By Syed Saleem Shahzad
On March 25, United States intelligence, despite detailed briefing by Pakistan, missed the chance to take out Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, one of the world's most wanted men with a US State Department bounty of US$5 million on his head.
This failure, some arrested men linked to Mehsud's banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) network have revealed, has set the scene for renewed unrest across the country, starting in the port city of Karachi.
Based on specific information they had handed over, senior officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence in Islamabad were confident of receiving a good-news call from their American friends concerning an attack on Mehsud's sanctuary. They got the call, saying that a target had been hit and eight al-Qaeda militants killed. The Predator drone strike was in Makeen in the South Waziristan tribal area, the headquarters of Mehsud, but crucially it left his compound unharmed.
The attack angered Mehsud, a senior jihadi leader told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, and he has vowed revenge. "The attack has left him like a wounded lion in the jungle, and everything and anything could be his prey," the jihadi said.
"However, in Mehsud's case, his anger will be vented only against Pakistan. The reason is very technical. Three large Pakistani tribal-based networks are in the region of North Waziristan and South Waziristan. These include the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, based in Dande Darpa Khail. This includes 22 powerful jehbas [groups]. The region borders Ghulam Khan, which goes into the Afghan province of Khost. This network is very influential and useful for attacks on NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] troops in Khost, Paktia and Ghazni.
"The second network," the jihadi continued, "is run by Mullah Nazeer and is based in the South Waziristan region of the Wazir tribes near Angor Ada and Shakai, which borders with Paktika. Nazeer runs the largest jihadi network in Paktika and is the main source of attacks on NATO troops. Neither Nazeer nor Siraj [Haqqani] is any threat to Pakistan, therefore NATO constantly attacks their positions and demands that Pakistan also take action against them.
"In this whole game, the strangest situation is that of Baitullah Mehsud. He is based in Makeen, which is disconnected from the border region and is near areas close to the Pakistani security forces. That's why Pakistan is always interested in getting ceasefire agreements with Mehsud's network, which is numerically the largest among all [militant groups], to protect its troops.
"Any American adventurism in Mehsud's area provokes Mehsud. Mehsud does not have any direct access to Afghan provinces, so he vents his reactions on Pakistani troops, blaming them as co-conspirators against him," the jihadi leader said.
Mehsud's activities have mostly been restricted to North-West Frontier Province, apart from sporadic attacks in Islamabad and its twin city, Rawalpindi. However, after the recent developments, including the first attack on his area, the Mehsud network and other al-Qaeda linked groups plan "real fireworks" all over the country, according to people linked to his network who were arrested in Karachi.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID), in collaboration with an intelligence agency, disclosed on Monday that it had arrested a close aide of Mehsud - 59-year-old Badshah Deen Mehsud, son of Gul Khadeen Mehsud, a resident of Shah Noorani Goth, Karachi and South Waziristan.
Badshah, who speaks Urdu and Pashto, is affiliated with Mehsud's TTP and is a close aide of Mehsud. One of his sons, Mehrban, also works for the TTP.
The CID's Fayyaz Khan claimed at a press briefing that Badshah provided logistical support to Mehsud and was allegedly involved in crimes ranging from robbing money changers and banks to providing vehicles and shelter to those working for the TTP in Karachi. He is also said to have provided medical treatment to injured associates.
Senior investigators have told HNN that the situation in Karachi is very delicate and law-enforcement agencies had decided to avoid any direct clashes with militants. That is, there was a tacit agreement that the militants could use Karachi to raise funds and for other logistic purposes, and the security agencies would not carry out any operations against their sanctuaries.
Most of the fund-raising was to provide support for the Taliban in Afghanistan - a source of anger for the US. This concern was translated to a Karachi-based political party, the Muttehida Quami Movement (MQM), which recently began a campaign against the Taliban in the city.
This included an incident in which the MQM blew the whistle on a kidnapping operation in Karachi by the Mehsud tribe in which several police officers were injured. This forced the police to take action, leading to several arrests, including the high-profile one announced on Monday.
With the "truce" with the security forces having been broken, Mehsud and his allied groups now want to strike back, starting by creating chaos in Karachi. They have chosen the city for two reasons:
It has the largest concentration of the Mehsud tribe after South Waziristan.
It has a non-Pashtun majority, making it ripe for ethnic violence with the second-largest community, the Pashtuns.
In this battle, HNN has learned, the militants are searching for ways to unnerve their enemies in top positions, including high-profile kidnappings in the country's largest city and financial center.
The battles of the tribal areas have now unmistakably moved to the urban centers.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Tigers stalk the ballot box
By Sudha Ramachandran
Even as the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) observed a two-day ceasefire in the island early this week, the LTTE and its supporters are heating things up in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu with threats and vitriolic speeches.
While Indian intelligence agencies have raised an alarm that the LTTE could attack senior political leaders in the country, politicians in Tamil Nadu known for their links to the LTTE just a few score kilometers across the Palk Strait have threatened bloodshed in the state if LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran comes to any harm.
India's month-long elections for 543 seats in the Lower House of parliament, the Lok Sabha, began on Thursday, with voting taking place in five phases - Tamil Nadu votes in the last phase on May 16 to elect 39 representatives.
Last week, security officials warned of a possible threat to the lives of Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka from the LTTE. Sonia and Rahul, both members of parliament, are contesting in the polls and have been campaigning for Congress across the country.
Sonia is the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber in May 1991 while campaigning at Sriperumpudur in Tamil Nadu.
Indian intelligence operatives believe that the Gandhi family is once again on the LTTE radar as it is furious with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for not pressuring the Sri Lankan government to halt its military operations against the battered LTTE. Also thought to be high on the LTTE's hit list is the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, whose Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK) party is a close ally of the Congress.
The LTTE has suffered grievously in the war over the past two years and has lost all the territory it once controlled in the north and east of the island. The Tigers are now reportedly confined to a 17-square-kilometer "no-fire zone".
While the LTTE has refuted reports that it has the Gandhi family in its crosshairs, media and politicians known to be close to the Tigers have made vituperative attacks on Sonia, holding her responsible for the LTTE's military debacle. According to pro-LTTE media, it is because of Sonia that India is quietly supporting the Sri Lankan government's ongoing military campaign to once and for all destroy the LTTE.
An Indo-Asian News Service report has drawn attention to a commentary in the Puthinam website, reportedly linked to the LTTE's political wing, which argues that Sonia is determined to wipe out the LTTE. She "will not sleep in peace till the last nail is hammered on Prabhakaran's coffin", it says, blaming Sonia for the suffering of the Tamils and concluding that it is India, not Sri Lanka, that is their enemy.
As venomous in their attacks on Sonia are pro-LTTE Indian politicians such as V Goplalaswamy, aka Vaiko, leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (MDMK). In speeches last week, Vaiko, a strident supporter of the LTTE who has vociferously campaigned for the Tigers to be de-proscribed, hurled abuse at the government, holding it responsible for Tamils being killed in Sri Lanka. "They've supplied arms, they've supplied radars, they've sent military for the genocide of Lankan Tamils," Vaiko alleged.
"If anything happens to Prabhakaran, rivers of blood would flow in Tamil Nadu," he thundered at a rally, warning that India wouldn't remain a united country, that is, Tamils would secede from the country if the war against the LTTE was not stopped.
"It has been quite a long time and we have forgotten what happened in Sriperumbudur," Vaiko said, in a chilling reminder of what the LTTE is capable of - the LTTE's suicide bombing of Rajiv Gandhi 18 years ago.
For the first time in many years, the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is at the center of the Tamil Nadu election battleground. This is thanks to the efforts of a host of LTTE sympathizers in the state, such as P Nedumaran, Thol Thirumavalavan and Vaiko. For several years, these leaders have been openly campaigning for a lifting of the ban on the LTTE. In the past two years, with the war going against the LTTE, these leaders have organized rallies, strikes and marches to pressure Delhi to take a more pro-LTTE stand.
While their efforts have cut no ice with the government, it has worked in stirring sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamils and in turning the public mood in Tamil Nadu in favor of the LTTE. Opinion polls indicate significant sympathy for the LTTE. This is no small achievement, considering the revulsion the LTTE's brutal methods have evoked among sizeable sections of the population since Rajiv's assassination.
With public sentiment now sympathetic to the Sri Lankan Tamils and to some extent to the LTTE, being seen to be unsympathetic to the plight of the Lankan Tamils would be disastrous this poll season. Parties have therefore protected themselves by expressing support to the Sri Lankan Tamils in their manifestoes and/or organizing hunger strikes and rallies on the issue.
The DMK and the Congress are on the defensive, fighting off accusations from the opposition alliance led by the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) and pro-LTTE parties like the MDMK and the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) that the UPA government has ignored the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils and failed to "protect the Tamil race from genocide" by the Sri Lankan government.
The decibel-level of speeches by politicians like Vaiko and others would suggest that it is the Sri Lankan problem that is the main issue in the Tamil Nadu elections. It is true that this issue has dominated media coverage of the poll in recent weeks. But the important question is whether this factor will determine how people vote.
In the 1991 election that followed Rajiv's assassination, the DMK, which was then in power in Tamil Nadu, was wiped out. Its brazen support of the LTTE from 1988 to 1991 was resented by the Tamil Nadu electorate, which blamed the party for the assassination and punished it at the election.
But in the years that followed, it has been caste, corruption and governance that have determined how people voted. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue was not a factor. The steady improvement in the PMK's electoral performance for instance must be attributed to caste factors, not its pro-Tiger rhetoric.
Political commentators say that in this election, too, while the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is raising the political temperature in Tamil Nadu and anxiety levels in Colombo, it will be issues of governance, development and corruption that will dominate in most constituencies.
This will put the DMK-Congress combine at a disadvantage. As the ruling alliance in the federal and state governments, it is likely to come up against an anti-incumbency vote. Moreover, the opposition AIADMK has managed to pull in more parties - the PMK, MDMK and the left as its allies.
The MDMK and the PMK are expected to do well. How will that impact on the post-poll scenario? These are small parties, contesting just four and seven seats, respectively in the elections. These figures might seem small in a 543-seat Lower House, but in an election which is expected to throw up a very close result these numbers will be significant. They could wield influence far greater than their numbers would suggest.
It is difficult to forecast their post-poll moves as it is not ideology but political expediency that has guided the strategies of Tamil Nadu's parties. Consider this: his fiercely pro-LTTE position notwithstanding, Vaiko is in a seat-sharing arrangement with J Jayalalithaa, leader of the AIADMK, who was responsible for dismantling the LTTE network in Tamil Nadu in the 1990s. He has been careful not to make his pro-LTTE speeches when he shares the campaign platform with Jayalalithaa.
The MDMK and the PMK might be spewing venom on the Congress today, but the possibility of either switching sides in the event of the UPA coalition returning to power cannot be ruled out. The PMK has said so in so many words.
There is some concern that should the pro-LTTE parties do well, they will demand a more pro-LTTE position as the price of their support. But this is unlikely to determine which alliance they will support post-elections. For all their rabble-rousing speeches on the Tigers, it is the fruits of power - how many ministers and which portfolios - that will decide which alliance they will eventually back.
Even as the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) observed a two-day ceasefire in the island early this week, the LTTE and its supporters are heating things up in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu with threats and vitriolic speeches.
While Indian intelligence agencies have raised an alarm that the LTTE could attack senior political leaders in the country, politicians in Tamil Nadu known for their links to the LTTE just a few score kilometers across the Palk Strait have threatened bloodshed in the state if LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran comes to any harm.
India's month-long elections for 543 seats in the Lower House of parliament, the Lok Sabha, began on Thursday, with voting taking place in five phases - Tamil Nadu votes in the last phase on May 16 to elect 39 representatives.
Last week, security officials warned of a possible threat to the lives of Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka from the LTTE. Sonia and Rahul, both members of parliament, are contesting in the polls and have been campaigning for Congress across the country.
Sonia is the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber in May 1991 while campaigning at Sriperumpudur in Tamil Nadu.
Indian intelligence operatives believe that the Gandhi family is once again on the LTTE radar as it is furious with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for not pressuring the Sri Lankan government to halt its military operations against the battered LTTE. Also thought to be high on the LTTE's hit list is the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, whose Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK) party is a close ally of the Congress.
The LTTE has suffered grievously in the war over the past two years and has lost all the territory it once controlled in the north and east of the island. The Tigers are now reportedly confined to a 17-square-kilometer "no-fire zone".
While the LTTE has refuted reports that it has the Gandhi family in its crosshairs, media and politicians known to be close to the Tigers have made vituperative attacks on Sonia, holding her responsible for the LTTE's military debacle. According to pro-LTTE media, it is because of Sonia that India is quietly supporting the Sri Lankan government's ongoing military campaign to once and for all destroy the LTTE.
An Indo-Asian News Service report has drawn attention to a commentary in the Puthinam website, reportedly linked to the LTTE's political wing, which argues that Sonia is determined to wipe out the LTTE. She "will not sleep in peace till the last nail is hammered on Prabhakaran's coffin", it says, blaming Sonia for the suffering of the Tamils and concluding that it is India, not Sri Lanka, that is their enemy.
As venomous in their attacks on Sonia are pro-LTTE Indian politicians such as V Goplalaswamy, aka Vaiko, leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (MDMK). In speeches last week, Vaiko, a strident supporter of the LTTE who has vociferously campaigned for the Tigers to be de-proscribed, hurled abuse at the government, holding it responsible for Tamils being killed in Sri Lanka. "They've supplied arms, they've supplied radars, they've sent military for the genocide of Lankan Tamils," Vaiko alleged.
"If anything happens to Prabhakaran, rivers of blood would flow in Tamil Nadu," he thundered at a rally, warning that India wouldn't remain a united country, that is, Tamils would secede from the country if the war against the LTTE was not stopped.
"It has been quite a long time and we have forgotten what happened in Sriperumbudur," Vaiko said, in a chilling reminder of what the LTTE is capable of - the LTTE's suicide bombing of Rajiv Gandhi 18 years ago.
For the first time in many years, the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is at the center of the Tamil Nadu election battleground. This is thanks to the efforts of a host of LTTE sympathizers in the state, such as P Nedumaran, Thol Thirumavalavan and Vaiko. For several years, these leaders have been openly campaigning for a lifting of the ban on the LTTE. In the past two years, with the war going against the LTTE, these leaders have organized rallies, strikes and marches to pressure Delhi to take a more pro-LTTE stand.
While their efforts have cut no ice with the government, it has worked in stirring sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamils and in turning the public mood in Tamil Nadu in favor of the LTTE. Opinion polls indicate significant sympathy for the LTTE. This is no small achievement, considering the revulsion the LTTE's brutal methods have evoked among sizeable sections of the population since Rajiv's assassination.
With public sentiment now sympathetic to the Sri Lankan Tamils and to some extent to the LTTE, being seen to be unsympathetic to the plight of the Lankan Tamils would be disastrous this poll season. Parties have therefore protected themselves by expressing support to the Sri Lankan Tamils in their manifestoes and/or organizing hunger strikes and rallies on the issue.
The DMK and the Congress are on the defensive, fighting off accusations from the opposition alliance led by the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) and pro-LTTE parties like the MDMK and the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) that the UPA government has ignored the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils and failed to "protect the Tamil race from genocide" by the Sri Lankan government.
The decibel-level of speeches by politicians like Vaiko and others would suggest that it is the Sri Lankan problem that is the main issue in the Tamil Nadu elections. It is true that this issue has dominated media coverage of the poll in recent weeks. But the important question is whether this factor will determine how people vote.
In the 1991 election that followed Rajiv's assassination, the DMK, which was then in power in Tamil Nadu, was wiped out. Its brazen support of the LTTE from 1988 to 1991 was resented by the Tamil Nadu electorate, which blamed the party for the assassination and punished it at the election.
But in the years that followed, it has been caste, corruption and governance that have determined how people voted. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue was not a factor. The steady improvement in the PMK's electoral performance for instance must be attributed to caste factors, not its pro-Tiger rhetoric.
Political commentators say that in this election, too, while the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is raising the political temperature in Tamil Nadu and anxiety levels in Colombo, it will be issues of governance, development and corruption that will dominate in most constituencies.
This will put the DMK-Congress combine at a disadvantage. As the ruling alliance in the federal and state governments, it is likely to come up against an anti-incumbency vote. Moreover, the opposition AIADMK has managed to pull in more parties - the PMK, MDMK and the left as its allies.
The MDMK and the PMK are expected to do well. How will that impact on the post-poll scenario? These are small parties, contesting just four and seven seats, respectively in the elections. These figures might seem small in a 543-seat Lower House, but in an election which is expected to throw up a very close result these numbers will be significant. They could wield influence far greater than their numbers would suggest.
It is difficult to forecast their post-poll moves as it is not ideology but political expediency that has guided the strategies of Tamil Nadu's parties. Consider this: his fiercely pro-LTTE position notwithstanding, Vaiko is in a seat-sharing arrangement with J Jayalalithaa, leader of the AIADMK, who was responsible for dismantling the LTTE network in Tamil Nadu in the 1990s. He has been careful not to make his pro-LTTE speeches when he shares the campaign platform with Jayalalithaa.
The MDMK and the PMK might be spewing venom on the Congress today, but the possibility of either switching sides in the event of the UPA coalition returning to power cannot be ruled out. The PMK has said so in so many words.
There is some concern that should the pro-LTTE parties do well, they will demand a more pro-LTTE position as the price of their support. But this is unlikely to determine which alliance they will support post-elections. For all their rabble-rousing speeches on the Tigers, it is the fruits of power - how many ministers and which portfolios - that will decide which alliance they will eventually back.
More than a tale of two personalities
By Kajol Singh
In mature political systems, rival practitioners never need to let go of ordinary norms of civility, the common courtesies. The ceremony attending a peaceful transfer of power is an unwritten part of the game - the smooth choreography of the George W Bush-Barack Obama transition has any number of informal precedents in the Indian system. The oft-quoted example is that of the late Rajiv Gandhi, after a particularly nasty election campaign in 1989 that saw him smeared with the Bofors gun deal scandal, graciously escorting his successor V P Singh, the very man who had led the charge against him, to the high chair.
But this time, the strains on the system are showing. The country is in poll mode: Thursday is the first of five phases of parliamentary voting for India's 714 million voters for 543 seats in the Lower House of parliament, the Lok Sabha. Exactly one month later, the next prime minister for the next five years should be known.
At the end of what must have been the most personalized and acrimonious run-up to a general election, the two main claimants to that post - incumbent Manmohan Singh, 77, of the Congress party, and Lal Krishna Advani, 82, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) barely acknowledged each other as they came face-to-face this week at a formal function in the central hall of parliament.
The political grapevine in New Delhi was buzzing with talk of the sub-zero temperature between the two, how they avoided each other. Everyone else was surprised by the schoolboy petulance displayed by the two grey eminences - more so because it was an occasion to commemorate a national icon, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who is credited with authoring the constitution, the holy book of India's democracy that was adopted on November 26, 1949, two years after independence.
The stressful streetfighting seen on dusty campaign trails, where accusations are flung about with all the panache of low theater, is never carried back into the rarefied chambers of lawmaking. But here, not only could everyone smell the battle smoke inside the high-domed central hall, the two squabbling sides had barely left the venue that they made Ambedkar himself the fodder for the next round in their slugfest. Advani accused the Congress of sabotaging Ambedkar's election to the Lok Sabha, in 1952. The Congress hit back, saying Advani should first sack Arun Shourie, a high-profile party colleague, for calling Ambedkar "a British collaborator" in a book.
Why, on the eve of a national election, was everyone arguing about events fading away into the distance of half a century? There is both a general and a more proximate, urgent reason. For one, Ambedkar, a Dalit who rose from the ranks of the "untouchables" in the old Indian caste hierarchy to become the country's revered law-giver, is always a subject for high symbolism. And every party feels impelled to embrace him. This has become all the more acute since the political consolidation of the Dalit vote around an emergent political formation, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which uses Ambedkar as a cult figure.
The Dalits (the former untouchables/depressed classes) were earlier a natural ally of the Congress, largely owing to Mahatma Gandhi's strong work towards the community's social amelioration. Their moving away from the patronizing yoke of the Congress umbrella has been one of the main causes of the Grand Old Party's enfeeblement in recent decades. More significantly, their rallying together is a political phenomenon with pan-India potential, and is already threatening the political status quo.
Riding this crest is BSP supremo Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh who goes by one name, which sends the largest component of 80 members to the Lok Sabha. Mayawati, who wears Ambedkar on her sleeve, also completes the triangle with Manmohan and Advani - she is the undeclared, potential prime ministerial candidate of what is known as the Third Front, a loose coalition of regional parties with the left acting as the pivot.
The sniping between the otherwise mild-mannered Manmohan and Advani, who revels in his role-playing of the aggressive Hindutva hardliner, goes back to what appears at first to be a superfluous element in this election: the concerted attempt by the BJP to pitch the battle of 2009 as a United States-style presidential election, where the personality, style and charisma of the rival claimants would seem to matter as much as the issues and policy projections.
It has by now become a frequently trotted-out cliche that this election is not about issues. There is no grand divide on a polarizing subject, no all-India wave of any sort - just a compendium of small, local factors. And despite internal security being seen to be under threat after the Mumbai terror attack of last November and the South Asia neighborhood being in ferment, there is no clear anti-incumbency feeling.
The present government is seen to have contained the Pakistan factor to a reasonable degree. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam/Sri Lanka problem has no spillover beyond the southern state of Tamil Nadu. And in Indian-administered Kashmir, just months after a huge voter turnout in the face of a separatist boycott call, a young separatist leader has for the first time decided to run for parliament. Sajjad Lone, the son of Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone, who was killed in 2002, rationalized the fact that he would have to sign on official documents as an Indian citizen saying it was only a "change in strategy, not ideology". Still, it is a major change for the positive.
It is in this situation that the BJP saw a clear advantage in pitching this as a battle of personality. The logic is: the cast-iron appeal of Advani, with his competent public oratory skills, could show up in favorable relief against the dour, professorial air of Manmohan. So they have been personally targeting Manmohan for being "the weakest prime minister ever", a mere cipher who is there only to execute the wishes of the real power behind the throne, the Italian-born Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi.
The constant goading and jibing has stung Manmohan to the quick and, to everyone's surprise, he has joined battle with uncharacteristic vigor and caustic wit. He has been giving it as good as he got, calling Advani "an iron man who melts" in the heat of crisis, referring specifically to the Kandahar hijack crisis of 1999 where the BJP's foreign minister Jaswant Singh escorted three A-list terrorists all the way to a Taliban haven in Afghanistan in exchange for the release of hostages. These included Maulana Masood Azhar, who went on to form the dreaded terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Omar Sheikh, now awaiting the gallows for masterminding the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
Advani has lit into Manmohan in his usual vein, once calling him "nikamma (a colorful Hindi word for a good-for-nothing). Now Manmohan is turning the tables on him, saying Advani was "weeping in a corner" while the Babri Masjid (mosque) was being demolished by right-wing Hindu hoodlums in 1992, and "wringing his hands" as home minister while the bloody Gujarat riots of 2002 were raging.
This slugfest may have made the election a little more interesting for the news channels and bored urban class voters, but the very act of reducing the entire process of electing a government to a verbal sparring is actually directly related to a larger fact. Which is that, the national parties - the Congress, the BJP and the left bloc - are losing ground to a rash of regional parties confined to single states. This is why elections have been throwing up a fractured mandate which makes multi-party coalitions an inevitability in Indian politics, as much as it is in Japan and Italy.
The frequent call for a presidential-style, televised debate between Advani and Manmohan by the BJP - which the Congress rejected out of hand - is linked to an impulse that is actually shared by the two. This is a deep urge to restrict the Indian electoral contest to a bi-polar one, with two all-India coalitions helmed by the "national" parties. In this reading, the so-called Third Front is always seen as a threat, a harbinger of instability. And the sight of two men debating on television could be a comforting vision for the urban class that sees with some trepidation the coming to New Delhi of regional satraps with their own axes to grind and no stake in the "national" framework.
But whether the elections will actually bear out this wish is not immediately apparent. Both the Congress and the BJP are expected to end up in a range of 30 seats on either side of 150, nowhere close to the simple majority figure of 272. The other pole, the left parties, did extremely well by their own standards in the last elections (62 seats) but are expected to lose ground - which they hope to make up via their strategic alliances with regional parties.
The Congress, by taking the grandiose line that it will not go into national alliances, lost most of its regional allies, including crucial ones in the north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The BJP, too, has lost some of its allies as regional parties jockeyed for advantage.
The first phase of elections (to 124 seats) is going to be especially crucial for the Congress. The two states where it is expected to do well - Kerala (20 seats) and half of Andhra Pradesh (22 out of its total 42) vote on Thursday. The northeast states, except Assam, also get covered in this phase - here also the Congress has some presence and in an election where even a single seat might prove crucial the stakes are higher than usual. The tribal states of Jharkhand (six out of 14) and Chhattisgarh (11) also see action - the BJP and Congress are in a direct fight here.
The crucial western state of Maharashtra (13 out of 48) has a curious situation. The Congress' alliance with a splinter group, the Nationalist Congress Party, is wobbly as the NCP has been playing footsie with all sides. Its president Sharad Pawar has prime ministerial ambitions of his own and may be willing to cast his lot with whoever might help him accomplish that end.
In the eastern seaboard state of Orissa, which saw anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal in all of 2008, 10 seats out of 21 see polling in the first phase - including in that troubled tribal district. Here, the ruling state party Biju Janata Dal has broken its 11-year-old alliance with the BJP to get on board the Third Front platform.
Not to mention Bihar, which is seen in India as a metaphor for backwardness. Here 13 seats out of 40 go to polls this week, and in the fray is the colorful personality of Union Rail Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, who is going into a perilous battle without the cover of Congress support.
The other notable whose fate gets decided this week comes from the far south: former United Nations under secretary general Shashi Tharoor, who ran for the highest office unsuccessfully against Ban Ki-moon. He is striding around purposefully in the Kerala capital of Thiruvanthapuram, having shed his three-piece suit for the local white mundu-shirt combo. Embracing regionalism via his attire and nationalism through his choice of political party, the Congress, he seems to offer the varying strands of the present elections in a single-package deal.
In mature political systems, rival practitioners never need to let go of ordinary norms of civility, the common courtesies. The ceremony attending a peaceful transfer of power is an unwritten part of the game - the smooth choreography of the George W Bush-Barack Obama transition has any number of informal precedents in the Indian system. The oft-quoted example is that of the late Rajiv Gandhi, after a particularly nasty election campaign in 1989 that saw him smeared with the Bofors gun deal scandal, graciously escorting his successor V P Singh, the very man who had led the charge against him, to the high chair.
But this time, the strains on the system are showing. The country is in poll mode: Thursday is the first of five phases of parliamentary voting for India's 714 million voters for 543 seats in the Lower House of parliament, the Lok Sabha. Exactly one month later, the next prime minister for the next five years should be known.
At the end of what must have been the most personalized and acrimonious run-up to a general election, the two main claimants to that post - incumbent Manmohan Singh, 77, of the Congress party, and Lal Krishna Advani, 82, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) barely acknowledged each other as they came face-to-face this week at a formal function in the central hall of parliament.
The political grapevine in New Delhi was buzzing with talk of the sub-zero temperature between the two, how they avoided each other. Everyone else was surprised by the schoolboy petulance displayed by the two grey eminences - more so because it was an occasion to commemorate a national icon, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who is credited with authoring the constitution, the holy book of India's democracy that was adopted on November 26, 1949, two years after independence.
The stressful streetfighting seen on dusty campaign trails, where accusations are flung about with all the panache of low theater, is never carried back into the rarefied chambers of lawmaking. But here, not only could everyone smell the battle smoke inside the high-domed central hall, the two squabbling sides had barely left the venue that they made Ambedkar himself the fodder for the next round in their slugfest. Advani accused the Congress of sabotaging Ambedkar's election to the Lok Sabha, in 1952. The Congress hit back, saying Advani should first sack Arun Shourie, a high-profile party colleague, for calling Ambedkar "a British collaborator" in a book.
Why, on the eve of a national election, was everyone arguing about events fading away into the distance of half a century? There is both a general and a more proximate, urgent reason. For one, Ambedkar, a Dalit who rose from the ranks of the "untouchables" in the old Indian caste hierarchy to become the country's revered law-giver, is always a subject for high symbolism. And every party feels impelled to embrace him. This has become all the more acute since the political consolidation of the Dalit vote around an emergent political formation, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which uses Ambedkar as a cult figure.
The Dalits (the former untouchables/depressed classes) were earlier a natural ally of the Congress, largely owing to Mahatma Gandhi's strong work towards the community's social amelioration. Their moving away from the patronizing yoke of the Congress umbrella has been one of the main causes of the Grand Old Party's enfeeblement in recent decades. More significantly, their rallying together is a political phenomenon with pan-India potential, and is already threatening the political status quo.
Riding this crest is BSP supremo Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh who goes by one name, which sends the largest component of 80 members to the Lok Sabha. Mayawati, who wears Ambedkar on her sleeve, also completes the triangle with Manmohan and Advani - she is the undeclared, potential prime ministerial candidate of what is known as the Third Front, a loose coalition of regional parties with the left acting as the pivot.
The sniping between the otherwise mild-mannered Manmohan and Advani, who revels in his role-playing of the aggressive Hindutva hardliner, goes back to what appears at first to be a superfluous element in this election: the concerted attempt by the BJP to pitch the battle of 2009 as a United States-style presidential election, where the personality, style and charisma of the rival claimants would seem to matter as much as the issues and policy projections.
It has by now become a frequently trotted-out cliche that this election is not about issues. There is no grand divide on a polarizing subject, no all-India wave of any sort - just a compendium of small, local factors. And despite internal security being seen to be under threat after the Mumbai terror attack of last November and the South Asia neighborhood being in ferment, there is no clear anti-incumbency feeling.
The present government is seen to have contained the Pakistan factor to a reasonable degree. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam/Sri Lanka problem has no spillover beyond the southern state of Tamil Nadu. And in Indian-administered Kashmir, just months after a huge voter turnout in the face of a separatist boycott call, a young separatist leader has for the first time decided to run for parliament. Sajjad Lone, the son of Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone, who was killed in 2002, rationalized the fact that he would have to sign on official documents as an Indian citizen saying it was only a "change in strategy, not ideology". Still, it is a major change for the positive.
It is in this situation that the BJP saw a clear advantage in pitching this as a battle of personality. The logic is: the cast-iron appeal of Advani, with his competent public oratory skills, could show up in favorable relief against the dour, professorial air of Manmohan. So they have been personally targeting Manmohan for being "the weakest prime minister ever", a mere cipher who is there only to execute the wishes of the real power behind the throne, the Italian-born Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi.
The constant goading and jibing has stung Manmohan to the quick and, to everyone's surprise, he has joined battle with uncharacteristic vigor and caustic wit. He has been giving it as good as he got, calling Advani "an iron man who melts" in the heat of crisis, referring specifically to the Kandahar hijack crisis of 1999 where the BJP's foreign minister Jaswant Singh escorted three A-list terrorists all the way to a Taliban haven in Afghanistan in exchange for the release of hostages. These included Maulana Masood Azhar, who went on to form the dreaded terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Omar Sheikh, now awaiting the gallows for masterminding the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
Advani has lit into Manmohan in his usual vein, once calling him "nikamma (a colorful Hindi word for a good-for-nothing). Now Manmohan is turning the tables on him, saying Advani was "weeping in a corner" while the Babri Masjid (mosque) was being demolished by right-wing Hindu hoodlums in 1992, and "wringing his hands" as home minister while the bloody Gujarat riots of 2002 were raging.
This slugfest may have made the election a little more interesting for the news channels and bored urban class voters, but the very act of reducing the entire process of electing a government to a verbal sparring is actually directly related to a larger fact. Which is that, the national parties - the Congress, the BJP and the left bloc - are losing ground to a rash of regional parties confined to single states. This is why elections have been throwing up a fractured mandate which makes multi-party coalitions an inevitability in Indian politics, as much as it is in Japan and Italy.
The frequent call for a presidential-style, televised debate between Advani and Manmohan by the BJP - which the Congress rejected out of hand - is linked to an impulse that is actually shared by the two. This is a deep urge to restrict the Indian electoral contest to a bi-polar one, with two all-India coalitions helmed by the "national" parties. In this reading, the so-called Third Front is always seen as a threat, a harbinger of instability. And the sight of two men debating on television could be a comforting vision for the urban class that sees with some trepidation the coming to New Delhi of regional satraps with their own axes to grind and no stake in the "national" framework.
But whether the elections will actually bear out this wish is not immediately apparent. Both the Congress and the BJP are expected to end up in a range of 30 seats on either side of 150, nowhere close to the simple majority figure of 272. The other pole, the left parties, did extremely well by their own standards in the last elections (62 seats) but are expected to lose ground - which they hope to make up via their strategic alliances with regional parties.
The Congress, by taking the grandiose line that it will not go into national alliances, lost most of its regional allies, including crucial ones in the north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The BJP, too, has lost some of its allies as regional parties jockeyed for advantage.
The first phase of elections (to 124 seats) is going to be especially crucial for the Congress. The two states where it is expected to do well - Kerala (20 seats) and half of Andhra Pradesh (22 out of its total 42) vote on Thursday. The northeast states, except Assam, also get covered in this phase - here also the Congress has some presence and in an election where even a single seat might prove crucial the stakes are higher than usual. The tribal states of Jharkhand (six out of 14) and Chhattisgarh (11) also see action - the BJP and Congress are in a direct fight here.
The crucial western state of Maharashtra (13 out of 48) has a curious situation. The Congress' alliance with a splinter group, the Nationalist Congress Party, is wobbly as the NCP has been playing footsie with all sides. Its president Sharad Pawar has prime ministerial ambitions of his own and may be willing to cast his lot with whoever might help him accomplish that end.
In the eastern seaboard state of Orissa, which saw anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal in all of 2008, 10 seats out of 21 see polling in the first phase - including in that troubled tribal district. Here, the ruling state party Biju Janata Dal has broken its 11-year-old alliance with the BJP to get on board the Third Front platform.
Not to mention Bihar, which is seen in India as a metaphor for backwardness. Here 13 seats out of 40 go to polls this week, and in the fray is the colorful personality of Union Rail Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, who is going into a perilous battle without the cover of Congress support.
The other notable whose fate gets decided this week comes from the far south: former United Nations under secretary general Shashi Tharoor, who ran for the highest office unsuccessfully against Ban Ki-moon. He is striding around purposefully in the Kerala capital of Thiruvanthapuram, having shed his three-piece suit for the local white mundu-shirt combo. Embracing regionalism via his attire and nationalism through his choice of political party, the Congress, he seems to offer the varying strands of the present elections in a single-package deal.
Newscop and the Next India Premier
By M H Ahssan
After over-heated summer weeks of campaigning, long on personal attacks and short on substance, guessing who India's next prime minister will be is about as easy as solving the decade-long puzzle on the identity of HNN's essayist Newscop.
My long-time suspicion is that Newscop is an HNN staffer, churning out blood pressure-tickling articles while sipping coconut juice in a sunny beach in coastal AP. But varied guesses about India's next prime minister could be as off the mark, or as accurate, as any Newscop identity guess. The latter is due to be revealed on Friday, April 17.
When the month-long voting process that started in India on Thursday ends, on May 16, counting will start and results released. Frenetic political dramas are sure to follow before the 18th prime minister of India is revealed.
I have told amazed local media colleagues, the ones who still think I am sane, that the next premier could be Lalu Prasad Yadav, India's maverick railway minister, a kingmaker in the last elections and a parliamentary funny man.
Never underestimate the shrewd court jester. During the bitter political fallout last year over India's nuclear deal with the United States, Yadav managed to keep cordial relations with both his warring coalition partners, the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). In one photograph taken during the crisis, he was seen with his hands on the shoulders of both a Congress and a CPI-M leader. All were laughing.
Such savvy to keep squabbling factions in good humor would prove devastatingly effective after the election results are announced, and India's political theater goes into hyperdrive over the formation of coalition marriages.
Besides, Yadav has a pan-India fan base. "Lalu Yadav would easily work himself into power," said a chuckling R S Patil, a guard at the Bank of India branch near Churchgate station, Mumbai. "He is a very street smart fellow."
While Patil told Asia Times Online that he would take time out to vote on April 30, the voting day for Mumbai, the general electoral mood in India's financial capital was as varied as the "mixed vegetable curry" coalition likely to come to power, as sales executive John Lobo termed it.
A Christian from the neighboring Portuguese-speaking state of Goa, Lobo said he may not exercise his voting rights, as an expression of disgust at the current crop of politicians.
However, Lobo's colleague Ravi Shinde, an office assistant and a resident of Raigad district, said he would take leave and travel the 100 kilometers to his village and vote on April 30.
Mumbai has expressed a strong anti-incumbent sentiment at street level. "I have long been a Congress party supporter, but [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh has doing nothing for us poor people," said Darshan Das, a middle-aged tea vendor near Eros Theater.
Das says he earns about 6,000 rupees (US$120) a month; the only income he has to support his wife and four children. "From this 6,000 income, I spend 1,000 rupees monthly as hafta (bribes) to local policemen and municipality officials to be allowed to sell tea here," he says. "Things don't change much for us, whichever government is elected."
"It's difficult to predict who the next prime minister will be, but whoever comes to power will be of no use unless they help people like us," said Ganga Ram, a member of Mumbai's dabbawallahs (lunch-box carriers). In 2001, the world famous home-to-office hot lunch delivery system was awarded a Forbes magazine rating of six-sigma, equal to a 99.9999% accuracy rate in delivery. (See India's lessons in a lunch box, Asia Times Online, Sep 8, 2006) Ram, a resident of suburban Ghatkopar, said he will vote.
In South Mumbai constituency, the area of the November 26 terrorist attacks, interest in elections is much higher than last year, said voter Anil Patkar. "I expect voter turnout percentage here will be the highest ever, at over 50%," he said. The turnout for the 2008 US presidential election was 56.8%, the highest since the 60.8% turnout of 1968 when Richard Nixon was voted into power.
Guessing who will form the next Indian government is big business for bookies, an outlawed but thriving tribe. They are currently offering odds on the Congress party grabbing around 150 seats and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bagging 120. A coalition needs the support of a minimum of 272 members in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the directly-elected house of Parliament, to form a government.
But India's electorate has always proved an enigmatic nut to crack, with both bookies and pollsters usually left wiping egg off their faces after the election results are announced.
In 2004, the Mumbai-dominated bookie tribe illegally raked in an estimated US$5 billion in punters' money after predicting that the ruling BJP would win 175 seats and the Congress 150. But the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress won 150 seats, up from 114 seats in the 1999 general elections, and formed a coalition government. The BJP crashed down to 137 seats, from 182 seats in 1999.
The two leading prime ministerial contenders in 2009, the 77-year old economist Manmohan Singh and the 81-year old lawyer LK Advani were both born in land that is now Pakistan, and formerly undivided India. Singh was born in Chakwal district, some 90 kilometers south of Islamabad, while Advani was born in the southern port city of Karachi.
Both could be runners-up this year, as opinion polls have shown the electorate would prefer a younger prime minister.
Either way, the prime minister-elect won't make too much of a difference. In India, politicians are like the noisy, visible surf of ocean waves. It's not the fleeting, fickle surf, but the deep, unseen, silent, strong, millennia-old undercurrents that actually define and direct the direction ahead this nation takes. India works despite its politicians, not because of them.
Manmohan Singh lasted the distance of his full five-year term, and won some respect, because he is not a politician. But after starting to talk like a politician during this campaign, voters could give him the usual nasty surprise they gift wrap for egoistic leaders who think only they know best what is best for the country.
For now, the next prime minister of India, the world's 12th largest and Asia's third-largest economy, appears as difficult but less popular a guess worldwide than the identity of Spengler. Advani produces 1.9 million Google search results, Manmohan Singh fetches 2.8 million searches. And Spengler? 2.9 million.
After over-heated summer weeks of campaigning, long on personal attacks and short on substance, guessing who India's next prime minister will be is about as easy as solving the decade-long puzzle on the identity of HNN's essayist Newscop.
My long-time suspicion is that Newscop is an HNN staffer, churning out blood pressure-tickling articles while sipping coconut juice in a sunny beach in coastal AP. But varied guesses about India's next prime minister could be as off the mark, or as accurate, as any Newscop identity guess. The latter is due to be revealed on Friday, April 17.
When the month-long voting process that started in India on Thursday ends, on May 16, counting will start and results released. Frenetic political dramas are sure to follow before the 18th prime minister of India is revealed.
I have told amazed local media colleagues, the ones who still think I am sane, that the next premier could be Lalu Prasad Yadav, India's maverick railway minister, a kingmaker in the last elections and a parliamentary funny man.
Never underestimate the shrewd court jester. During the bitter political fallout last year over India's nuclear deal with the United States, Yadav managed to keep cordial relations with both his warring coalition partners, the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). In one photograph taken during the crisis, he was seen with his hands on the shoulders of both a Congress and a CPI-M leader. All were laughing.
Such savvy to keep squabbling factions in good humor would prove devastatingly effective after the election results are announced, and India's political theater goes into hyperdrive over the formation of coalition marriages.
Besides, Yadav has a pan-India fan base. "Lalu Yadav would easily work himself into power," said a chuckling R S Patil, a guard at the Bank of India branch near Churchgate station, Mumbai. "He is a very street smart fellow."
While Patil told Asia Times Online that he would take time out to vote on April 30, the voting day for Mumbai, the general electoral mood in India's financial capital was as varied as the "mixed vegetable curry" coalition likely to come to power, as sales executive John Lobo termed it.
A Christian from the neighboring Portuguese-speaking state of Goa, Lobo said he may not exercise his voting rights, as an expression of disgust at the current crop of politicians.
However, Lobo's colleague Ravi Shinde, an office assistant and a resident of Raigad district, said he would take leave and travel the 100 kilometers to his village and vote on April 30.
Mumbai has expressed a strong anti-incumbent sentiment at street level. "I have long been a Congress party supporter, but [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh has doing nothing for us poor people," said Darshan Das, a middle-aged tea vendor near Eros Theater.
Das says he earns about 6,000 rupees (US$120) a month; the only income he has to support his wife and four children. "From this 6,000 income, I spend 1,000 rupees monthly as hafta (bribes) to local policemen and municipality officials to be allowed to sell tea here," he says. "Things don't change much for us, whichever government is elected."
"It's difficult to predict who the next prime minister will be, but whoever comes to power will be of no use unless they help people like us," said Ganga Ram, a member of Mumbai's dabbawallahs (lunch-box carriers). In 2001, the world famous home-to-office hot lunch delivery system was awarded a Forbes magazine rating of six-sigma, equal to a 99.9999% accuracy rate in delivery. (See India's lessons in a lunch box, Asia Times Online, Sep 8, 2006) Ram, a resident of suburban Ghatkopar, said he will vote.
In South Mumbai constituency, the area of the November 26 terrorist attacks, interest in elections is much higher than last year, said voter Anil Patkar. "I expect voter turnout percentage here will be the highest ever, at over 50%," he said. The turnout for the 2008 US presidential election was 56.8%, the highest since the 60.8% turnout of 1968 when Richard Nixon was voted into power.
Guessing who will form the next Indian government is big business for bookies, an outlawed but thriving tribe. They are currently offering odds on the Congress party grabbing around 150 seats and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bagging 120. A coalition needs the support of a minimum of 272 members in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the directly-elected house of Parliament, to form a government.
But India's electorate has always proved an enigmatic nut to crack, with both bookies and pollsters usually left wiping egg off their faces after the election results are announced.
In 2004, the Mumbai-dominated bookie tribe illegally raked in an estimated US$5 billion in punters' money after predicting that the ruling BJP would win 175 seats and the Congress 150. But the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress won 150 seats, up from 114 seats in the 1999 general elections, and formed a coalition government. The BJP crashed down to 137 seats, from 182 seats in 1999.
The two leading prime ministerial contenders in 2009, the 77-year old economist Manmohan Singh and the 81-year old lawyer LK Advani were both born in land that is now Pakistan, and formerly undivided India. Singh was born in Chakwal district, some 90 kilometers south of Islamabad, while Advani was born in the southern port city of Karachi.
Both could be runners-up this year, as opinion polls have shown the electorate would prefer a younger prime minister.
Either way, the prime minister-elect won't make too much of a difference. In India, politicians are like the noisy, visible surf of ocean waves. It's not the fleeting, fickle surf, but the deep, unseen, silent, strong, millennia-old undercurrents that actually define and direct the direction ahead this nation takes. India works despite its politicians, not because of them.
Manmohan Singh lasted the distance of his full five-year term, and won some respect, because he is not a politician. But after starting to talk like a politician during this campaign, voters could give him the usual nasty surprise they gift wrap for egoistic leaders who think only they know best what is best for the country.
For now, the next prime minister of India, the world's 12th largest and Asia's third-largest economy, appears as difficult but less popular a guess worldwide than the identity of Spengler. Advani produces 1.9 million Google search results, Manmohan Singh fetches 2.8 million searches. And Spengler? 2.9 million.
Elections Level 2: Money talks, democracy walks
By Sobha Naidu
With the first round of balloting accounting for 124 of the 543 seats over, the shrill campaign rhetoric, that had even turned personal, subsided considerably Friday with the attention shifting to spending of government funds and spiriting away of black money abroad.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked the people of Uttar Pradesh to find what the state government had done with central funds. Her son and party general secretary Rahul Gandhi did the same in Karnataka, while Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani promised to get back all the black money stashed abroad, a major campaign plank of the party.
Speaking in Domariaganj, Uttar Pradesh, Sonia Gandhi said: "The state government (run by the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati) is not using properly the funds being released by the central government. So, you must ask the state government where it has spent the central funds meant for carrying out developmental schemes in the state...
"If you give our party a second term, we would be in a position to take our development schemes on a larger scale to help people across the country."
Echoing his mother in Gulbarga, north Karnataka, a state run by the BJP, Rahul Gandhi said, "Thousands of crores of rupees have been given to Karnataka by the central government but the money has not reached the intended beneficiaries.
"Yesterday (Thursday) I was in Andhra Pradesh (which borders Karnataka). There is a Congress government and central funds have been properly utilised." While in Andhra Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi prayed at the famous Lord Venkateshwara temple at Tirupati at midnight.
Having addressed over 40 campaign rallies so far, Rahul Gandhi is gradually emerging as one of the principal campaigners for the Congress. His scheduled visit to Madhya Pradesh's Maoist-affected Balaghat district had to be called off after an intelligence warning that his life could be in danger, said party sources.
With the first round of balloting accounting for 124 of the 543 seats over, the shrill campaign rhetoric, that had even turned personal, subsided considerably Friday with the attention shifting to spending of government funds and spiriting away of black money abroad.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked the people of Uttar Pradesh to find what the state government had done with central funds. Her son and party general secretary Rahul Gandhi did the same in Karnataka, while Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani promised to get back all the black money stashed abroad, a major campaign plank of the party.
Speaking in Domariaganj, Uttar Pradesh, Sonia Gandhi said: "The state government (run by the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati) is not using properly the funds being released by the central government. So, you must ask the state government where it has spent the central funds meant for carrying out developmental schemes in the state...
"If you give our party a second term, we would be in a position to take our development schemes on a larger scale to help people across the country."
Echoing his mother in Gulbarga, north Karnataka, a state run by the BJP, Rahul Gandhi said, "Thousands of crores of rupees have been given to Karnataka by the central government but the money has not reached the intended beneficiaries.
"Yesterday (Thursday) I was in Andhra Pradesh (which borders Karnataka). There is a Congress government and central funds have been properly utilised." While in Andhra Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi prayed at the famous Lord Venkateshwara temple at Tirupati at midnight.
Having addressed over 40 campaign rallies so far, Rahul Gandhi is gradually emerging as one of the principal campaigners for the Congress. His scheduled visit to Madhya Pradesh's Maoist-affected Balaghat district had to be called off after an intelligence warning that his life could be in danger, said party sources.
Muslim working women and society
By Samiya Anwar
It is a malevolent society. And what truly astounds is the gender bias, it still exists. men favoritism isn’t it weird? Yes it is. We all know today’s women are independent but also in the shambles and tattered mostly. This is a bizarre. An odd reality! But modern women are bombarded by unrealistic expectations from within themselves and by external demands from home, work, relationships, and traditions. Life is not easy. It’s surely difficult for them especially if they are Muslim.
Women here, we can categorize into three types. Firstly a traditional house wife, secondly, a working woman of fast paced world and lastly a modern woman who manages everything. All the three are different and masters of their occupation. It would be no good to say only women working in offices or companies are working women and not others. Our grand mothers and mothers are for instance traditionally working for the well-being of the family. They are religiously very good as they hear our fathers, doesn’t demand to work and have a job of own. They are dependent on the male members, also happy. But now the need of women has expanded the horizon and walks with the world not just they talk and stay back, they participate. They have redressed the area of gender.
Moreover a working woman faces much hype in everything. What a women at home doesn’t not. Unlike other religions Muslim women, in the present era, faces lot of stereotype against the male dominance society.
An independent and working woman is a good turn-on. Either they are single, married, divorcees or childless every working female has so many open advantages. They are confidently walking the corporate ladder and have proved as successful entrepreneurs and CEO’s what not. Men love the women who are beautiful, independent and outspoken. They are appreciated. But not all. When it comes to a family and marriage she is not the right choice for many. Men are smart. Every Muslim man wants somebody who can be at home. They think that the first duty of women is to be women of house and nothing else. If a women serves food, washes clothes and irons it, which is still loved by husbands. The career women are not in their list. Men like women to be their associates at home they want women supporter not decision makers. And this is what makes the working women wonder. Soha (name changed), 26 is working in Gen pact from five years and has no plans to tie the knot. She is smart, independent, liked by many everywhere. But for marriage the guys don’t choose her. They are scared of her independence. She wishes to work after marriage and there is less who understands her. What is wrong if a women wishes to work after marriage? This made her broke and she decided not to marry for some time. Her matrimonial side is zero when compared to others. All her friends are married and have children. She feels isolated though successful following her dreams.
Every time we attempt to assert ourselves as Muslim women we are accused of being influenced by the West, isn’t that wrong. It is not only Soha who was single and stressful. Many others are in such circumstances. There is a very unfriendly environment within our own communities. The same stereotype questions arise all time if a women works. Like Bushra (name changed) is a call centre employee whose mother was ashamed to say the relatives that her daughter is employed in a job. She is scared to reveal that she is working in a night shift. Bushra stood tall in times of crises and proved a good support for the family. What is wrong if she is working in the night? According to her mother, “everyone and everybody start questioning from friends to neighbors, all. Whenever I go out to parties, or have a family get-together, or leave my house, the question inevitably gets asked, “Why are you sending your daughter in the night?” but how long it will be anonymous. Our own parents feel we shouldn’t work, though we support the work. Isn’t it?
Also the married women are victims of several typecast questions. She spends more time in the office than at home. The boss, male co-workers and husband she is shattered in pieces with the work pressure, household chores, children and husband, all makes her drained of life. No time for grooming and friends forget about the “Me Time”. Life is not rosy. She is always reminded of her religion that she walks with the pride of religion and family. She should maintain the poise and be reserve.
“You’re a Muslim” this is the statement told to every girl almost every day stepping out of the houses. There is a big burden she carries when she make a foot out. Why? why because she is a Muslim.
Islam liberated women 1400 years ago and history is a proof of women being successful in every area of society. They were women participants in the war, political activities and economic needs. Though it is grisly that women with more freedom has became slaves of modernity. The women from burqa’s turned to tramp. The old notion of society is been altered. They work, they are independent. They are keeping men at guessing. In the newspapers and magazines we see and hear so many Muslim women being harassed and molested. The same old complains my boss repeatedly puts his arm around my waist when discussing work-related matters. The co-workers unwelcome comments often make me uncomfortable. Who is to be blame? The female workers or the boss, if the women dress shabbily, doesn’t care of modesty while dressing. Such things are common and act as an open invitation to men. In such a case you either get afraid of loosing job or welcome the advances of such people. Good women changes the job and it is been observed that women have more reasons to change jobs frequently than men. A woman doesn’t walk alone when she works outside.
Nevertheless ness we Muslim women can walk with pride and dignity in the society only if we maintain the true concept of women. Working is no sin. It is good if a woman supports her parents or husband. But changing the dimensions of society is no fair. Religion is an important aspect of life and every woman should understand and be in the limits of the boundaries set by the religion and society as well.
Also Read:
Employment concerns for working Muslim women
Can Islam liberate women?
Shattering Illusions - Western Conceptions of Muslim Women
Muslim Women - Change in the air
It is a malevolent society. And what truly astounds is the gender bias, it still exists. men favoritism isn’t it weird? Yes it is. We all know today’s women are independent but also in the shambles and tattered mostly. This is a bizarre. An odd reality! But modern women are bombarded by unrealistic expectations from within themselves and by external demands from home, work, relationships, and traditions. Life is not easy. It’s surely difficult for them especially if they are Muslim.
Women here, we can categorize into three types. Firstly a traditional house wife, secondly, a working woman of fast paced world and lastly a modern woman who manages everything. All the three are different and masters of their occupation. It would be no good to say only women working in offices or companies are working women and not others. Our grand mothers and mothers are for instance traditionally working for the well-being of the family. They are religiously very good as they hear our fathers, doesn’t demand to work and have a job of own. They are dependent on the male members, also happy. But now the need of women has expanded the horizon and walks with the world not just they talk and stay back, they participate. They have redressed the area of gender.
Moreover a working woman faces much hype in everything. What a women at home doesn’t not. Unlike other religions Muslim women, in the present era, faces lot of stereotype against the male dominance society.
An independent and working woman is a good turn-on. Either they are single, married, divorcees or childless every working female has so many open advantages. They are confidently walking the corporate ladder and have proved as successful entrepreneurs and CEO’s what not. Men love the women who are beautiful, independent and outspoken. They are appreciated. But not all. When it comes to a family and marriage she is not the right choice for many. Men are smart. Every Muslim man wants somebody who can be at home. They think that the first duty of women is to be women of house and nothing else. If a women serves food, washes clothes and irons it, which is still loved by husbands. The career women are not in their list. Men like women to be their associates at home they want women supporter not decision makers. And this is what makes the working women wonder. Soha (name changed), 26 is working in Gen pact from five years and has no plans to tie the knot. She is smart, independent, liked by many everywhere. But for marriage the guys don’t choose her. They are scared of her independence. She wishes to work after marriage and there is less who understands her. What is wrong if a women wishes to work after marriage? This made her broke and she decided not to marry for some time. Her matrimonial side is zero when compared to others. All her friends are married and have children. She feels isolated though successful following her dreams.
Every time we attempt to assert ourselves as Muslim women we are accused of being influenced by the West, isn’t that wrong. It is not only Soha who was single and stressful. Many others are in such circumstances. There is a very unfriendly environment within our own communities. The same stereotype questions arise all time if a women works. Like Bushra (name changed) is a call centre employee whose mother was ashamed to say the relatives that her daughter is employed in a job. She is scared to reveal that she is working in a night shift. Bushra stood tall in times of crises and proved a good support for the family. What is wrong if she is working in the night? According to her mother, “everyone and everybody start questioning from friends to neighbors, all. Whenever I go out to parties, or have a family get-together, or leave my house, the question inevitably gets asked, “Why are you sending your daughter in the night?” but how long it will be anonymous. Our own parents feel we shouldn’t work, though we support the work. Isn’t it?
Also the married women are victims of several typecast questions. She spends more time in the office than at home. The boss, male co-workers and husband she is shattered in pieces with the work pressure, household chores, children and husband, all makes her drained of life. No time for grooming and friends forget about the “Me Time”. Life is not rosy. She is always reminded of her religion that she walks with the pride of religion and family. She should maintain the poise and be reserve.
“You’re a Muslim” this is the statement told to every girl almost every day stepping out of the houses. There is a big burden she carries when she make a foot out. Why? why because she is a Muslim.
Islam liberated women 1400 years ago and history is a proof of women being successful in every area of society. They were women participants in the war, political activities and economic needs. Though it is grisly that women with more freedom has became slaves of modernity. The women from burqa’s turned to tramp. The old notion of society is been altered. They work, they are independent. They are keeping men at guessing. In the newspapers and magazines we see and hear so many Muslim women being harassed and molested. The same old complains my boss repeatedly puts his arm around my waist when discussing work-related matters. The co-workers unwelcome comments often make me uncomfortable. Who is to be blame? The female workers or the boss, if the women dress shabbily, doesn’t care of modesty while dressing. Such things are common and act as an open invitation to men. In such a case you either get afraid of loosing job or welcome the advances of such people. Good women changes the job and it is been observed that women have more reasons to change jobs frequently than men. A woman doesn’t walk alone when she works outside.
Nevertheless ness we Muslim women can walk with pride and dignity in the society only if we maintain the true concept of women. Working is no sin. It is good if a woman supports her parents or husband. But changing the dimensions of society is no fair. Religion is an important aspect of life and every woman should understand and be in the limits of the boundaries set by the religion and society as well.
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Voting: How do you decide?
By Team HNN
One of the great spectacles of the world - elections to the parliament of the world's largest democracy - is just about to get under way. It is by far and away the most elaborate excercise in franchise anywhere in the world. During the next month, 700+ million voters will have a chance to cast their ballots, with the contest apparently evenly poised between the two largest coaltions and a fresh avatar of the Third Front. And a dizzying array of goodies have been dangled before the voters.
But how exactly do voters make their choices? What about you? How do you decide who to vote for? Are you swayed by promises of freebies from the parties? Lower taxes? Secularism? Infrastructure? Privatisation? Are you a single issue voter, or do you balance a range of interests in deciding who to vote for? Do you vote for the party, or the candidate? And after the election, do you have any further control over governance? How do you really make yourself count in this great dance?
Post your comments.
Best posting will get an attractive reward and award. Only one can send us one contribution, as we're receiving an overwhelming response for this post. Thanks for your support.
One of the great spectacles of the world - elections to the parliament of the world's largest democracy - is just about to get under way. It is by far and away the most elaborate excercise in franchise anywhere in the world. During the next month, 700+ million voters will have a chance to cast their ballots, with the contest apparently evenly poised between the two largest coaltions and a fresh avatar of the Third Front. And a dizzying array of goodies have been dangled before the voters.
But how exactly do voters make their choices? What about you? How do you decide who to vote for? Are you swayed by promises of freebies from the parties? Lower taxes? Secularism? Infrastructure? Privatisation? Are you a single issue voter, or do you balance a range of interests in deciding who to vote for? Do you vote for the party, or the candidate? And after the election, do you have any further control over governance? How do you really make yourself count in this great dance?
Post your comments.
Best posting will get an attractive reward and award. Only one can send us one contribution, as we're receiving an overwhelming response for this post. Thanks for your support.
Dhamrmendra - The Sundance Kid
By M H Ahssan
Dharmendra could get away with anything in his life. And he did. Women, good looks and great films — HNN looks back on a rich 50 years.
As a nosey reporter for Star & Style, it was difficult for Bharti S Pradhan to track a Tamil priest in the bylanes of Chennai during the scorching summer of 1980. All she knew was his name, Srinivas Acharai, and that he had solemnised a marriage which, if word got out, would make the front page of every newspaper in the country. Pradhan eventually met Acharai and got the details of the secret wedding he had solemnised in Mumbai of one Dilawar Khan with Hema Malini. Pradhan knew she had the nation’s biggest scoop — Khan was none other than Dharmendra, Bollywood’s action hero whose clean-cut looks and rugged appeal had made him the cynosure of a million adoring eyes
There were, of course, others who said that the actual marriage had taken place — in a Muslim way — on June 21, 1979, and was, deliberately, not publicised for fear that Prakash Kaur, Dharmendra’s first wife, who had already refused him a divorce, would grow more depressed at the fate of her 25-year-old marriage. Later, in a conversation with a friend, Kaur laughed off her life’s biggest crisis by saying, “You should see Jugnu to understand his dual personality.”
The story made Pradhan a star overnight. Emotions ran high in Bollywood. “How could he?” some wondered aloud. But all the world loves a lover and Garam Dharam’s obvious passion for his beauteous southern Dream Girl, not surprisingly, made him even more popular.
“I met him almost a year later and he wondered how I had got wind of the wedding,” says Pradhan. What she did not tell Dharmendra was that Star & Style would have had an even bigger scoop complete with pictures if only their cameraman, BK Sanil, had not returned to the couple a film roll that had mistakenly been delivered to him. “Those were pictures of the Dharmendra- Hema wedding, but Sanil returned the roll after printing the negatives,” says Pradhan.
Dharmendra’s younger son, Bobby, laughs when he hears the story. “He was Bollywood’s most loved actor and could get away with anything. Extend your hand and you would get a hug; extend your arm and you would be in the living room for a drink,” he says. In hindsight, he feels it is that great affection that Dharmendra inspired that allowed Bollywood to accept the much-talked-about second marriage so easily. Besides, Dharmendra was blessed with the kind of looks that made it impossible for mere mortals to despise him. Barely a few years before his second marriage, he had been voted one of the world’s most handsome men. It wasn’t until 1997 that another Hindi film star — Salman Khan — managed to win that accolade.
The success of any mega movie star depends on how irresistible he is to both sexes. In Dharmendra’s case, both men and women fell for his goofy manliness. “Women and my dad are inseparable,” says Bobby, who knows about the muchpublicised split between Meena Kumari and her husband Kamal Amrohi in 1964 and the actress’ subsequent linkage with Dharmendra. The pair sparkled in Kaajal (1965), where her purely fraternal feelings for him are misunderstood, and in the superhit Phool Aur Patthar (1966), where she plays a weeping widow seeking his protection.
But it wasn’t until 1997 that Dharmendra really got his due in the Hindi film industry when he won a Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award. As he accepted the honour from Dilip Kumar and his wife Saira Banu, he grew emotional about how he had never received a single Filmfare award in the ‘Best Actor’ category despite having worked in over a hundred popular movies and despite having been discovered in a Filmfare talent spotting competition. Dilip Kumar, always the epitome of quiet sophistication, quickly consoled him: “Never mind, whenever I get to meet with God Almighty I will set before Him my only complaint: Why did you not make me as handsome as Dharmendra?” The audience of industry insiders enveloped the star in a burst of happy, accepting laughter. It was a spontaneous acknowledgement of Dharmendra’s good looks and acting prowess — those qualities that have helped him shine in more than 250 films, beginning with Dil Bhi Tera, Hum Bhi Tere in 1960 right up to Johnny Gaddar (2007).
It’s hard to believe it today but for a long time, the actor-hero who pushed box-office sales with his memorable performances in Haqeeqat, Bandini, Phool aur Patthar, Satyakam, Jugnu, Raja Jani, Chupke Chupke, Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Seeta aur Geeta and Sholay, didn’t get his due. Gulzar wonders why the actor often let his heroines — Meena Kumari, Nutan, Mala Sinha and Suchitra Sen — walk away with the glory while he was content to play the romantic foil. Perhaps his paradoxically rugged yet clean-cut appearance and his million-dollar Colgate smile detracted from his talent. “For me, he is the ultimate Devdas because only he remained stuck in adolescence, even as the two women — Paro and Chandramukhi — grew out of their youth. That’s a part of his persona,” says the celebrated lyricist of Indian cinema’s ideal lover boy.
Dharmendra’s love and drinking escapades are legendary. The world agrees. Writer and television anchor Anupama Chopra has chronicled it in her bestseller, The Making of Sholay. She recounts how, during the shooting schedule at Ramnagaram, a hamlet on the outskirts of Bangalore that doubled up as the village in Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster, he would offer cash to lightboys to mess the shots so he could hold onto Hema Malini a little longer. “The boys were thrilled and earned, on an average, a cool Rs 1,500 each at the end of the shooting. Once drunk, Dharmendra even got up from his hotel in Bangalore at midnight and walked alone to the village and slept on a rock. He could carry both — love and liquor,” laughs Chopra.
But his life wasn’t always about these two motifs. During the serious 1960s and the swinging 1970s, Dharmendra often transmuted the angry machismo of an Amitabh Bachchan, the hill-station profligacy of a Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna’s narcissism to devastating effect at the box-office. In short, he carried every film loaded onto his broad shoulders. All this while raising laughs by throwing in a kuttey (dogs), delivered with the correct comic Jat intonation during the most taut fight scenes. Not surprisingly, kuttey remains the most popular mock invective across north India.
WHILE his image had been tempered by musicals and high-voltage drama in the 1960s, he victoriously wielded style with sinew with films like Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) and Jugnu (1973),” says Bollywood chronicler Dinesh Raheja. Today, he remains the ultimate performer in front of the camera while continuing to be messy outside the magic halo of the studio arch lights. That’s not surprising, considering he has never been a man cut out for speeches and ribbon-cutting ordeals. “He was a darling of the heroines,” quips Saira Banu, who remembers the actor’s talent for putting his foot in his mouth. Laughs veteran actor Waheeda Rehman: “He was a complete actor who left his mark in each of his films. Politics is not his cup of tea. No wonder he did farming and avoided Parliament.”
But that’s Dharmendra. The world acknowledged how he unhesitatingly carried the mantle of concern and social realism in his many roles as a respectable professional: he’s the upright engineer in Satyakam and Aadmi aur Insaan, a barrister in Mamta, a jail doctor in Bandini, an honest cop in Mera Gaon Mera Desh and a loving brother in Yadon Ki Baraat. Even his morally-serious lover boys in Raja Jaani, Jugnu, Dream Girl, Charas, and, above all, Sholay, had honesty streaked with a robust sex appeal that blended well with the country’s cinematic traditions.
“Otherwise, who would be the ideal vehicle for Bengal’s literary realism in Hindi cinema?” asks filmmaker Samar Khan, in what appears to be an obvious reference to Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s landmark Satyakam, the 1969 movie where Dharmendra plays an honest civil engineer who troubles many with his decisions, the boldest being to marry a woman raped and impregnated by a debauched prince. Commentators compared his on-screen ideals of anticolonial nationalism with Indira Gandhi’s splitting of the Congress to create an era of post-Nehruvian socialism. That the year was 1969 was merely coincidental. Dharmendra himself thought the best scene in Satyakam was the one where he, the illegitimate son, takes on his father, Ashok Kumar, who berates him. “Dharmendra had no dialogues. He just listened to Kumar and laughed away his worries,” says Gulzar, adding that, in many ways, Satyakam was the necessary prelude to Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer (1973), which pushed Amitabh Bachchan to the forefront. Incidentally, that script was first shown to Dharmendra who rejected it because he was too busy.
THE year of Zanjeer also saw the birth of parallel cinema with the release of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur and MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa. It was also the year of love, reflected in Raj Kapoor’s evergreen Bobby. But what turned the tide against Dharmendra was the changing nature of Hindi cinema. The popularity of the scripts of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, better suited to Bachchan’s rebellious persona, changed the course of the silver screen for the next two decades. Despite riding an alltime high with Sholay and Chupke Chupke (both released in 1975), Dharmendra was the unfortunate casualty of this change.
But there was some respite. Raheja says the toxic testosterone cocktails that were the flavour of the 1980s helped prolong some careers. “It elongated the career of three 40-plus holdovers from the 1970s: Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha,” says Raheja, adding that the revival of the Jat hero fighting feudal Thakur oppression helped push Dharmendra’s career a little in movies like Ghulami, Yateem, Batwara and Kshatriya. But it was an era that drew quickly to a close.
Fans who have missed the old Dharam magic are once again in for a treat. At the sunset of his career, he will team up with his sons, Sunny and Bobby for Cheers — Celebrate Life, a movie that fittingly celebrates his 50 years as an actor. “Actually, we are trying to celebrate my dad’s 50 years in the industry with the film,” says Sunny.
Yes, the idealistic Satyapriya of Satyakam is all set for the next exciting makeover of his life.
Dharmendra could get away with anything in his life. And he did. Women, good looks and great films — HNN looks back on a rich 50 years.
As a nosey reporter for Star & Style, it was difficult for Bharti S Pradhan to track a Tamil priest in the bylanes of Chennai during the scorching summer of 1980. All she knew was his name, Srinivas Acharai, and that he had solemnised a marriage which, if word got out, would make the front page of every newspaper in the country. Pradhan eventually met Acharai and got the details of the secret wedding he had solemnised in Mumbai of one Dilawar Khan with Hema Malini. Pradhan knew she had the nation’s biggest scoop — Khan was none other than Dharmendra, Bollywood’s action hero whose clean-cut looks and rugged appeal had made him the cynosure of a million adoring eyes
There were, of course, others who said that the actual marriage had taken place — in a Muslim way — on June 21, 1979, and was, deliberately, not publicised for fear that Prakash Kaur, Dharmendra’s first wife, who had already refused him a divorce, would grow more depressed at the fate of her 25-year-old marriage. Later, in a conversation with a friend, Kaur laughed off her life’s biggest crisis by saying, “You should see Jugnu to understand his dual personality.”
The story made Pradhan a star overnight. Emotions ran high in Bollywood. “How could he?” some wondered aloud. But all the world loves a lover and Garam Dharam’s obvious passion for his beauteous southern Dream Girl, not surprisingly, made him even more popular.
“I met him almost a year later and he wondered how I had got wind of the wedding,” says Pradhan. What she did not tell Dharmendra was that Star & Style would have had an even bigger scoop complete with pictures if only their cameraman, BK Sanil, had not returned to the couple a film roll that had mistakenly been delivered to him. “Those were pictures of the Dharmendra- Hema wedding, but Sanil returned the roll after printing the negatives,” says Pradhan.
Dharmendra’s younger son, Bobby, laughs when he hears the story. “He was Bollywood’s most loved actor and could get away with anything. Extend your hand and you would get a hug; extend your arm and you would be in the living room for a drink,” he says. In hindsight, he feels it is that great affection that Dharmendra inspired that allowed Bollywood to accept the much-talked-about second marriage so easily. Besides, Dharmendra was blessed with the kind of looks that made it impossible for mere mortals to despise him. Barely a few years before his second marriage, he had been voted one of the world’s most handsome men. It wasn’t until 1997 that another Hindi film star — Salman Khan — managed to win that accolade.
The success of any mega movie star depends on how irresistible he is to both sexes. In Dharmendra’s case, both men and women fell for his goofy manliness. “Women and my dad are inseparable,” says Bobby, who knows about the muchpublicised split between Meena Kumari and her husband Kamal Amrohi in 1964 and the actress’ subsequent linkage with Dharmendra. The pair sparkled in Kaajal (1965), where her purely fraternal feelings for him are misunderstood, and in the superhit Phool Aur Patthar (1966), where she plays a weeping widow seeking his protection.
But it wasn’t until 1997 that Dharmendra really got his due in the Hindi film industry when he won a Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award. As he accepted the honour from Dilip Kumar and his wife Saira Banu, he grew emotional about how he had never received a single Filmfare award in the ‘Best Actor’ category despite having worked in over a hundred popular movies and despite having been discovered in a Filmfare talent spotting competition. Dilip Kumar, always the epitome of quiet sophistication, quickly consoled him: “Never mind, whenever I get to meet with God Almighty I will set before Him my only complaint: Why did you not make me as handsome as Dharmendra?” The audience of industry insiders enveloped the star in a burst of happy, accepting laughter. It was a spontaneous acknowledgement of Dharmendra’s good looks and acting prowess — those qualities that have helped him shine in more than 250 films, beginning with Dil Bhi Tera, Hum Bhi Tere in 1960 right up to Johnny Gaddar (2007).
It’s hard to believe it today but for a long time, the actor-hero who pushed box-office sales with his memorable performances in Haqeeqat, Bandini, Phool aur Patthar, Satyakam, Jugnu, Raja Jani, Chupke Chupke, Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Seeta aur Geeta and Sholay, didn’t get his due. Gulzar wonders why the actor often let his heroines — Meena Kumari, Nutan, Mala Sinha and Suchitra Sen — walk away with the glory while he was content to play the romantic foil. Perhaps his paradoxically rugged yet clean-cut appearance and his million-dollar Colgate smile detracted from his talent. “For me, he is the ultimate Devdas because only he remained stuck in adolescence, even as the two women — Paro and Chandramukhi — grew out of their youth. That’s a part of his persona,” says the celebrated lyricist of Indian cinema’s ideal lover boy.
Dharmendra’s love and drinking escapades are legendary. The world agrees. Writer and television anchor Anupama Chopra has chronicled it in her bestseller, The Making of Sholay. She recounts how, during the shooting schedule at Ramnagaram, a hamlet on the outskirts of Bangalore that doubled up as the village in Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster, he would offer cash to lightboys to mess the shots so he could hold onto Hema Malini a little longer. “The boys were thrilled and earned, on an average, a cool Rs 1,500 each at the end of the shooting. Once drunk, Dharmendra even got up from his hotel in Bangalore at midnight and walked alone to the village and slept on a rock. He could carry both — love and liquor,” laughs Chopra.
But his life wasn’t always about these two motifs. During the serious 1960s and the swinging 1970s, Dharmendra often transmuted the angry machismo of an Amitabh Bachchan, the hill-station profligacy of a Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna’s narcissism to devastating effect at the box-office. In short, he carried every film loaded onto his broad shoulders. All this while raising laughs by throwing in a kuttey (dogs), delivered with the correct comic Jat intonation during the most taut fight scenes. Not surprisingly, kuttey remains the most popular mock invective across north India.
WHILE his image had been tempered by musicals and high-voltage drama in the 1960s, he victoriously wielded style with sinew with films like Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) and Jugnu (1973),” says Bollywood chronicler Dinesh Raheja. Today, he remains the ultimate performer in front of the camera while continuing to be messy outside the magic halo of the studio arch lights. That’s not surprising, considering he has never been a man cut out for speeches and ribbon-cutting ordeals. “He was a darling of the heroines,” quips Saira Banu, who remembers the actor’s talent for putting his foot in his mouth. Laughs veteran actor Waheeda Rehman: “He was a complete actor who left his mark in each of his films. Politics is not his cup of tea. No wonder he did farming and avoided Parliament.”
But that’s Dharmendra. The world acknowledged how he unhesitatingly carried the mantle of concern and social realism in his many roles as a respectable professional: he’s the upright engineer in Satyakam and Aadmi aur Insaan, a barrister in Mamta, a jail doctor in Bandini, an honest cop in Mera Gaon Mera Desh and a loving brother in Yadon Ki Baraat. Even his morally-serious lover boys in Raja Jaani, Jugnu, Dream Girl, Charas, and, above all, Sholay, had honesty streaked with a robust sex appeal that blended well with the country’s cinematic traditions.
“Otherwise, who would be the ideal vehicle for Bengal’s literary realism in Hindi cinema?” asks filmmaker Samar Khan, in what appears to be an obvious reference to Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s landmark Satyakam, the 1969 movie where Dharmendra plays an honest civil engineer who troubles many with his decisions, the boldest being to marry a woman raped and impregnated by a debauched prince. Commentators compared his on-screen ideals of anticolonial nationalism with Indira Gandhi’s splitting of the Congress to create an era of post-Nehruvian socialism. That the year was 1969 was merely coincidental. Dharmendra himself thought the best scene in Satyakam was the one where he, the illegitimate son, takes on his father, Ashok Kumar, who berates him. “Dharmendra had no dialogues. He just listened to Kumar and laughed away his worries,” says Gulzar, adding that, in many ways, Satyakam was the necessary prelude to Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer (1973), which pushed Amitabh Bachchan to the forefront. Incidentally, that script was first shown to Dharmendra who rejected it because he was too busy.
THE year of Zanjeer also saw the birth of parallel cinema with the release of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur and MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa. It was also the year of love, reflected in Raj Kapoor’s evergreen Bobby. But what turned the tide against Dharmendra was the changing nature of Hindi cinema. The popularity of the scripts of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, better suited to Bachchan’s rebellious persona, changed the course of the silver screen for the next two decades. Despite riding an alltime high with Sholay and Chupke Chupke (both released in 1975), Dharmendra was the unfortunate casualty of this change.
But there was some respite. Raheja says the toxic testosterone cocktails that were the flavour of the 1980s helped prolong some careers. “It elongated the career of three 40-plus holdovers from the 1970s: Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha,” says Raheja, adding that the revival of the Jat hero fighting feudal Thakur oppression helped push Dharmendra’s career a little in movies like Ghulami, Yateem, Batwara and Kshatriya. But it was an era that drew quickly to a close.
Fans who have missed the old Dharam magic are once again in for a treat. At the sunset of his career, he will team up with his sons, Sunny and Bobby for Cheers — Celebrate Life, a movie that fittingly celebrates his 50 years as an actor. “Actually, we are trying to celebrate my dad’s 50 years in the industry with the film,” says Sunny.
Yes, the idealistic Satyapriya of Satyakam is all set for the next exciting makeover of his life.
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