could be made to happen was to elevate it into a high religious and moral principle. What evolved over hundreds of years cannot be taken away in the fifty or so years of independence. Our present hypocrisy is merely a hangover that refuses to go away, having pickled our collective brains for those deprived centuries. We Indians have far to go in the Self Confidence Department. —Sharad Bailur, Mumbai, India, 6/17/2001

Ayodhya and the Babri Mosque

Ayodhya and the Babri Mosque 03-5-2002 Sharad Bailur
		I am sometimes ashamed of my country. In truth, I say this because India means so much to me. Were that not to be so I would perhaps have been indifferent to what its people regularly do to themselves. One of our biggest banes is our preoccupation with religion. It has perhaps caused nothing but misery to its people throughout the ages. From a mystical, if admittedly thin, understanding of our place in the universe, it developed into a religion with its rituals and its rewards. Over the thousands of years that it has been practised it added first, a patina of myth which later thickened and hardened into a rhinoceros hide of unreasoning belief made horrible by practices like sati, the ostracism of widows, the caste system and such other fossilised and unreasoning attempts to make the lives of people miserable. And all for the benefit of mythological characters who may never have existed. The misfortune is that the Indian has always accepted any religion unhesitatingly. This is the result of the readiness of the people to believe any rubbish that is dished out to them from on high. And ‘on high’ merely means by those who were educated enough to read and write. We have had so many different religions being practised by so many people because we have always looked for short cuts. Short cuts even to the effort necessary for understanding, which in reality calls for mental effort. Who has the will to make that mental effort? As a result, India is the most ritualistic society in the world. To this day it describes its much vaunted secularism as “equal respect to all religions,” knowing all the time that this is another bit of sophistry meant to be talked about loudly because it is comfortable, calls for little understanding and with the knowledge all the time that it can never be put into actual practice. Hinduism evolved as a broad way of life in the subcontinent over four thousand or more years. The Hindu religion or that version of it that is practised in north India believes that in ages past there was a King of Ayodhya called Rama. That Rama was an incarnation of the god Vishnu. That Rama was born in Ayodhya at a particular place. As a result Ayodhya is a place that is fully dedicated to Rama and the temples constructed in his honour over the millennia are testimony to this. Nobody really knows the exact place that Rama was born in or for that matter whether he really ever existed. He is also a literary figure made famous by the Ramcharitramanas of Kalidasa and is the hero of that great epic. In much the same way as the Aryans drifted into the subcontinent from eastern Europe, there were subsequent and later invasions from other groups of people. The Muslim invasions began some time in the last part of the first millennium after Christ. Better organised and better led, the Muslims established their own empires in a land populated by the people of an idolatrous and fossilised faith. Among the many Muslim invasions the most lasting was that of the Mongols or Mughals, their first leader Babur a descendant of Timur or Tamerlane. Since, unlike Hinduism, Islam is a proselytising religion, attempts were made to convert the population to the true faith by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary. And inevitably mosques were built all over India for the true faithful. Vast non-Muslims populations were, over hundreds of years, taxed by successive Muslim empires merely for not being Muslim. The tax was called the Jaziya. It has sanction in the Quran. Among the ways of showcasing Islam to the people was to build, forcibly where possible, mosques in places where temples once stood, the temples having first been destroyed. This was done all over India and it was also done in Ayodhya. A general of Babur’s decided that he would build a mosque in Ayodhya in honour of his master. The mosque was therefore called the Babri Mosque. Over the next three hundred years it was fitfully used by the local Muslim populace and then it gradually fell into disuse as it became a ruin and there was no money to renovate it. That is where matters stood till some idiot of a Hindu fanatic decided that there had been a temple in the place before the mosque had been built some six hundred years before and that the place should be converted back into a temple. He went and placed a few idols in the disused mosque. When the government remained indecisive, mobs went on the rampage in Ayodhya and pulled down the old ruin that had been a mosque. That kicked up the controversy which dogs the nation to this date. It is now fifty years old and shows no signs of abating. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or the World Hindu Council) pressured the Government of India to agree that it would come to a decision by a particular date. Like Musharraf claiming Kashmir, the VHP would accept nothing other than the right to build a temple. The “core issue” is that the Government should yield to its demand to build a temple in the place. This incensed the Muslims. They want their mosque rebuilt just where it stood. It does not matter that it had been in ruins for decades before it got pulled down. In essence, it is the classic case of two religions fighting over a piece of land. Hindus regard themselves as “belonging” to the subcontinent. According to them all other religions that originated elsewhere are “foreign.” They therefore arrogate to themselves a sort of super-patriotism, which they deny to those who follow other faiths, especially those who are Muslims. The partition of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India did much to exacerbate this feeling. Some ten days ago, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its followers decided that it would send teams of volunteers to build the temple, permission or no permission. A number of them went from the state of Gujarat which lies along the western coast to the north of Maharashtra. On their way back, their train was waylaid at a station called Godhra by Muslim fanatics who set fire to the train after having sealed the Hindu volunteers inside. Some fifty plus Hindus died in the conflagration, which set off a chain of events culminating in retaliatory riots all over Gujarat in which hundreds of Muslims were murdered by Hindu mobs. And Muslim fanatics fought Hindus with petrol bombs and acid. It has even had peripheral effect in places as far off as Hyderabad in the south and Lucknow in the north. The army has been called in in Ahmedabad the capital of Gujarat to quell the riots and they have largely succeeded in bringing about an uneasy calm. The essence of the issue is religion and the land on which a religious structure is supposed to have stood. There is only one way to solve the issue in perpetuity. First, do nothing that encourages or even allows religious sentiment to creep into the issue. Second, create something that will discourage any human being or even any living thing going into the place. Many good souls have suggested the creation of a hospital or a garden or a monument to all religions. That will not work for the simple reason that the hospital or garden will inevitably acquire religious overtones and become the subject of a further dispute. The only solution is to make the site of the temple/mosque a nuclear waste dump so that it becomes out of bounds for human use for the next fifty thousand years. We need not bother with what happens to it after that. This drastic measure will also send a condign message to those who fight over land and property in the name of religion. Fight and the place gets converted into a nuclear dump. Do this just once and the message will go home. TOP

Fundamentalism, the Taliban and Indo-Pak history

Fundamentalism, the Taliban, and the Indo-Pak History 11-02-2001 Sharad Bailur
		I would like to put forward for the reader’s consideration a number of propositions. First, that the Taliban is NOT a fundamentalist organisation. In fact the concept of fundamentalism as interpreted in this day and age is alien to the Quran. Second, that the concept of Jihad is central to Islam. And third, that those who do not follow these Islamic principles in full are committing blasphemy in the sight of Allah (Peace be upon Him). Let us begin with the word Taliban. The word Taleem means education, preferably an education received in a Madarsa or Muslim seminary in which students are trained to recite the Quran by rote. A Talib is therefore a student who receives his Taleem at a Madarsa. The plural of Talib is Taliban. The Taleem, which demands that students should learn to recite the Quran by rote, is because the Quran is in ancient Arabic. Most students do not know ancient Arabic. The Quran cannot be translated into a modern language because it is regarded as the actual word of God. Any translation is bound to distort it. It’s meaning is therefore expatiated upon by the learned or the Ulema. A Muslim or true believer is one who accepts the Quran as the word of God in all its aspects, and practises what the Quran demands in its entirety. He therefore follows the precepts of Halal. Conversely any person, who accepts what he likes from the Quran and discards what he does not, is not a Muslim. By this token a Muslim who consumes alcohol or eats pork is no Muslim. The exact word for such acts in Arabic is Haram. The word Haram is interesting. From Haram comes the concept of Harb or disbelief. The land of the unbeliever or kaffir is therefore referred to as Dar-ul-Harb, while the land of the believer is referred to as the Dar-ul-Islam. The Quran enjoins upon its believers to persuade unbelievers or kaffirs to accept the Quran as the word of God. Persuasion is the best means for this purpose of proselytisation. Unfortunately, people often refuse to be persuaded. This is seen as a fact of life in the Quran. When persuasion becomes impossible the Quran enjoins upon the faithful to wage a holy war or Jihad to persuade them by force. Jihad is therefore a means of getting followers for the religion. Islam does not merely enjoin its people to wage a holy war. It trains them for the purpose. The holy month of Ramzan demands that the faithful eat and drink nothing during the day. At the end of this month of daylong fasting comes Ramzan Id or the festival of Ramzan. During the days of Muhammad, wars were fought during the day since at night it was difficult to see. When you wage a war you cannot say to an on-rushing enemy, “Just a moment. It is teatime. Would you care for some cake?” Nights were therefore reserved for resting, taking care of the wounded and the dying and for general repairs. Daylight signified the resumption of hostilities. Ramzan is therefore the training given to the faithful for going into battle and succeeding. The training, spread over a month, helps build endurance and the ability to stand up to the heat of battle amidst hunger and thirst. The festival at the end signifies victory over the kaffir. Nowhere does the Quran say that Jihad should not be waged against the innocent. If the innocent are unbelievers according to the precepts of Islam Jihad should be waged against them. The Taliban of Afghanistan insist, and correctly, that all they are doing is following the Quran. It is not that they are extremists. They are merely doing what the Quran demands of them. After all, where does one draw a line that says that the neglect of an Islamic precept thus far is tolerable and beyond it is un-Islamic? The Quran does not allow the word of God to be polluted by those who choose to interpret it to their convenience. The Quran likewise enjoins upon those who live in the Dar-ul-Islam or the land of the faithful to wage a jihad on those who live in the Dar-ul-harb. This is a holy duty that helps in attaining jannat or heaven on the day of qayamat or day of judgement. Taking this as given data let us see what Islam has done. It has waged a thousand-year jihad against the subcontinent of India and it largely succeeded in ruling over this land of kaffirs between the years 900 AD and 1857 AD, forcibly converting those who came in its path and imposing a tax known as the Jaziya on those who refused conversion. During this period, Islam and its devout followers succeeded in destroying much of Hindu culture, its religion and the precepts it stood for. It brought to a green and verdant land a faith born in the blast of desert sand and laid waste to it. Muslim rulers repeatedly and over hundreds of years destroyed temples and looted their treasures, took away Hindu women to rape at leisure and destroyed Hindu artefacts—all in the name of Jihad. At that time Jihad as interpreted did just what the Quran ordered, nothing more, nothing less. If India today reacts with de ja vu at what happens in Kashmir it is because it has seen it happening since long before it learned how to speak English. India has suffered Islamic purgatory and seen firsthand what Jihad and Islam can do over a thousand years. Its reaction to the World Trade Center attack was not one of surprise, but one of, “Oh no. Not again!” This is something that America has not yet understood. Whatever the domination of a largely Hindu population over ten centuries did to the local population, it did something quite different to the Muslim population of the subcontinent. Used as they were to ruling over the Kaffirs over a millennium, a feeling developed especially among Muslims in powerful positions, hardly articulated perhaps and carefully kept under wraps safe from scrutiny by kaffir eyes, that the Muslim was born superior to the Hindu. How else could Muslim kingdoms have ruled over this alien religion and culture over ten centuries? There was probably something to it, too. The Hindus deserved what they got by the mere fact of their being plain incompetent at defending themselves and having allowed their own culture to ossify and go to seed. I have myself experienced this extraordinary feeling among my classmates in Hyderabad almost all of whom came from the families of the Jagirdars of the Nizam of Hyderabad. There was a barely-concealed but never articulated superciliousness among my Muslim classmates peeping out at unguarded moments towards their Hindu classmates. This, a full ten years after Independence had given to the Muslims the Pakistan they so craved. Pakistan was born out of a desire for a nation separate from the domination of the Hindus. Why did they fear the domination of the Hindus? The Muslims who went to Pakistan could never reconcile themselves to being ruled by an inferior people. That is the reason every child in Pakistan is taught from primary school that a Pakistani soldier is worth ten Indian soldiers. And that is the real reason they have never been able to reconcile themselves to the loss of Bangla Desh. President Musharraf’s justification for asking for Kashmir on a platter was that Pakistan had to have recompense for the loss of Bangla Desh. So here is a superior people convinced of its superiority and the superiority of its religion that has little to say for itself except in terms of religion. It is a nation of converts who refuse to acknowledge the fact that they are converts. It is a state that denies that it had any culture or history before it became this artificially created nation. It follows social customs barely distinguishable from those of the Hindus they left behind. It also follows a brand of Islam known as Sufism that has strong overtones of the Hindu way of life that they once accepted. Sufism is not accepted as Islam in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam. Islam bans music. But the Sufi tradition involves the singing of traditional hymns called “Qawwali.” Baisakhi, the spring festival, is celebrated in Pakistan. It is a Hindu tradition. The 4,000-year-old Hindu blood that flows in the veins of the Pakistanis cannot help but reverberate in the music of their distant ancestors. It is therefore quite common for Pakistani singers to invoke Hindu Gods and sing, “Hey Raam…” (Raam is a Hindu God and an incarnation of Vishnu) because Islam does not permit music. Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali do it. So did Ustad Barkat Ali Khan and the two singing pairs Salamat Ali and Nazakat Ali, and Amanat and Fateh Ali Khan and even that grand dame of Hindustani Classical music, Roshanara Begum, who migrated a full two years after Independence to Paklstan from India. One thousand years of Islam has merely addled their brains but has had no effect on their “convert blood.” I can do no better than to quote Robert Kaplan who wrote thus in the Atlantic Monthly in September 2000: “At the end of my visit to Pakistan, I sat with a group of journalists trying to fathom why Nawaz Sharif, when still Prime Minister, had reportedly turned down an offer of several billion dollars in aid from the United States in return for agreeing not to test nuclear weapons. A Pakistani friend supplied the simple answer: 'India had tested them, so we had to. It would not have mattered who was Prime Minister or what America offered. We have never defined ourselves in our own right—only in relation to India. That is our tragedy.'” It is for this reason that India has to always be on its guard. The fact that it is not Islamic and therefore constitutes an eyesore of a Dar-ul-harb in Pakistani eyes and that it occupies a larger part of the subcontinent than Pakistan does is reason enough. The problem for the rest of the non-Muslim world is two-fold. This problem has been growing all the time once the Muslim world understood that it could dictate terms because it was sitting on a sea of oil. It should have been noticed after a single instance of a Salman Rushdie writing a blasphemous novel resulted in a fatwa, issued by the Iranians, calling for his death. There have been any number of such fatwas, or “orders,” being issued for such transgressions of Islam over the years. There have been “condemnations” from all “right thinking” and “moderate” Muslims from all over the world about what happened on September 11th. The fact, however, is that not a single fatwa has been issued by a single Muslim cleric from even the remotest part of the world against the terrorists or the organisations that were responsible for the crime. Why not? It is quite simple, really. There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. You are either a Muslim in the eyes of Allah or you are not. Nineteen Christians were slaughtered in cold blood in Bahawalpur in Pakistan, in a church on October 28th. When prominent Pakistani Muslims were interviewed on TV their reaction was, “Of course we condemn it, but Islam is a very tolerant religion and does not countenance such atrocities.” Why do they jump to the defence of Islam so quickly? How about issuing a fatwa against those who did it? And if not, why not? Why are the condemnations not wholehearted and why are they so obviously mealy-mouthed? Islam is a particularly dangerous but familiar ideology. It has a prophet like Communism did—Muhammad on the one hand and Karl Marx on the other. It has a book like communism did—The Quran on the one hand and Das Kapital on the other. Both promise a paradise to its converts that cannot be attained. It even has a God like communism did—Allah on the one hand and Dialectical Materialism on the other. Both have their fanatics: We were then afraid of the Reds; it is time we acquired a similar dread of the Greens. It should be dealt with just like communism was dealt with, an ideology run amok and threatening the lives of everyone around it. The difference, of course is that the communists were an educated lot. These people, unfortunately, are mostly not. In fact, by the very nature of the fact that the Quran is untranslatable Islam sanctions and glorifies ignorance. The problem lies with the fact that Islam offers solace in the hereafter, something Communism said did not exist. What killed off Communism was its realism. What keeps Islam going is the exact opposite—its unrealism. When George W. Bush says that his war is against terrorism and not against Islam he is missing the wood for the trees. The individual trees are terrorism. The wood as a whole is Islam. When the Taliban says that the war by America is a war on Islam, take them at their own word. While eradicating the Taliban or Osama bin Laden is the correct step it is just a small first step. It is for this reason that I suspect that Samuel Huntington was right all along. It is a clash of civilisations. Whether America and the rest of the civilised world has the stomach and the gumption to face up to this reality and take this battle to its logical conclusion is a matter of great doubt. America and its much-vaunted coalition could not even remove one Saddam Hussein. This is a much bigger and more diverse enemy. Even if the entire world got together to destroy Islam and nuked the Kaaba, for example, it cannot solve the problem. The problem, ultimately, cannot be solved with bombs but with ideas. It will continue to fester till such time as the regimes of the Middle East take it upon themselves to instill a modicum of modern scientific education into their populations, especially their female populations, and till that helps to relax the hypnotic grip of this ideology masquerading as religion. Till then, let us pray to our various Gods. Or better still, learn to understand the value of thinking for ourselves. —Sharad Bailur, Mumbai, India, 11/02/2001

The harm that bad English does

The harm that bad English does

by

Sharad Bailur

“Is it?”, was the first “stylish” expression that I heard from a boxwalla working for ICI the chemical multinational giant, some time in the late fifties. He meant, “Did you?” or “Is that so?” I was young then. Young enough to think that anything spoken by anyone in authority, someone who was so visibly in control, was correct. “Is it?” as a form of cure-all formed part of the multinational boxwalla lexicon for over two decades and seems to have died some sort of an unsung death about two decades ago. I still hear it rarely, but more and more among the elderly.

Our inability to understand the full nuances of a phrase in English, of course, comes of thinking in our own language and then trying as hard as possible to translate it into educated English. That, at least, is understandable. What is not understandable is carelessness about correct meanings. It is quite the thing in Mumbai for an invitation to be delivered for the inauguration of something, “at the hands of”, some body. The fact that “at the hands of” has derogatory connotations is something that the ordinary Marathi speaker finds incomprehensible. I once told a colleague that only murders got committed “at the hands of” someone. Similarly some time ago an official note sent up to the top management of my organisation referred to the “enormity of the task”. It took some persuading to explain to everyone right up to the top that “enormity” meant gross wickedness, not magnitude or enormousness.

This has resulted in major disasters, not just among the ordinary people but in matters of national importance like India’s foreign policy and even in the controlling of law and order. When the British left India they had clearly stated that British India recognises Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. A suzerain is a state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous. In other words while British India recognised that China had some control over Tibet, Tibet would be recognised as being internally autonomous. Some uneducated idiot in the Foreign Office confused “suzerainty” with, “sovereignty”, and in 1951 the Foreign Office announced that India recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. This meant that Tibet was recognised by India as Chinese territory. Any hope of having Tibet as a buffer state between ourselves and China evaporated with just this one misinterpretation of English, to the benefit of the Chinese.

Today the “K” word is Kashmir. People are trained in Pakistan in training camps with the sole purpose of causing murder and mayhem after crossing over into Indian Kashmir. They have been responsible for a long running battle with the Indian police and the army but it is not just the Indian army or the police that are the targets of these animals. It is the local people of Kashmir. Indian newspapers revel in calling such people, ”Militants”. A militant is a person who militates or rebels against the established order. It would be correct to describe a local Kashmiri as a militant if he does not like India and Indians and rebels. A person who sneaks in from across the border to commit mass murder in India should not be given this spuriously benign face. He is a terrorist, plain and simple. By describing such people as militants, India is actually playing into the hands of Pakistan which gratefully accepts such descriptions, since it meets very well with the stand that it takes. At the recent talks Pakistan bucked like a bronco when the Indian side described what was happening as “cross border terrorism”. For the first time someone in the Foreign Office had understood the significance of using wrong language and the harm it can do, and had come out with a correct, if blunt, term for the phenomenon.

Much the same sort of short shrift is given to other less important but nevertheless difficult problems. Veerappan is a brigand, a dacoit and a murderer. He has been responsible for killing more than seventeen people. Some half literate newspaper hack called him a ”sandalwood smuggler”. The epithet stuck, if only because other reporters had neither the education nor the application to find out if that was all Veerappan was. The fact that he had a much more malign face than that of a mere sandal wood smuggler was lost in a cacophony of misleading, almost eulogistic, description of Veerappan as some sort of modern Robin Hood.

This sort of wrong description does not apply only to humans. Large multinationals sell “ice cream” that isn’t ice cream. It is made of vegetable oil, water and emulsifying agents. Luckily, it is not harmful. When pressed, they are careful enough, for fear of the law, to call it “frozen dessert” or “non-dairy ice cream”. In Europe the same thing is kept under separate storage and is called Mellorine, not ice cream. Here, people, who don’t know better, are paying the prices they would for real ice cream and eating stuff made of vegetable oil, and they are not aware of the fact that they are being cheated simply because they do not know the difference between “frozen dessert” and ice cream. When I pointed this out to Dr. Kurien, he was the first to instruct the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation to insist on giving Amul ice cream the slogan, “Real milk. Real ice cream”, to distinguish it from the imitation.

North India is facing an epidemic of adulterated milk being sold to unsuspecting housewives. Testing for fat, which is the normal way to test milk, does not work. This concoction of vegetable oil, detergent powder, urea, chalk or poster paint and dirty water goes by the facile name, ”synthetic milk”. Synthetic milk is nothing but poison because the titanium dioxide in the poster paint is carcinogenic. The bacteria contaminated water often results in enteric infections. The description, “Synthetic milk”, gives to this concoction a spuriously benign face and benefits those who make it. We should, I suppose, thank our stars that it is not called “non-dairy milk”. It would have been, if it had the benefit of multinational clout behind it.

Much of the problem of misnomers and mis-descriptions comes from two separate phenomena. The first is an inadequate education. There is constant pressure on children to do well in school but no pressure is greater than for them to do well in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Almost unanimously, all parents wish that their children should become engineers or doctors. Therefore while attention is given to the child’s prowess in Mathematics and Science there is no pressure to learn how to write well, especially in English, partly also because the parents themselves are uncomfortable in the language. Those schools that have English as their medium of instruction develop in children the ability to speak fairly fluently, but their ability to write is, at best, barely passable. Second, those who do really well are invariably those in the Science stream and therefore get into colleges offering professional courses. Those who opt for the Arts are almost always second-raters. Their prowess at English is probably worse than those who do Science. It is these students who finally drift into journalism. There are exceptions, of course, but this is more or less what happens. For example, I was a second-rater. If I had not gone into banking I would have become a journalist. Today, I do Corporate Communications. Near enough.

Third, reading and the spirit of curiosity does not come easily to Indian students, used as they are to rote learning. And with the advent of television even those who would normally have developed the habit tend to become couch potatoes and watch faces and bodies on the screen jigging up and down like so many marionettes. The absence of television did a lot for earlier generations to encourage a habit of reading. Reading by itself improves the writing of any language. If the reading is extensive in range it makes for broad frames of reference and better general knowledge. The absence of the reading habit is what these former students take into their journalistic careers. Combined with mental laziness this leads to journalese of a peculiar sort. For example, we have this trite illiterate headline every year after a heavy downpour: “City limps back to normalcy”. (Why not just plain “normal”? Nobody knows.) The same headline every year. It is often the result of the desk editor being too lazy to invent another headline. It can also be that he genuinely does not know better. But much worse, it could be that he couldn’t care less.

It is this factor, of infirm understanding of English, that is really responsible for mis-description and the wrong use of words that make for meanings widely different from those that should actually be used. The only way this can be improved upon is for newspapers to employ people who are not merely able to write but those who write well. If seniors among the editorial staff take it upon themselves to instil into their juniors a certain habit of merely wishing to write better, they automatically will over time. The willingness to learn to craft sentences and take pride in writing ability comes much later, but this, at least, will be a beginning.

Some thirty years ago I was appalled to see a first edit by the celebrated Shyamlal in the Times of India that began with, “Who do they think they are kidding?” Today, “more better”, commonly finds place in its second edits. It appears that we shall have to be satisfied with being condemned to many more years of, “Limping back to normalcy”.