A groundswell of concern is building on Wall Street that the U.S. stock market is in dangerously high territory.
This week, the Nasdaq Composite hit a new high as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 remained in record territory — and they are up 28%, 18% and 16% respectively from a year ago. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is trading at 25 times trailing 12-month earnings compared with a historical average of 16. The value of the stock market is nearly 150% higher than the nation’s GDP, a level last seen around the dot-com bust in 2000, according to the World Bank. And a BofA Merrill Lynch survey showed that 81% of fund managers think U.S. stocks are overvalued.
Anshai Lal’s debut is an enjoyable but overstretched yarn about the inadvertent wedding between a young man and a ghost from many years ago.
Kanan has the pre-wedding jitters, and all the marijuana in the world cannot cure him of his belief that he is getting married too early.
When Kanan (Suraj Sharma) lands from Canada in Amritsar for his big fat Punjabi wedding (there is no other kind, it seems), he is informed that he is “manglik”: if he weds, great misfortune will befall him. Since superstition always comes with an exit clause, Kanan’s otherwise posh family (his grandmother’s diet consists of many glasses of whisky) makes him marry a tree before his actual wedding. On this tree lives the ghost of Shashi (Anushka Sharma), the latest in a long line of unhappy female spirits who have been unable to transit to the other world because they have unfinished business in this one.
Kanan is understandably spooked by Shashi, beautifully conceptualised by the visual effects team as a shimmering vision in white and gold who leaves a trail of glitter. Rather than warding off trouble, Kanan’s cheat wedding only compounds his misfortune. Does he actually want to marry Anu (Mehreen Pirzada), and has Shashi’s appearance reminded him of the folly of it all?
Anushka Sharma is her customary efficient self, and works better in the comic moments, but the movie’s best scenes belong to Suraj Sharma’s Kanan, whose hysterical voice and stricken visage mark him out as the perfect victim of a haunting.
Anshai Lal’s directorial debut plonks the idea of an inadvertent wedding between a human and a ghost (borrowed from the 2005 animated movie Corpse Bride) between the present and Shashi’s past in the early 1900s in Punjab. Shashi is too obedient to flout her stern brother’s diktats that well-behaved women do not waste their time on poetry and music. She nevertheless falls for folk singer Roop Lal (Diljit Dosanjh), but accepts him only after he starts behaving more like a gentleman than the proto rock star that he is. A similar kind of behaviour change is being attempted in the present, as Anu tries to remind Kanan of his vows.
In another more subtle parallel, Shashi learns that the world still has use for “frying pans” – as the first music records are referred to – when she sees a DJ spins tunes at Kanan’s nuptials.
The present is an altogether more fun place than the past. Shashi and Roop Lal are barely convincing as star-crossed lovers despite being luminously shot by Vishal Sinha in golden yellows and earthy browns. For all their squabbling, Kanan and Anu actually seem like a couple in love (but with caveats).
The idea of a ghost who has been floating around for decades results in a time warp that affects the narrative pacing. This is one wedding that seems to be in no hurry to be conducted, and Kanan and Anu seem to have all the time in world to sort out his haunting. Day turns into night and night into day as the film shifts between now and then. The sense of being trapped in between the hands of the clock leaches into the running time. At 127 minutes, Phillauri doesn’t simply have enough to go on. Lal, working on a screenplay by Anvita Dutt, lets several scenes roll on several indulgent minutes in order to reserve his punch for the twist-laden climax.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is a bit weak. Had the narrative threads been braided together even more tightly, Phillauri could have been an even more enjoyable comedy about the need to make peace with the past. Potentially neurosis-inducing problems (the curbing of ambition and dreams, the belief that elders know best, damaging superstitions) get the kid glove and soft-focus treatment. The fate of Shashi and Roop Lal isn’t as engaging as Kanan’s disenchantment with his fate. The real ghost in Kanan’s bedroom isn’t the vision in white-and-gold from many years ago – it’s his present, and possibly dull future.
The top court has never shied away from instituting policies on everything from the organisation of cricket to the auctioning of coal. What gives here?
Wouldn’t the world be wonderful if we could all just get along? Unfortunately, people don’t always achieve that ideal, which is why we have laws and courts. Imagine now, that organisations which don’t get along at all have been fighting each other in court for decades, as sometimes happens in Indian trials. Nearly 70 years on, individuals among the original petitioners have all died of natural causes, hundreds of citizens unconnected with the case have died of unnatural causes as a result of the dispute, and the nation’s Supreme Court finally gets ready to pronounce a verdict. Having listened to all sides, and considered the complex issues carefully, the most senior judge in the country addresses the litigants. Why do you need courts at all, he asks, can’t you just sort this out by yourselves? Can’t you all just get along? He offers to play mediator, but is reluctant to play the role assigned to him, the role for which tax payers provide him a salary and perks, that of a judge.
That’s what Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar did on Tuesday in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case. He might as well have entered the field of Kurukshetra and asked the Kaurava and Pandava armies to sort things out amicably. Barack Obama was fond of saying that every decision he made was complex and tough because anything simple would already have been done by somebody else.
Supreme Courts of every country are in the business of making difficult decisions. Ours, though, shies away from matters pertaining to law and basic rights while instituting policies on everything from the organisation of cricket to the auctioning of coal.
Babur to Babri
For those who came in late (which is a majority of Indians, since half of those alive today were yet to be born when the Babri Masjid was demolished, and about 15% more had not got to secondary school), here’s the gist of the back-story. The Central Asian king Babur defeated the army of Ibrahim Lodi in 1526 CE, founding what came to be called the Mughal dynasty. He spent four years consolidating his rule before losing the unequal battle against Indian bacteria. In 1528, his governor in Awadh province, a Shia general named Mir Baqi, constructed a large mosque in Ayodhya town, which came to be called the Babri Masjid.
From the middle of the 19th century, there were attempts by Hindu groups to take over the site under the pretext that it was Ram janmabhoomi, the birthspot of Lord Rama. A local akhara forcibly wrested a part of the complex for itself and commenced prayers in the open. Later, it sought legal sanction to build a shrine on the platform. Muslims protested and successive layers of the colonial administration ordered maintenance of status quo, with a section of the land held by the akhara, and the bulk of it controlled by the mosque’s caretakers.
The dark night
In December 1949, a group of Hindu activists entered the mosque at night and placed idols of Rama and Sita inside. The following day, the Akhil Bharatiya Ramayana Mahasabha declared the idols had appeared miraculously. As credulous devotees flooded the venue, the state administration locked the gates, disallowing both Muslims and Hindus from praying there. Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel tried to reverse what the trespassers had accomplished by ordering the state to remove the idols, but the district administration refused to do it, fearing riots. Within a year, the issue ended up in court, and there it has stayed ever since.
In the 1980s, right-wing Hindu organisations launched a political movement to construct a temple where the mosque stood. They claimed Mir Baqi had demolished a Rama temple and built the Babri Masjid over its ruins. On December 6, 1992, a Hindu mob broke through the paltry police cordon placed at the site by Uttar Pradesh’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, and reduced the Babri Masjid to rubble. A criminal case related to the demolition against BJP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and Vishwa Hindu Parishad Hindu leaders has been stalled for years.
In 2010, an Allahabad High Court judgement divided up the land where the mosque had stood, giving a third to the Sunni Waqf board, a third to the Nirmohi akhara, and a third to the human representatives of the infant Lord Rama. The court based its judgement substantially on a 2003 report by the Archaeological Survey of India which claimed to have found ruins of a temple under the erstwhile Babri Masjid.
The great red herring
The demolished temple has been the great red herring in the Babri Masjid saga. Secularist commentators played into Hindutvavadi hands in the 1980s by allowing it to become the centrepiece of the debate. The secular position should have been something to this effect: Islam’s iconoclastic streak is one of the repugnant aspects of the faith from a liberal perspective. A number of Hindu temples were, indeed, demolished by Muslim rulers in centuries past. There is no evidence that the Babri Masjid was built on one such demolished temple, but it shouldn’t matter anyway. A modern state cannot turn back the clock of history, and should restrict itself to addressing contemporary injustices.
Since the Allahabad court, like most left-wing commentators and all right-wing ones, accepted the notion that the mosque’s history counts, here’s a summary of the facts. Babur is renowned for his remarkable memoir, Baburnama, in which he put down details about everything from his drug use to his wars. Unfortunately, not long after the Babri Masjid’s construction, a sudden storm brought down Babur’s tent in the midst of a campaign, drenching his books and manuscripts. He saved what he could, but most of his 1528 and 1529 entries were probably lost at this time, and he died the following year before he could rewrite them.
In the parts of the memoir that have survived, Babur expressed no fondness for demolishing Hindu shrines. We know he left temples intact in forts he took over from Hindu rajas. At the same time, he wasn’t above the odd act of vandalism against places of worship that offended his sensibilities, even Muslim ones, and may not have objected to a general’s proposal to bring down a temple and build a mosque in its place. The contemporary record, in other words, is of no help whatsoever in resolving the Babri Masjid question.
The Archeological Survey of India’s report to the Allahabad court isn’t much better. The ASI asked a private company to map the area using ground penetrating radar, and drew conclusions on the basis of that data. The radar detected a few anomalies, which the ASI concluded were remnants of a temple’s pillars. If it was a temple, it was a pretty small one, far from the grand monument to Lord Rama’s birthplace we were led to expect. The report provided hints that the Babri mosque was built on the ruins of another mosque, which in turn might have been built on the ruins of a temple or after demolishing a temple.
Irrelevant history
Whether it was mosque on demolished temple, or mosque on ruined temple, or mosque on ruined home, or mosque on ruined mosque on ruined temple, or mosque on ruined mosque on demolished temple, cannot be ascertained on the basis of a radar scan.
Which is fine, because, as I’ve said, the history is irrelevant to the case. The Supreme Court ought to set aside myths of the birth of an avatar, and dubious archaeological reports, and treat the matter as a dispute over property rights. In such a dispute, it is difficult to envision the infant Rama as a beneficiary. The property ought to be divided unequally between the Waqf board and the akhara (since squatters gain some rights if they occupy land for long enough). This would return the site to the status quo of the 19th century with one difference: no mosque stands on the spot any longer.
At that point, a BJP government could use eminent domain to take over the land and construct the temple it’s been promising for decades. Or a secular government could build a hospital there, on the basis that Ayodhya’s Hindus and Muslims have plenty of places to pray, but inadequate health care. But neither secular parties nor religious will make such a move. The secular parties are weak and scared, while the BJP prefers to keep the pot of the public’s emotions simmering.
Who can blame them for indecisiveness when the nation’s highest court is reluctant to pronounce verdict on a property dispute?
After Uttar Pradesh election results, Muslim community debates whether their very presence in the political arena has become problematic for Hindus.
Four months before the Uttar Pradesh election results sent Muslims in India reeling in shock, former Rajya Sabha MP Mohammed Adeeb delivered a speech in Lucknow, which, in hindsight, might be called prescient.
“If Muslims don’t wish to have the status of slaves, if they don’t want India to become a Hindu rashtra, they will have to keep away from electoral politics for a while and, instead, concentrate on education,” Adeeb told an audience comprising mostly members of the Aligarh Muslim University’s Old Boys Association.
It isn’t that Adeeb wanted Muslims to keep away from voting. His aim was to have Muslim intellectuals rethink the idea of contesting elections, of disabusing them of the notion that it is they who decide which party comes to power in Uttar Pradesh.
Adeeb’s suggestion, that is contrary to popular wisdom, had his audience gasping. This prompted him to explain his suggestion in greater detail.
“We Muslims chose in 1947 not to live in the Muslim rashtra of Pakistan,” he said. “It is now the turn of Hindus to decide whether they want India to become a Hindu rashtra or remain secular. Muslims should understand that their very presence in the electoral fray leads to a communal polarisation. Why?”
Not one to mince words, Adeeb answered his question himself.
“A segment of Hindus hates the very sight of Muslims,” he said. “Their icon is Narendra Modi. But 75% of Hindus are secular. Let them fight out over the kind of India they want. Muslim candidates have become a red rag to even secular Hindus who rally behind the Bharatiya Janata Party, turning every election into a Hindu-Muslim one.”
Later in the day, Adeeb met Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who was in Lucknow. To Adeeb, Azad asked, “Why did you deliver such a speech?”
It was now Azad’s turn to get a mouthful from Adeeb. He recalled asking Azad: “What kind of secularism is that which relies on 20% of Muslim votes? The Bahujan Samaj Party gets a percentage of it, as do the Samajwadi Party and the Congress.”
At this, Azad invited Adeeb, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh, to join the Congress. Adeeb rebuffed the offer saying, “First get the secular Hindus together before asking me to join.”
Spectre of a Hindu rashtra
A day after the Uttar Pradesh election results sent a shockwave through the Muslim community, Adeeb was brimming with anger. He said, “Syed Ahmed Bukhari [the so-called Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid] came to me with a question: ‘Why aren’t political parties courting me for Muslim votes?’ I advised him to remain quiet, to not interfere in politics.” Nevertheless, Bukhari went on to announce that Muslims should vote the Bahujan Samaj Party.
“Look at the results,” Adeeb said angrily. “But for Jatavs, Yadavs, and a segment of Jats, most Hindus voted [for] the Bharatiya Janata Party.” His anger soon segued into grief and he began to sob, “I am an old man. I don’t want to die in a Hindu rashtra.”
Though Adeeb has been nudging Muslims to rethink their political role through articles in Urdu newspapers, the churn among them has only just begun. It is undeniably in response to the anxiety and fear gripping them at the BJP’s thumping victory in this politically crucial state.
After all, Uttar Pradesh is the site where the Hindutva pet projects of cow-vigilantism, love jihad, and ghar wapsi have been executed with utmost ferocity. All these come in the backdrop of the grisly 2013 riots of Muzaffarnagar, which further widened the Hindu-Muslim divide inherited from the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the 1990s and even earlier, from Partition. Between these two cataclysmic events, separated by 45 years, Uttar Pradesh witnessed manifold riots, each shackling the future to the blood-soaked past.
I spoke to around 15 Muslims, not all quoted here, each of whom introspected deeply. So forbidding does the future appear to them that none even alluded to the steep decline in the number of Muslim MLAs, down from the high of 69 elected in 2012 to just 24 in the new Uttar Pradesh Assembly.
They, in their own ways, echoed Adeeb, saying that the decline in representation of Muslims was preferable to having the Sangh Parivar rule over them with the spectre of Hindutva looming.
“Muslims need to become like the Parsis or, better still, behave the way the Chinese Indians do in Kolkata,” said poet Munawwar Rana. “They focus on dentistry or [their] shoe business, go out to vote on polling day and return to work.”
He continued: “And Muslims?” They hold meetings at night, cook deghs (huge vessels) of biryani, and work themselves into a frenzy. “They think the burden of secularism rests on their shoulders,” said Rana. “Educate your people and make them self-reliant.”
Readers would think Adeeb, Rana and others are poor losers, not generous enough to credit the BJP’s overwhelming victory in Uttar Pradesh to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s development programme. In that case readers should listen to Sudhir Panwar, the Samajwadi Party candidate from Thana Bhawan in West Uttar Pradesh, who wrote last week on the communal polarisation he experienced during his campaign.
In Thana Bhawan, there were four principal candidates – Suresh Rana, accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots, stood on the BJP ticket; Javed Rao on the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s; Abdul Rao Waris on the Bahujan Samaj Party’s, and Panwar on the Samajwadi Party’s. It was thought that the anger of Jats against the BJP would prevent voting on religious lines in an area where the Muslim-Hindu divide runs deep.
This perhaps prompted Rana to play the Hindu card, and the Muslims who were more inclined to the Rashtriya Lok Dal switched their votes to the Bahujan Samaj Party, believing that its Dalit votes would enhance the party’s heft to snatch Thana Bhawan.
Communal polarisation
Sample how different villages voted along communal lines.
In the Rajput-dominated Hiranwada, the Bahujan Samaj Party bagged 14 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal not a single vote, the Samajwadi Party seven, and the Bharatiya Janata Party a whopping 790.
In Bhandoda, a village where the Brahmins are landowners and also dominate its demography, followed by Dalits, the Bahujan Samaj Party secured 156 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal zero, the Samajwadi Party nine, and the Bharatiya Janata Party 570.
In the Muslim-dominated Jalalabad, the Bahujan Samaj Party received 453 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal 15, the Samajwadi Party 6 and the Bharatiya Janata Party 23.
In Pindora, where Jats are 35% and Muslims around 30% of the population, the Bahujan Samaj Party polled 33 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal 482, the Samajwadi Party 33, and the Bharatiya Janata Party 278, most of which is said to have come from the lower economically backward castes.
In Devipura, where the Kashyaps are numerous, the Bahujan Samaj Party got 86 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal 42, the Samajwadi Party 1 and the Bharatiya Janata Party 433.
In Oudri village, where the Jatavs are in the majority, the Bahujan Samaj Party bagged 343 votes, the Rashtriya Lok Dal 15, the Samajwadi Party 12, and the Bharatiya Janata Party 22.
This voting pattern was replicated in village after village. Broadly, the Jat votes split between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal, the Muslim votes consolidated behind the Bahujan Samaj Party, with the Samajwadi Party getting a slim share in it, the Jatavs stood solidly behind the Bahujan Samaj Party, and all others simply crossed over to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP’s Suresh Rana won the election from Thana Bhawan.
“Can you call this election?” asked Panwar rhetorically. “It is Hindu-Muslim war through the EVM [Electronic Voting Machine].” Panwar went on to echo Adeeb: “I feel extremely sad when I say that Muslims will have to keep away from contesting elections. This seems to be the only way of ensuring that elections don’t turn into a Hindu-Muslim one.”
The Bahujan Samaj Party’s Waris differed. “Is it even practical?” he asked. “But yes, Muslims should keep a low profile.”
Hindu anger against Muslims
For sure, Muslims feel that the binary of secularism-communalism has put them in a bind. Lawyer Mohd Shoaib, who heads the Muslim Rihai Manch, pointed to the irony of it. “For 70 years, we Muslims have fought against communalism,” he said. “But it has, nevertheless, grown by 70 times.”
Indeed, those with historical perspective think Uttar Pradesh of 2017 mirrors the political ambience that existed there between 1938 and 1946 – a seemingly unbridgeable Hindu-Muslim divide, a horrifyingly communalised public discourse, and a contest for power based on mobilisation along religious lines.
Among them is Mohammad Sajjad, professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University. “The 69 MLAs in the last Assembly was bound to, and did, raise eyebrows,” he said.
But what irks Hindus even more is that Muslims constitute nearly one-third of all members in panchayats and local urban bodies. “It is they who have become a sore point with Hindus,” said Sajjad. “When they see Muslim panchayat members become examples of the rags-to-riches story, the majority community feels aggrieved. It is not that Hindu panchayat members are less corrupt. But every third panchayat member being Muslim has given credibility to the narrative that Muslims are being favoured.”
The Hindu angst against Muslim empowerment is also on account of both the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party being popularly perceived to be indifferent to the aspirations of certain subaltern social groups. For instance, it is this indifference that has led to non-Jatav Dalits and most backward castes, clubbed under the Other Backward Classes for reservations, to leave the Bahujan Samaj Party, as non-Yadav middle castes have left the Samajwadi Party. They did so in response to Mayawati turning hers into primarily the party of Jatavs, and the Samajwadi Party pursuing the Yadavisation of the administration.
“These aspirational Hindu groups are angry with the SP [Samajwadi Party] and the BSP [Bahujan Samaj Party],” said Sajjad. “Their anger against them also turned into anger against Muslims.” This is because it is popularly felt that the support of Muslims to the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party brings them to power, turning these parties callously indifferent to the aspirations of other groups.
It is to neutralise the efficacy of Muslim votes, and also to teach their parties of choice a lesson, that these aspirational groups have flocked to the BJP. “This is why the very presence of Muslims in the political arena has become problematic for Hindus,” Sajjad said.
So then, should Muslims take Adeeb’s cue and retreat from the political arena or at least keep a low profile?
Sajjad replied, “Go ahead and vote the party of your choice. But after that, play the role of a citizen. If people don’t get electricity, protest with others. You can’t be forgiving of those for whom you voted only because they can keep the BJP out of power. This is what angers aspirational Hindu social groups.”
Indeed, it does seem a travesty of justice and democracy that Muslims should rally behind the Samajwadi Party in Muzaffarnagar after the riots there. Or that they voted for the Bahujan Samaj Party in Thana Bhawan in such large numbers even though Mayawati didn’t even care to visit the Muslim families who suffered unduly during the riots.
Introspection and self-criticism
Like Sajjad’s, most narratives of Muslims have a strong element of self-criticism. Almost all vented their ire against Muslim clerics. Did they have to direct Muslims which party they should vote for? Didn’t they know their recklessness would trigger a Hindu polarisation?
Unable to fathom their irresponsible behaviour, some plump for conspiracy theories. It therefore doesn’t come as a surprise to hear Obaidullah Nasir, editor of the Urdu newspaper Avadhnama, say, “They take money from the Bharatiya Janata Party to create confusion among Muslims. I got abused for writing this. But how else can you explain their decision to go public with their instructions to Muslims?”
Poet Ameer Imam, who teaches in a college in the Muslim-dominated Sambhal constituency, said, “Muslims will have to tell the maulanas that their services are required in mosques, not in politics. When Muslims applaud their rabble rousers, can they complain against those in the BJP?”
To this, add another question: When Mayawati spoke of Dalit-Muslim unity, didn’t Muslims think it would invite a Hindu backlash?
Most will assume, as I did too, that Muslims fear the communal cauldron that Uttar Pradesh has become will be kept on the boil. But this is not what worries them. Not because they think the Bharatiya Janata Party in power will change its stripes, but because they fear Muslims will feel so cowered that they will recoil, and live in submission. “Our agony arises from being reduced to second-class citizens, of becoming politically irrelevant,” said journalist Asif Burney.
True, members of the Muslim community are doing a reality-check and are willing to emerge from the fantasy world in which they thought that they decided which party won an election. The Uttar Pradesh results have rudely awakened them to the reality of being a minority, of gradually being reduced to political insignificance, and their status as an equal citizen – at least in their imagination – challenged and on the way to being undermined.
But this does not mean they wish to enter yet another world of fantasy, which journalist and Union minister MJ Akbar held out to them in the piece he penned for the Times of India on March 12. Akbar wrote,
“…[T]his election was not about religion; it was about India, and the elimination of its inherited curse, poverty. It was about good governance.”
One of those whom I spoke to laughed uproariously on hearing me repeat Akbar’s lines. So you can say that with them believing their future is darkled, Muslims at least haven’t lost their humour.
After tactically using caste arithmetic, the party has also consciously tried to undermine social justice as casteism and secularism as appeasement.
The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results are not a one-time anomaly. They are repeat of the 2014 Lok Sabha results. In fact, the Bharatiya Janata Party has improved on its performance in 2014. Because the party seems set to stay in Indian politics for a long innings, it is important to reflect on what its politics means and what it is doing or going to do once in power in such an overwhelming manner.
While the BJP has cynically employed the use of religious identity, it has also consciously sought to downplay identity politics or social justice on the basis of caste or community in the last decade, particularly in the last few years. This is clear from the way the party brought a non-Jat politician to lead Haryana and encouraged a counter-mobilisation against the Jat hegemony. It also appointed a non-tribal chief minister Jharkhand and has persisted with one in Chhatisgarh. The party does not even seem to mind a Gujarati hegemony.
Where the party excels at is to package and present itself as rising above caste and community, decrying social justice as casteism, and secularism as appeasement, as Vandita Mishra points out in the Indian Express, after having carefully and “astutely picking a large number of its candidates from the large scatter of non-Yadav OBC [Other Backward Classes] castes, for instance, to add them to its traditional upper caste Brahmin-Thakur mix”, even while making a pronounced bid for backward caste support.
In fact, the success of the party’s political vision is evident from the fact that what appeared earlier as impossible seems to be the new normal now. For example, in a state like Jharkhand, the party brought in fundamental change by amending the land tenancy laws so as to serve the corporate capital and yet there was hardly any effective resistance to the move.
Most of the BJP’s important leaders also happen to be well-honed cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The party seems to have made an effort to ensure that such candidates are given crucial postings, with a view to a more disciplined and ideologically committed leadership for the governments – at the Centre and in the states.
In other words, the BJP has sought to downplay one of the traditional basis of politics – that of social identities – because it hampers growth and expansion of capital.
The 2014 Lok Sabha results and now the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results have shown how the BJP has created an anti-local, anti-caste, anti-region political ambience by ensuring that a combination of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah become acceptable to people across regions.
The Manifesto of the party for Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections began by saying:
“The Party has begun the implementation of aims of social and economic justice through good governance (sushashan) under the leadership of Shri Narendra Modi”.
Beyond this point the Manifesto talked in an idiom of class and professions, laying down how the party’s perspective on and vision of development has to reach the youth, poor, business community, women and others.
The party simply does not use the concept of social justice the way other political formations do.
Economic argument
It is in this sense that one can see how the BJP seeks to build a political agenda beyond the social identities. It tries to reach out to all of them through some economic argument or the other.
The party seems to know and understand that gradually it has to be a politics of class, which will allow it to expand because its historical legacy of being a brahmanical political force alienated it for quite some time from the Muslims and Dalits.
In the last three years or so, the party has amply shown how well religion and other social and cultural affiliations can only be used to ensure a very clearly defined rule of corporate capital. However, these affiliations along with that of nation, and other such are only instruments for mobilisation, if at all.
The violence in campuses could be seen as an example of how the party uses the instrument of lumpenism to ensure that voices of dissent can be suppressed by use of collective force.
Social justice is not a term often invoked by the Indian State after 2014. And yet the BJP cannot completely do away with the decades-long practices of positive discrimination in policy making because the move might invite strong counter mobilisation against it. Which is what explains the party’s conscious decision of going slow on its earlier discourse and policy programmes based on social identities. But the so-called slips of tongue on quotas and reservation and demonisation of Dalit activists is a clear indication of what many of the party’s leaders think on these questions.
In days to come, the BJP would rather focus on policy areas that would more proactively bring Dalits and tribals within the fold of the market. The policy decisions of the BJP are aimed at breaking the consensus on the need of taking affirmative action to remove social inequalities among groups.
Social reengineering
The BJP seeks to transform everybody into an individual, concerned only about their own self, while ironically seeking votes from them or expressing outrage in the name of Hinduism. The collective, as noted above, continues to be invoked when needed but only as a mere source of mobilisation to move towards a fragmented/individuated situation.
This thinking, while destroying their social and cultural allegiances, would transform each citizen into somebody who would cease to be concerned about the marginalised, oppressed or discriminated groups and communities. This would also lead to weakening of any opposition to whatever the state would do – from handing over the economy to corporate capital to making education institutions into skilling centres among other things.
The BJP campaigns in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections mocked the gains that the Other Backward Classes and Dalit political mobilisations have made in these states. The party has routinely sought to underplay that there was any significant historic element of caste based discrimination. In Haryana, for instance, the party has come down heavily on unionisation of workers in the industrial belts of the state.
It has thus sought to delegitimise all movements that claim to represent social or economic justice. Which is why there is hardly any large scale resistance even when, for instance, the Haryana government unabashedly celebrates its foundation year using the symbol of a conch with a chariot embedded in it among other things. The party has thus got away by introducing overtly religious motifs in a secular country. Nor is there any public anger when workers are
The BJP represents a new moment in Indian politics. It understands and knows how to manipulate the social and cultural milieu much better than any other force towards making India fully compatible to the workings of corporate capital and seeking to break down the consensus on community and caste-based concepts of social justice.
If the political forces fail to understand this they would find it difficult to counter the BJP’s winning streak, even in 2019.
By LIKHAVEER
73 people have been arrested in the racket where US citizens were cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It took just two days for J Roy (name changed) to figure out that all was not quite above board at the call centre he had just joined, having had several years' experience in business process outsourcing units or BPOs.
"It just didn't seem right," he told when he was brought to court on Monday.
Roy is among 73 men and women who have been arrested in a widespread call-centre racket busted in Thane district near Mumbai in which callers, posing as American tax agents, coerced victims in the US into paying up online after telling them that they had defaulted on their taxes. The police suspect that the roots of the racket go back to Ahmedabad and have said it could be much wider than what they have uncovered so far.
On Monday, all the arrested accused were produced before a Thane magistrate. Thirteen have been remanded to further police custody and the rest have been sent to judicial custody.
Murky business
The call centre that Roy worked at was one among more than 10 that have been raided in Thane district over the last week, starting from October 4. He had spent a month there and was due to get his salary this week, but the police swooped in on his centre.
Looking back, Roy said with a smile, he knew that “the American Internal Revenue Service doesn’t call anyone”.
With a script ready for employees that ranged from mildly threatening to downright aggressive, the goings on at these purported call centres were far from right.
The call-centre employees, posing as US Internal Revenue Service agents, would use Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP – voice calls made using a web connection – and would tell their prospective victims that they had failed to pay their full taxes and would have to pay up or face further action. The convinced callers would make an online payment using a credit card.
Several thousand Americans – police are yet to estimate the number of victims – were conned into parting with small and large sums of money. The masterminds of the racket are still at large. The police said that about seven people had put their money into setting up these call centres and operating the racket. However, 73 mostly junior employees have been arrested so far. More than 630 are also under investigation.
The IRS regularly puts out advisories about fake calls such as the ones these centres were making. Despite this, in rented premises, the purported call centres managed to run a lucrative racket, that has fetched around Rs 500 crores in a year, according to reports.
From the script
Most of the callers were young men and women – in their 20s and 30s – who had responded to advertisements and flyers announcing openings at call centres or had heard of them through word-of-mouth. Knowledge of English was generally enough to get the job.
They were then primed with a script based on anticipated responses. Some of the conversations went like this:
Statement: Where are you calling me from?
Answer: I am calling you from the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE HEADQUARTERS which is located in Washington DC.
Statement: Where was the miscalculation (error) found?
Answer: Well, Mr customer let me make you aware that we are calling you from the investigation departments and not from the audit department and hence we cannot help you to where did you do the mistakes (sic).
Employees were trained in how to sound menacing, and taught to ask questions like, "What is your intention now, would you like to resolve this case or are you looking for a dispute?”
Callers who asked why they had not been sent the paperwork by mail or heard about the problem earlier would be told that attempts had been made to reach them, but to no avail. They would also be told no further paperwork could be sent across as it was lying in the court house.
Those who sought to speak to their accountants would be told this meant the IRS could charge them up to $50,000 as a fine and inform their employers and the media.
An accent trainer, among those arrested last week, helped the callers work on their diction and delivery and develop what the trainer described as a “neutral sounding" accent – something that would presumably not peg them to a specific country.
The scripts also took into possible scenarios where people would not agree to pay up easily and gave instructions on how to tackle those. For instance:
Scenario 1
Answer: I have already paid the IRSCaller: What we are investigating about is the miscalculation seen in your tax filed which makes us assume your intention was to defraud to IRS and the income tax law (sic).
Scenario 2
Statement: I am not going to make any payment over the phone.Answer: …I am here to guide you so that you can go ahead and make the payment and resolve the matter outside the court house so we can go ahead and cancel the arrest warrant.”
Scenario 3
Statement: My accountant files my taxes.Answer: Well Mr Customer, let me make aware that federal government has not allow to hire any third party for your taxes (sic)… the law suit is filed against you. So you are the responsible person for it.”
Tell-tale signs
A relative said his nephew had worked in call centres before this and was trained to simply repeat what they had been taught without thinking too much. “That is how these things usually work,” he said.
For employees, however, there were several tell-tale signs. There were no formal identity badges, no work contract at the time of joining and most significantly, no salary slips. Employees were paid in cash, with salaries starting from Rs 10,000 monthly for about eight hours of work. This was alluring for school dropouts or young people from lower-middle-class families.
"We started to realise something was wrong, but everyone is tempted by money," said the relative of one of the accused. “When a young man has a steady income it is good for him and for the family.”
An employee who worked at one of the raided call centres on a night shift had not met his wife in a month before he was arrested last week. “He said to me, ‘I have to show them I am working hard,” his wife told Scroll.in. “His job was simply to supervise, he did not make calls.”
One of the accused claimed they realised something was wrong only about four or five days before the police raided the centres. Many had been working at the establishments for just a couple of months or a few weeks and were waiting for their salaries.
“Our children are also victims,” said a relative of one of the arrested accused. “They were only employees, doing as they were told.”
Big fish at large
The relative of another employee said: “The police needs to go after the masterminds, not the employees, who were the small fry.”
The police, however, believe that it is unlikely that the employees had no clue what was going on.
The police said that a team has just returned from Ahmedabad, the possible starting point of the operation.
“There are likely to be more [such fraudulent centres],” said Param Bir Singh, Thane commissioner of police.
The raids were conducted over the past week in Thane. Many of the centres were renting out premises in a single building. “It is an industry,” said a senior police official. “We have learnt so much in investigating this case.”
The three First Information Reports registered in the case so far include charges of cheating and cheating by impersonation under the Indian Penal Code and sections of the Information Technology Act, including those related to sending menacing messages.
Police conducted the raids based on tip-offs they received and also found that the call centres had been operating without the requisite permissions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US is expected to formally contact the Thane police in connection with the scam.
Police estimate that the racket was running for a year, but say that further details will only be gleaned once they nab the main accused in this case. The purported mastermind, believed to have fled the country, is a 23-year-old identified as Sagar Thakkar alias Shaggy, who has no previous criminal record, police said.
Some reports said that some “gang members” were operating from the US, but the police did not comment on this.
