The Caravan - August 2019 8688065543, 9529020226

Citation preview

Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

VOLUME 11 • ISSUE 8 AUGUST 2019

cover story / politics 26

All in the Family The American Sangh’s affair with Tulsi Gabbard pieter friedrich

26

Tulsi Gabbard, a fourth-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, has launched her campaign for the 2020 presidential election in the United States. If she wins, she would be the first woman, and the first Hindu, to be US president. Her rise to prominence came out of nowhere, and is inexplicable until one considers the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in it. A large number of her donors, even from when she was a virtual unknown, are top executives in RSS affiliates in the United States. Members of such groups organised fundraisers and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her various campaigns, as the Sangh looked for sympathetic politicians to rehabilitate Narendra Modi’s tainted reputation in the United States in the run-up to his election as the prime minister of India. Gabbard played a significant part in that project, even as she now tries to distance herself from the RSS in order to run for the White House as a progressive Democrat.

perspectives

18 law

60

18 Scorched Earth

The suffocation of the National Green Tribunal

aruna chandrasekhar film

communities

How Diljit Dosanjh helmed the rise of Punjabi comedy

How poetry became a crime in Assam

60 Jatt Like That

22 In the Crosshairs

manik sharma

samrat AUGUST 2019

3

the lede

10 70

arts

10 Camera Obscura

The dying art of hand-painting photographs

shruti janardhan caste

14 The Sound of the Fury

photo essay / communities

How an ancient art form became a symbol of resistance

70 Tears of a

nikhil latagajanan

Thousand People

government

Exploring the violence of displacement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

16 King’s Gambit

samsul alam helal

The economic turmoil caused by Jordan’s “strategic refocus”

sreejith sugunan

books

96

business

84 Inside Story

Rajat Gupta’s appeal to the court of public opinion

sanjana ramachandran

the bookshelf showcase editor’s pick 4

94 96 98

84 NOTE TO READERS: THE “MARKETING INITIATIVE” ON PAGE 52-59 IS PAID ADVERTISING CONTENT.

THE CARAVAN

True media needs true allies. India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever. We need allies like

YOU.

I think that there will come a time when people will ask of the Indian media: What were you doing in those five years when a government came to power that spread hate and poison, that controlled the media, what were you doing then? And very few in the Indian media will be able to hold their heads up and say that we were calling the powerful to account. I think Caravan is one of the few magazines that will be able to hold its head up, if it stays afloat. And I hope it stays afloat, which is why I’m saying, please read Caravan. ARUNDHATI ROY, Author

I love reading The Caravan, because the kind of reportage it does, is away from the din of fast news, of something which is out there, every news hour to debate upon. It’s delivery of news which takes two steps back, goes back to the basic principles of reportage. Yes, sometimes I do not agree with the ideology, the ideological slant that the stories take. But overall, the way in which the reportage is done is something that one really looks forward to. SHUBHRASTHA, Political Strategist, BJP

I recommend Caravan magazine because this is one of the most bold, forthright, creative and imaginative magazines that I’ve read in a very long time. But the most important quality is its truthfulness. The Loya series of articles, in particular, is an example of how it can unearth evidence that others have ignored or simply not wanted to find, how it can publish despite opposition and how it can continue to do so despite the fact that the government of the day is embarrassed, and probably angry, and doing everything it can to stop the magazine. Caravan stands out as a striking light in a country where otherwise press freedom seems to be more often dishonoured rather than updated. I recommend Caravan as one of the best products that Indian journalism has produced in a very long time.

KARAN THAPAR, Journalist

contributors THE LEDE

10 14 16

Shruti Janardhan is a former editorial intern at The Caravan. Nikhil Latagajanan is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai. Sreejith Sugunan is a PhD candidate at the centre for political studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has previously written for Himal Southasian, the Indian Express and The Wire.

PERSPECTIVES

18

Aruna Chandrasekhar is an independent journalist and researcher working on issues of corporate accountability, climate change, land rights and environmental conflict. Samrat is a journalist and author, and co-editor of Insider/Outsider—Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India.

22

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

26 Pieter Friedrich is an activist and journalist who has written for The Wire, The Quint, Countercurrents and The Citizen, among others. 60 Manik Sharma writes on arts, culture, books and film.

PHOTO ESSAY

70 Samsul Alam Helal is a freelance photographer based in Dhaka. His work explores the stories of people from the margins. Surabhi Kanga is the web editor at The Caravan.

BOOKS

84 Sanjana Ramachandran is a former editorial-management intern at The Caravan.

COVER

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty images

Correction: Richard Kamei and Sabina Y Rahman’s “Drawing the Line,” published last month, mistakenly mentioned the word “northern” instead of “northeastern” in one instance.

edited, printed & published by Paresh Nath on behalf of Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, New Delhi - 110055 and printed at PS PC Press Pvt. Ltd., DLF 50, Industrial Area, Faridabad, Haryana - 121003 and published at Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. E-8 Jhandewalan Estate, New Delhi - 110055 editorial, advertisement & publication office E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, Rani Jhansi Marg, New Delhi - 110055, Phone: 41398888, 23529557 email: [email protected] Other Offices ahmedabad: 31, Ground Floor, Narayan Chamber, Nehru Bridge Corner, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad - 380009 bangalore: Flat No. 001, Ravi Kiran Apartments, No. 12, Plain Street, Off Infantry Road, Bangalore - 560001 chennai: 14, First Floor, Cison’s Complex, Montieth Road, Chennai - 600008 Phone: 044 - 28554448

6

website www.caravanmagazine.in

patna: 12, Ashiana Tower, Exhibition Road, Patna - 800001 mumbai: A 4, Shriram Industrial Estate, Wadala, Mumbai - 400031 Phone: 022 - 24100844 kolkata: 16 A, Amrita Banerjee Road, Kalighat, Kolkata - 700026 kochi: G-7, Pioneer Towers, 1, Marine Drive, Kochi - 682031, Phone: 0484 2371537 lucknow: B-G/3, 4, Sapru Marg, Lucknow - 226001, Phone: 0522 - 4045544 secunderabad: 122, Chenoy Trade Centre, 116, Park Lane, Secunderabad 500003 Phone: 040 - 27841596, Mobile: 8688065543 jaipur: Geetanjali Tower, Shop No 114 Opp. Vyas Hospital, Ajmer Road, Jaipur - 302006, Phone: 0141 - 3296580, Mobile: 9529020226 bhopal: B-31, Vardhawan, Green Park, Ashoka Garden, Bhopal - 462023 Title The Caravan is registered with Govt. of India as trade mark. ISSN 0971-0639

[email protected]

facebook.com/TheCaravanMagazine

The Caravan regrets the error.

subscribe [email protected]

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Roman Gautam books editor Maya Palit creative director Tanvi Mishra senior assistant editors Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen copy editors Ajachi Chakrabarti and Akash Poyam web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors (web) Arshu John and Tusha Mittal contributing editors Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and Salil Tripathi staff writers Praveen Donthi, Atul Dev, Nikita Saxena, Sagar, Kaushal Shroff and Dearton Thomas Hector reporting fellow (north india) Tushar Dhara reporting fellow (government) Nileena MS reporting fellow (south india) Aathira Konikkara editorial fellows Amrita Singh and Mehak Mahajan multimedia producer Shaheen Ahmed fact checking fellows Ahan Penkar and Armanur Rahman social-media management and engagement fellow Arunima Kar senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan assistant photo editor Shahid Tantray graphic designers Paramjeet Singh and Kevin Ilango hindi translator Vishnu Sharma editorial trainee Mohammed Tahir editorial manager Haripriya KM editorial assistant Akshita Pattiyani editorial interns Appu Ajith, Sreerag PS, Midhun Mohan and Karishma Koshal photo intern Rishi Kochhar

Rates inland One copy R125, Discounted price one/two years, R1125/2100 respectively. 75 p. per copy air surcharge in following areas: Silchar, Dibrugarh, Agartala, Tezpur, Imphal, Akaras and Nepal. international subscription airmail US $ 61 (12 Issues) express delivery saarc countries US $ 140 (12 Issues) express delivery europe & south america US $ 219 (12 Issues) express delivery to the rest of the world US $ 219 (12 Issues) subscription should be remitted through money orders, cheques/ bank drafts drawn in favour of Delhi Prakashan Vitran Pvt. Ltd. at E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, New Delhi - 110055 Copyright notice © Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi - 110055. INDIA. All materials published in this magazine (including, but not limited to articles, quotations, extracts, or any parts of the

THE CARAVAN

@thecaravanindia

article, photographs, images, illustrations also known as the “Content”) are protected by copyright, and owned by delhi press patra prakashan pvt. ltd. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content in whole or in part. This copy is sold on the condition that the jurisdiction for all disputes concerning sale, subscription and published matter will be settled in courts/forums/tribunals at Delhi. Readers are recommended to make appropriate enquiries and take appropriate advice before sending their money, incurring any expense or entering into a binding commitment in relation to an advertisement. The Caravan magazine shall not be liable to any person for loss or damage incurred as a result of his/her accepting or offering to accept an invitation contained in any advertisement published in The Caravan.

True media needs true allies. India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever. We need allies like

YOU.

Democracy just cannot survive without a free press. And certainly, a country like India, which is so diverse, can absolutely not survive without a free expression of facts and views. And because the mainstream media is now shutting its mouth, out of greed or out of fear, the role of magazines like Caravan becomes all-important. It is very important that all of us should subscribe to magazines like Caravan, so that they get an independent source of funds and can continue to be doing completely independent and fearless work. ARUN SHOURIE, Journalist and Politician

My favourite literary genre is long nonfiction, and no one does a better job of it than Caravan magazine in India. I recall that the very best review that I read about my book The Difficulty of Being Good came as a very thoughtful, analytical, independent-thinking article on it. And that’s really the tenure of Caravan, so go and read Caravan magazine. GURCHARAN DAS, Author and Former CEO, Procter & Gamble

I’ve been a reader of The Caravan for several years, and I think it’s in a position which is very, very important, because it provides nuanced, detailed stories of issues that are really going to impact the future of India. I think it’s one of the very rare publications now that seem quite fearless in their approach, which is why I respect what it’s doing, and recommend that more readers join in and share the work that Caravan is doing. SHUBHA MUDGAL, Hindustani Classical Vocalist

I think what we need a lot more of is free, thinking press. Press which is unafraid, press which actually explores and gets into the nitty-gritties, which isn’t just there as one of news but continues to explore and dig deep, and is unafraid to do so. And it is that to my mind that Caravan represents, and which we need more of—good, well-reasoned journalism, which is unafraid and which has a voice. So keep it up! NAINA LAL KIDWAI, Chairperson,

Max Financial Services

I read Caravan because I find it to be a journal that tells, investigates, and delves into important stories, on what’s going on in the country today. Caravan is not influenced by corporate interest or political alignments, and investigates in a genuine sense the real stories that we need to know. ORIJIT SEN, Artist

I do enjoy reading Caravan and I get a lot of pleasure out of it. And it forces me to think. The research that goes into the writing of the articles, the way they are written and the subjects chosen, are thoughtprovoking, in the sense that you think beyond the obvious. In the process of doing this—like in everything that is thought-provoking—you ask questions, you have doubts and you want to explore the freedom of asking questions and expressing your doubts and trying to get answers. And I find that I do enjoy it very much, because it forces me to do that. ROMILA THAPAR, Historian

True media needs true allies.

India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever. We need allies like

D IG ITA L PL AN S

YOU.

D IG ITAL + PR I N T PL A NS

now assured delivery by registered post

+ Unlimited access to all stories on The Caravan

+ Unlimited access to all stories on The Caravan website (including archives)

website (including archives)

C

O

M

M

E

N

D

E

D

+ Home delivery of monthly print issues

A NN UA L

R

E

at just K2.74/day.

3 YE AR S

at just K2.47/day.

10 YEA RS at just K2.19/day.

ONLY

AN N UA L

L999

at just K4.11/day.

D1500

ONLY

3 YE AR S

L2700

at just K3.65/day.

D3000

ONLY

AN N UA L

L8000

OVERSEAS PACKAGE

D10000

ONLY

L1500 D2000

ONLY

L4000 D4500

ONLY

$100

at just $0.27/day.

3 YE AR

4PIEWIƤPPMRXLMWSVHIVJSVQ ERH QEMP MX [MXL ]SYV VIQMXXERGI XS (IPLM4VEOEWLER:MXVER4ZX 0XH ) .LERHI[EPER )WXEXI 6ERM .LERWM1EVK2I[(IPLM

OVERSEAS PACKAGE

ONLY

$280

at just $0.25/day.

Please Note:

Name:

• It will take 5-7 working days to process your subscription. • You will receive an email and SMS on your registered e-mail ID and mobile number, respectively. Kindly ensure that you have entered your primary correspondence.

E-mail:

• For further information, please contact our subscription department. Phone (Toll free number) : 1800 103 880. Landline: 011 41398888 (extn: 119/221/264) Mobile/SMS/WhatsApp: 08588843408. Email: [email protected]. You can also subscribe online at www.delhipress.in.subscribe

Mobile No.: Address:

• *SV 7TIIH 4SWX OMRHP] TE] ER EHHMXMSREP WYQ SJ Ƈ TIV IHMXMSR for less XLER  OQW ERH Ƈ TIV IHMXMSR JSV FI]SRH  kms. (For subscription in India only)

Payment Mode: Paytm (Transaction ID:

)

Cheque/DD (Cheque/DD No.:

)

*Favouring DELHI PRAKSHAN VITRAN PVT. LTD payable at par SCAN FOR PAYTM

THE LEDE Camera Obscura

courtesy vasantha yogananthan

The dying art of hand-painting photographs / Arts

/ shruti janardhan On the afternoon of 29 November, when I visited Jaykumar Shankar’s small office in Delhi’s Patel Nagar, his desk was strewn with hand-painted photographs and bottles of transparent photo colours. The photographs were for his upcoming exhibition with Vasantha Yogananthan, a photographer based in Paris who describes his work as “photographic practice that addresses the space between documentary and fiction.” The two began 10

THE CARAVAN

their collaboration in 2016, and Yogananthan’s work, A Myth of Two Souls—to which Shankar contributed—was released the following year. Shankar flipped through some of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that he has painstakingly coloured by hand. “If someone who is not used to transparent photo colour uses it on the photograph, it will take only one dab for the photograph to be ruined,” he told me. “It is tricky to use this colour if you can’t do it with finesse, because otherwise the photograph will get spotted, and then it takes you additional time to clean it before you start again.” He described the headspace with which he starts hand-painting a photograph. The entire process is guided by the intuition and sensitivity of the hand-painter, he said. “It is all in the imagination.” Once he has an idea of where he wants to take a particular composition, he cleans the black-and-white print by applying a particular chemical. The photo is then kept in the dark, to protect it from exposure to sunlight. The next step is to apply the photo colours, the amount of which is determined by the relative distance of objects in the photograph. Finally, it is left to dry. The entire process can take days at a stretch, depending on the picture. Shankar uses a colour palette suggested by Yogananthan for the projects they collaborate on. Hand-painting photographs was a popular practice in the West during the nineteenth century. The art arrived in India around the same time as photography itself. Deepali Dewan, an art professor at the University of Toronto, argues in her book Embelished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs: Towards a Transcultural History of Photography, that “the desire to manipulate the photographic image stemmed from what was perceived as the limitations of photography’s technical capabilities.” The first generation of Indian hand-painters were court painters, who had, prior to the advent of photography, faithfully recorded minute details of prominent royal events, including subtle variations in costume. Even

the lede

opposite page: “Dasaratha and Kaushalya longing for a son” (Ramtek, Maharashtra, 2015), from Vasantha Yogananthan’s book Early Times, handpainted by Jaykumar Shankar.

courtesy vasantha yogananthan

left: “Magic Jungle” (Jog Falls, Karnataka, 2016), from Vasantha Yogananthan’s book Dandaka, handpainted by Jaykumar Shankar.

AUGUST 2019

though photography had taken over their role of capturing an exact rendition of what the eye could see, the medium had its limitations. “Painting and photography have always been linked,” Yogananthan told me. “Painters were looking at photographs and vice versa.” By the mid nineteenth century, paintings and photography were fused together into a hybrid art form in India. Over the years, hand-coloured photographs became more accessible, as photo studios hired skilled hand-painters and offered their services to the public. In his book Painted Photographs: Coloured Portraiture in India, Rahaab Allana, the curator of the Alkazi Foundation for Arts, writes that “colours in Indian textiles convey meaning embedded in several simultaneous registers—they indicate social and marital status, signify the seasons and major festivals. Rituals are often associated with the use of textiles in a specific colour.” He adds that the “need for photographs to convey the colourful splendour and symbolism of Indian textiles quickly manifested through the new medium of painted photographs.” 11

courtesy philippe calia

camera obscura · the lede

Shankar said that his family has been hand-painting photographs for six generations. In the nineteenth century, they were based on the banks of the river Sarayu—Shankar, a devout Hindu, said their proximity to Ayodhya, Ram’s mythical birthplace, lent his family’s work a certain “godliness.” All of the photographs of the religious organisation Radha Soami Satsang, he said, had been hand-painted by his family. Shankar learnt the art of hand-painting from his parents, Indra Prakash and Tara Devi. He told me that his mother had developed her own interpretation of the photographs of the eighteenth-century ruler Tipu Sultan, and hand-painted around forty thousand photographs before she stopped pursuing the craft. “My parents also hand-painted pictures for the king of Bhutan and Hyderabad’s Nizam’s Palace. And then there was this image, of the 1971 war, hand-painted by my mother long back.” Their work had earned them enough recognition that the actor Amitabh Bachchan and the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi met them, Shankar said with evident pride. 12

Allana told me that the practice of hand-painting has been pigeonholed as an older tradition. “There is no mass production of this particular art form, and the craft is considered very niche. While this historical tradition came in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, digital technologies replaced this traditional practice.” The advent of colour photography killed the demand for hand-painted photographs. Many hand-painters were driven to look for alternate sources of income, since the profession could not sustain them. When Shankar was growing up, there were only eight to ten hand-painters left in Delhi. He felt he was restricted both because of geography and the changing times. Allana first came across Shankar’s work while making a film on hand-painting, in 2001, through Mahatta, a studio in Delhi’s Connaught Place that had many of Indra Prakash’s photographs. After getting to know Shankar, he put him in touch with Yogananthan in 2015. Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls was a photographic project inspired by the Ramayana, providing a modern retelling of the THE CARAVAN

above: Jaykumar Shankar inherited the art from his parents, Indra Prakash and Tara Devi, who were prolific hand-painters.

story using hand-painted photographs. “I was interested by the concept of journey in time,” Yogananthan told me over email. “Colours are fundamental in the way we read photographs, they influence how we read them. The idea behind the series was to mix classic color photographs with hand-painted photographs in order to confuse the viewer. Is he looking [at] photographs of today’s India or from the past?” As the scope of the art form continues to be restricted, Allana and Dewan have made active attempts to chronicle this part of India’s visual history. Shankar and Yogananthan have been instrumental in reviving it over the past few decades. Allana told me that, “as a practice, hand-painting is at the cusp of fading altogether.” Yogananthan was more optimistic. “Hand-painting has a great potential and many contemporary artists are revisiting or using old techniques,” he said. “The trick is to do so not out of pure nostalgia, but to bring something new to the tradition.” s

the lede

The Sound of the Fury How an ancient art form became a symbol of resistance / Caste / nikhil latagajanan On a Sunday morning at the usually crowded Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, the loud beating of drums began echoing through empty streets. It was a group of youths from Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, who had gathered for their weekly practice of parai attam. The youths, part of a group called the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu—Blue Arts Collective—began by chanting a Tamil slogan: Parai ongi olikatum Idhu uzhaikum makkalin viduthalaikai Engal parai mulakam savukaga alla Uzhaikum makkalin valvukaga Onki adipathil kiliyatum Paraigal alla suya sathiya perumai pesuvor mugathiraigal Let the parai sound loudly For the freedom of the working people Our parai shouts not for death But for the life of the working people By beating loudly Let the veils of proud casteists be torn apart Parai attam refers to a performance of the parai—a hollow drum made of a wooden frame, with cow skin stretched over one side, played with sticks of unequal size and thickness—accompanied by a folk dance. The parai is said to be one of the oldest percussion instruments in human history. It has its origins in ancient Tamil society, where it had several uses: gathering people, broadcasting announcements and warnings, celebrating weddings and festivals, as well as invoking divine spirits during funeral processions. Over the years, it was the last usage that came to be identified with the instrument. Under Brahminical orthodoxy, the parai was considered a funereal instrument played only by 14

Dalits. “You play the tabla, you play the mridangam, but you beat parai,” Avatthi Ramaiah, a professor in the centre for the study of social exclusion and inclusive policy at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, told me. “The word itself suggests how much prejudice there is behind it.” The stigma associated with parai attam was passed down the generations. Most Dalits stopped playing the instrument during the Self-Respect Movement led by the social activist Periyar E Ramasamy in the early twentieth century. In 1987, during a protest in the Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, a Dalit scholar was reportedly murdered for suggesting that people from other castes could play the parai. The founders of the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu are fourth-generation Tamil migrants in Mumbai. Since the 1960s, many Dalit and other oppressed-caste families began migrating to the financial capital from Tamil Nadu, particularly the district of Tirunelveli. They were fleeing caste atrocities, as well as seeking employment, since land back home was concentrated in the hands of the dominant castes. Tamil Nadu was known for its leather industry, and Dharavi, where most members of these communities settled, became a major centre for tanneries. In 2014, Raja Kutty, who runs a shop in Dharavi, started the Jai Bhim Foundation along with his elder brother Suresh Kumar, his sister-in-law Vennila Kartikaran and his friend Nithyanand. The JBF’s aim was to raise awareness about caste discrimination by popularising the writings of the anti-caste intellectuals BR Ambedkar and Periyar. On 17 January 2016, Rohith Vemula, a doctoral student at the University of Hyderabad, committed suicide following a discriminatory discipline process that led to his expulsion, sparking nationwide outrage. The JBF was part of a joint-action committee that organised a peaceful protest rally in Dharavi. The rally, which was reportedly THE CARAVAN

attended by some five hundred people, was attacked by activists from the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Several protestors were hospitalised with injuries. According to a social-media post by Ajmal Khan, one of the protestors injured in the attack, the police refused to intervene despite being present at the scene. “To lodge a complaint against the attackers, the protesters had to camp outside the Dharavi police station.” It was only when they refused to leave that the police agreed to file a complaint under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. However, soon after the crowd dispersed, the police released the RSS activists it had detained, who filed a complaint of their own, against Raja and other organisers of the protest. The matter was eventually resolved through police mediation, but Raja and two others continue to attend hearings in a case filed against them, for organising the protest without obtaining a no-objection certificate from the police. The clash changed how the founders of the JBF perceived their role in the anti-caste movement—simply organising events on the birth anniversaries of social reformers was not enough to get the people on their side. To better reach the masses, they formed the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu as a cultural wing. Ideology and culture, they realised, could not be seen separately. Art could bring people together, and its role was not limited to entertainment. It could be used to generate mass awareness. “Art and culture was there from the time of Buddha, Charvaka, Sant Kabir to the present time of Annabhau Sathe,” Raja told me. “Everything came to us through the culture only.” Since the elders in their community had never played the parai due to the stigma attached to the instrument, the members of the NKK picked up the basics from artists based in Tamil

the lede

nikhil lata gajanan

left: The founders of the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu are fourth-generation Tamil migrants in Mumbai, who are based in Dharavi.

Nadu, and began developing their own techniques. As they engaged in their weekly practice, people would gather to listen. While people are often unresponsive to direct political engagement, the music worked to break the silence. The audience often responded to their anti-caste message with questions, leading to long conversations. Raja said that the NKK had decided not to carry on the traditional system of playing the parai at religious rituals and funerals. Instead, the group wants to change the parai into a symbol of resistance. “We work with the ideologies of Dr Ambedkar, Periyar and Marx, and we aim to spread our ideas through this medium of music. For us, the parai is a tool to unite people and make them aware about social realities.” The Hindu Right was using culture to spread hate and communal divides, he added, and the NKK was looking to do the polar opposite, using the parai to promote social justice. The NKK’s efforts echo similar attempts made to liberate the parai from its caste-based roots. In 2006, Manimaran, a former child labourer who had

learnt the instrument at an orphanage, decided to no longer perform at funerals. A year later, he formed the Buddhar Kalaikuzhu, a group that performs parai attam and conducts classes. Many of its students belong to dominant castes. “I played at so many funerals that the music itself began to hurt me,” Manimaran told the Indian Express, in 2016. “I wanted to enjoy playing the instrument.” In 2011, V Shakthi, a software engineer based in Coimbatore, formed Team Nimirvu Kalaiyagam, to perform, popularise and teach parai attam. Raja and Suresh rued, however, that much of this rehabilitation was being personally funded by enthusiasts, without much collaboration. They were also concerned about whether these movements were furthering the anti-caste struggle that is central to their work, rather than focussing on individual fame and success. Besides cultural performances, the NKK organises occasional group discussions. People in the neighbourhood—both adults and children—gather to read books by social reformers, share thoughts and plan future activities. The children in the group have begun setAUGUST 2019

ting up a community library. The Tamil founders of the group have approached other communities in Dharavi to join their cause. They now work alongside Telugu-speaking people, as well as those from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra. They want to increase female participation, but women have been hesitant to join, since the group practises in an open space and often faces local opposition. Though the NKK members’ families moved to Mumbai to escape caste discrimination, caste never left them. It plays a critical role in Dharavi as well. The slum is divided into different parts, each with its particular caste and identity politics. Many of the dominant-caste Marathi-speaking residents are supporters of the RSS. The NKK’s founders alleged that under the influence of the RSS, the local police repeatedly refused them permission to hold events. Raja said that some members of the group had noticed suspicious people following them. During the campaign for the general election earlier this year, the group’s members heard that the RSS had despatched assailants to attack them, and chose to temporarily suspend its activities. A noise complaint was recently filed against the group. Since then, they are not allowed to practise in the open ground in their locality, which also hosts the local RSS shakha—branch. As a result, they now gather at the Bandra Kurla Complex. The NKK’s members continue their attempts to expand the discourse around caste, despite having to balance their activism with providing for their families. The difficulties they face, Raja told me, only motivate them to stand firm and continue their struggle for a cultural revolution against injustice and discrimination. s 15

the lede

King’s Gambit The economic turmoil caused by Jordan’s “strategic refocus” / Government

On 20 March, a Bangladeshi migrant working at a small eatery in the coastal Jordanian city of Aqaba complained to me about how little the jobs there paid, leaving “hardly anything to send home,” even as he conceded that “at home, I might not even get a job.” It was a sentiment echoed by not only the majority of migrant workers I spoke to—mostly Palestinians, Syrians, South Asians, Filipinos and Egyptians—but by the Jordanians themselves. There was palpable disappointment in the air because of the lack of jobs and meagre salaries. The government holds an ongoing refugee crisis partially responsible for the domestic situation, but the residents of Jordan no longer buy this explanation. During an interview at the World Economic Forum, on 24 January, the prime minister, Omar Razzaz, admitted that Jordan was suffering from “neighbourhood effects”—a reference to the Syrian crisis, which has reshaped the demographics of the country, where one in three people is now a refugee. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey together host over three quarters of the 5.6 million registered Syrian refugees, who have fled their country following the crisis that has unfolded since 2011. Although Turkey has taken in most of the Syrian refugees, Jordan and Lebanon—despite their relatively smaller size—host over a thousand Syrian refugees per 100,000 habitants. While Jordan’s government and the UNHCR have tried to ensure that the majority of the nearly seven hundred thousand registered Syrians in the country are housed outside of the country’s refugee camps, recent reports indicate that 80 percent of those outside the camps live below the poverty line, and more than half are unemployed. Jordan has for long been a hospitable country, accepting refugees from 16

mohammad hannon / ap

/ sreejith sugunan

many war-torn countries. The kingdom accommodated over 1.5 million Palestinian refugees following the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948–49 and 1967. After it withdrew its claim to the West Bank, in 1988, the Jordanian government provided these refugees with passports for travel purposes, but did not grant them citizenship or permanent residency. During the Gulf War in the early 1990s, a comparatively smaller exodus of Palestinians came from Kuwait, in addition to a million Iraqi refugees. According to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, of the five million

LETTER FROM JORDAN

THE CARAVAN

registered Palestinian refugees, over two million live in Jordan—a country with a population of around ten million. When added to Jordanian citizens of Palestinian descent, they amount to over half the country’s population, according to unofficial estimates. In 2016, the World Bank estimated that the cost of hosting Syrian refugees in the kingdom was $2.5 billion per year, suggesting that the government spent almost four thousand dollars per refugee per year. According to the government, over a quarter of the country’s budget was directed towards meeting the costs of the refugees. In order to meet the government’s growing demands for aid, an agreement called the Jordan Compact was signed, in 2016, by representatives from the United Kingdom, Germany, Kuwait, Norway and the United Nations. Touted

the lede

above: Jordan’s refugee camps accomodate nearly seven hundred thousand registered Syrians and over two million Palestinian refugees.

as a multilateral partnership with a “renewed focus” on Jordan’s economic transformation, the agreement resulted in an annual grant of over seven hundred million dollars for the next three years. This was in addition to concessional loans of $1.9 billion, as well as the relaxation of the European Union’s trade regulations for Jordanian products. This financial aid was aimed at targets such as providing work permits for Syrian refugees, and ensuring all Syrian children were enrolled in schools. Nevertheless, the Jordanian government faces considerable challenges. In February 2018, its hand forced by the worsening economic environment in the kingdom, it stopped subsidising the medical treatment of Syrians, leading to a fivefold increase in their medical expenses. To make things worse, in August 2018, the United States government announced that it would stop all funding toward the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees. It also passed the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act of 2018, which allows recipients of US aid to be sued in US courts. When the law came into force in February 2019, the Palestinian Authority wrote to the US State Department that it would stop accepting aid, out of fear of being implicated in counterterrorism lawsuits in the United States. Earlier, in December 2017, the Donald Trump administration also recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The move was deemed unacceptable by both Palestinians and Jordanians, since it would entail giving up their stake in eastern Jerusalem, which was annexed from Jordan by Israel in 1967. The Jordanian government considers East Jerusalem integral to the two-state solution, as the capital for a future Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Jordan’s economy has been wilting under increasing debt, due to its large public sector, generous subsidies and the drying up of foreign capital and aid. In 2016, the kingdom accepted a structural-reform package from the International Monetary Fund. However, the IMF mandated tax hikes and the removal of government subsidies in 2018, resulting in massive protests across the country, eventually leading to the resignation of the prime minister, Hani al-Mulki. The domestic situation is further exacerbated by the lack of opportunities. While the average growth rate during the first decade of the century was 6.5 percent, it dropped to 2.5 percent during the 2010s. This slowdown is primarily attributed to the effects of the global financial crisis in 2008–09, AUGUST 2019

as well as the regional turbulence that accompanied the Arab Spring two years later. The unemployment rate remains at an alarming 18.7 percent, while youth unemployment has soared to a record high of 40 percent. The kingdom has also witnessed a reduction in its exports as a consequence of the unstable geopolitics in its neighbourhood. In February this year, the government finally responded to this domestic turmoil with what King Abdullah II called, at an investment summit in London, a “strategic refocus on our competitive advantages.” According to the king, this would mean devising an economic strategy that “prioritises certain sectors that benefit directly from Jordan’s high-value human capital,” as well as “foster a healthy business climate” in the country. The government plans to make private players and public–private partnerships central to spurring economic activity, and has also positioned the capital, Amman, as a gateway to business in West Asia. However, the decrease in public expenditure following the IMF restructuring has had the unintended consequence of stalling private-sector growth, stifling investment in an atmosphere of austerity. In a country where one in three people is reported to be employed by the state, the government’s effort to direct people towards private-sector employment has also faced opposition. In February, around a hundred and fifty job seekers from Aqaba marched on foot for over three hundred kilometres to Amman, and staged a protest demanding jobs in state-run enterprises. Similar marches towards Amman were reported from the cities of Irbid, Karak and Madaba. The protesters rejected the government’s offer to find them jobs in the private sector. During the 2011 Arab Spring, protests erupted in Jordan as well, demanding better governance. However, Abdullah prevented the protests from spiralling out of control by dismissing the government and significantly reforming the constitution. Part of the reforms included the establishment of an independent election commission. As a result, the royal family has an image of being reform-oriented, of espousing liberal values in a region historically perceived to be authoritarian and rent seeking. However, economic deprivation is turning public sentiment against the monarchy. It is evident that the king’s plans are not working, and that the proposed “strategic refocus,” or the IMF’s structural readjustment, will not solve Jordan’s problems. s 17

PERSPECTIVES Scorched Earth

/ aruna chandrasekhar At first light one day in July last year, Shivpal Bhagat packed his modest holdall and caught the first bus out of Kosampali—an Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district, fragmented by three coal mines and two power plants. After two hours of trailing coal trucks through patches of sal forest, Bhagat alighted at the Raigarh railway station, and boarded a cramped train to Bilaspur, another two hours away. With afternoon wearing on, he caught the Chhattisgarh Express to Bhopal. The next morning, having crossed the state border into Madhya Pradesh, the train approached Bhopal. Bhagat changed into a white shirt as the train pulled into the city, then squeezed into a shared auto for the last stretch of his journey. Finally, more than a full day after he left home, he arrived at the Bhopal branch of the National Green Tribunal, the country’s only court dedicated to environmental issues. Bhagat, the sarpanch of Kosampali and an Adivasi himself, is no stranger to the courts. For years, Raigarh’s residents have resisted the exploitation of the area’s massive coal reserves by public and private companies given permission to mine and generate power here by the central government. Getting at the coal often means stripping away forests, farmland and homes, with devastating environmental consequences even before the pollution from the coal dust, fly ash and contaminated runoff that accompanies mines and power plants. Bhagat has long been part of the 18

resistance, in court and on the ground, and has had to fight multiple cases filed against him by the companies, as well as state authorities. This court date, however, was unusual. For the first time, Bhagat would be appearing not before a judge of the NGT in Bhopal, but on camera, via videoconference, before the NGT’s principal bench in Delhi. The case in question, filed by Bhagat and several co-petitioners, involved the Gare Pelma IV/2&3 mining complex. The complex was operated by Jindal Steel and Power, but, in the aftermath of a 2014 ruling by the Supreme Court that cancelled all prior coal-block allocations, the government handed custody of it to a public company, Coal India. During the video hearing, the Delhi bench accepted that mining at the complex had devastating health effects. It noted that the project did not have the consent of affected villagers, and that in many cases mines had encroached to barely ten metres from their homes. Earlier, the NGT had directed a joint committee with representatives from the coal and environment ministries to prepare a report on the matter. Now, the bench accepted the report’s recommendation for measures to contain pollution, as well as the recommendation that JSPL and Coal India be fined R5 crore each. It ordered “that the recommendations be given effect to in letter and spirit and in a time bound manner,” but it did not specify any deadline, leaving the companies free to act at their own pace while the mining continued. THE CARAVAN

ishan tankha

The suffocation of the National Green Tribunal / Law

Environmental justice has always been dauntingly remote for Bhagat and his village, both figuratively and physically. “We went wearing chappals,” Bhagat said, but the lawyer for JSPL was wearing suits worth many

perspectives

left: The people of Kosampali are reeling under the impact of three coal mines and two power plants in the village.

thousands of rupees. “Everything he was wearing was special.” The villagers “don’t have the money to pay a lawyer’s fees, or the money to cover our costs up and down.” Since the case began, in 2014, Bhagat had travelled the eight-

hundred-plus kilometres to Bhopal four times, supported by community collections towards the case in Raigarh. There is no closer option—the Bhopal branch of the NGT has jurisdiction over all of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh AUGUST 2019

and Rajasthan, host to many of the country’s most polluting mines and industrial facilities. At the Bhopal bench, Bhagat appeared before a live court until, in October 2017, the last judge to sit there was transferred to Delhi. Now petitioners from the three states address themselves remotely to a judge in the national capital. Videoconferencing has become a feature of many Indian courts in recent years. The Supreme Court, for example, allows witnesses to testify on live camera in a growing variety of cases. But while this is seen as a welcome innovation in some courts—cutting down delays from waiting for witnesses to appear in person—in the environmental courts, it papers over a festering crisis. The NGT has been crippled by a lack of judicial appointments by the Modi government. Its regional benches have been rendered defunct, and the system of environmental justice has come to a near-complete halt. Videoconferencing with Delhi has kept some cases limping along, but most proceedings are inordinately delayed, and the list of pending cases is getting longer and longer. By its own count, at the end of this May, the NGT had 2,821 cases pending before it. Meanwhile, in most instances, the environmental destruction these cases are meant to address continues unhindered. The National Green Tribunal Act, which created the NGT in 2010, stipulates that the tribunal must have, at any 19

given time, between ten and twenty full-time judicial members, and between ten and twenty fulltime expert members, “as the Central government, may, from time to time, notify.” To improve access, on paper the NGT has four regional benches—in Bhopal, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune—as well as four circuit benches—in Shimla, Shillong, Jodhpur and Kochi. For a bench to function, it needs at least one dedicated judicial member and an expert member. The Bhopal bench currently has a judge assigned to it, who sits in Delhi, but has no dedicated expert. In August 2017, the NGT had only eight judicial members, including its chairperson, and just six expert members. When an advocate alerted the Delhi High Court to the shortage, it asked the central government, “Would you like to wind up the National Green Tribunal?” When the NGT’s chairperson stepped down in December 2017, the tribunal was left headless. The NGT Bar Association petitioned the Supreme Court for remedy, and after the top court’s intervention the government appointed an acting chairperson, in March 2018. A real replacement arrived that July, in the form of the former Supreme Court judge AK Goel, six months after the last permanent chairperson departed. The tribunal’s work slowed even more drastically in the interim, exacerbating the logjam of cases. Petitioners, lawyers and activists were relieved to see the post filled, and hoped for some restoration of order. But though the NGT resumed function, its staffing, and its backlog, did not improve after Goel arrived. Today, the NGT has only five judicial members, and two expert members— both forest officers. The only new appointees have been judicial members, all to the principal bench. The NGT Act suggests that the body also include experts on such things as pollution control, environmental-impact assessment and climate-change management, but none of them currently feature. This March, in another hearing on the NGT Bar Association’s petition, the Supreme Court noted, “We find that the vacancy position in respect of both the categories”—judicial and expert members—“is quite staggering. Resultantly, some Benches of the NGT have virtually become dysfunctional, thereby causing severe inconvenience to the litigating public.” The solicitor general reassured the Supreme Court that the “process of selection of eight Expert Members is already at an advanced stage and the selection process for six Judicial Members has also commenced.” Last year, the lawyer Gitanjali Sreedhar filed a right-to-information application with the environment ministry, asking whether it had formed a committee to select appointees, how many times it had met in the last six months, how 20

ishan tankha

scorched earth · perspectives

many applications it had received and how many interviews it had conducted. The ministry responded that this information “prejudicially affect strategic interest of the state,” and so was confidential. Sreedhar appealed, but has not received a fresh response. Regional benches have been allotted specific, limited days for hearing via video. Cases from Bhopal, for example, are heard only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “This should be a short-term crisis measure, not a long-term solution,” the environmental lawyer Ritwick Dutta told me, yet THE CARAVAN

above: For years, residents of Raigarh district have resisted the exploitation of the area’s massive coal reserves. Shivpal Bhagat has been part of the resistance, in court and on the ground.

scorched earth · perspectives it has been the practice for well over a year. Bhagat and his co-petitioners’ case dragged on because of the hobbling of the NGT. Rinchin, a Raigarh-based filmmaker and one of the co-petitioners, pointed out that between January and July 2018 there was no Bhopal bench. “Tareeq pe tareeq, we waited,” she said, “and finally asked for a transfer petition to Delhi.” The transfer was accepted, but the case was then sent back to Bhopal because the principal bench in Delhi was overloaded. Finally, the NGT delivered its verdict. But at Kosampali, Coal India was in no rush to see that the recommendations of the joint committee were effected “in a time bound manner.” Mine fires continued to rage despite an explicit recommendation that they be put out, and the boundaries of opencast mines drew ever closer to locals’ doorsteps, ignoring the recommendation that they be kept at least five hundred metres from any villages. “What good does it do for us?” Rinchin said of the NGT order. “The environmental damage, if it’s still happening, then there’s no point.” With the Bhopal bench inoperative, Bhagat, Rinchin and residents of six villages in Raigarh approached the Delhi bench asking for orders to enforce the recommendations on the ground. They also asked the bench to order a comprehensive clean-up, examine the carrying capacity of the district—that is, the number of mines and other industrial installations it can safely sustain—and declare a moratorium on mining in the meantime. JSPL later took the matter to the Supreme Court, where it remains. The case will now require the petitioners to travel to Delhi—over a thousand kilometres overland. While hearing the matter, Goel ordered that petitioners seeking action on unfulfilled recommendations must first approach government authorities, and give them 15 days to respond before appealing to the courts. Activists saw this as a dangerous precedent. For one, it could give authorities and companies lead time to cover up violations. For another, it could put complainants at risk of intimidation and retaliation to forestall a case.

As cases against environmental violators languish, the environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, announced recently that environment clearances will be processed in no more than 80 days, down from an already sped-up 108 days. One ministry expert told me that his colleagues already barely get time to read project reports before they are forced to approve them. The environment ministry has rejected fewer than one percent of project proposals under the Modi administration. Last month, Bhagat, Rinchin and their co-petitioners finally received an action report on their new case, from the Chhattisgarh Environment Conservation Board. Shweta Narayan, a public-health researcher who helped to empirically establish the contamination

At Kosampali, mine fires continued to rage despite an explicit recommendation that they be put out, and the boundaries of open-cast mines drew ever closer to locals’ doorsteps, ignoring the recommendation that they be kept at least five hundred metres from any villages.

ww of the area’s air, soil and water, found it flawed. “For their study, they’ve taken only air and water samples from two villages, Sarasmal and Kosampali,” she said. “But we had talked about the whole of Tamnar block, which has nine mines and 21 power plants.” Narayan’s report showed, among other things, heavy-metal contamination of soil and water—and an alarming frequency of musculoskeletal disorders among local teenagers. The conservation board’s report, even with its limited sample, corroborated heavy-metal contamination, the mismanagement of fly ash and the presence of particulate matter in excess of safe limits—all pointing to coal mining as the root cause of the pollution. The report’s authors, Narayan said, had “tried to lessen the impact of their AUGUST 2019

own findings—something you don’t expect scientists to do. When scientists put out statements like ‘slightly polluted,’ that’s where one starts using kid gloves to communicate problems of very serious concern. That’s when you are compromising on your scientific integrity and making it political and biased.” The remedial measures suggested by the conservation board were aimed at only one polluter in the area, Coal India, and again left to the company to implement at its pleasure. Other mine and power-plant operators were let off. When the petitioners complained about the report’s shortcomings, the court agreed that it did not adequately address the concerns they had raised. As of late July, the petitioners were awaiting further hearings. Coal India sent Bhagat legal notices in August 2018, threatening to sue him and a fellow activist for R73 crore of damages that it estimates were caused by strikes that the two had been part of. Bhagat has court dates coming up everywhere from Raigarh to Delhi. He still has faith in the judiciary. “In the beginning, we didn’t even have an idea that we could fight in a court somewhere and get our rights,” he said. “But as soon as we started getting orders from the high courts, from the NGT, we realised that there’s a lot that the law can save. At the district level and the block level, unless there’s a kick from the higher courts, no work happens here. We’ve learned that for any kind of justice to arrive here, whether it’s for rehabilitation or the environment, it has to come this way.” New mines continue to come up in Raigarh, threatening the region’s last remaining forests. “The new Adani-operated one has started, Ambuja started, Coal India is starting,” Rinchin said. “You can’t just open up eight or nine mines at one go. You have to think about cumulative impact, especially if you’re taking away the green cover. They have to rethink the whole mining plan and impose a moratorium. In the US, they’d evacuate people with this kind of pollution.” But this is India. “They fought so hard because their lives are precarious,” Rinchin said. “How much are people going to fight?” s 21

perspectives

In the Crosshairs How poetry became a crime in Assam / Communities / samrat Write Write down I am a Miya My serial number in NRC is 20,543 I have two children Another is coming next summer Will you hate him as you hate me? These lines by Hafiz Ahmed, a Muslim poet of Bengali heritage from Assam, could potentially land him in jail. Ahmed is part of a literary movement called “Miya poetry”—Muslims of Bengali origin are referred to as “Miyas” in Assam—that, among other things, highlights the discrimination the community faces in the state. On 11 July, a first-information report was filed against Ahmed, along with nine other Miya poets, who were charged with criminal conspiracy and spreading social disharmony under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. According to the local Assamese journalist who filed the report, the poems tried to defame the Assamese people as xenophobic, at a time when the National Register of Citizens was being updated in the state. The poets went into hiding. Several of them put out statements declaring their loyalty to Assamese, a language in which a few of them are pursuing or have obtained doctorates. Even before the FIR, Miya poetry had already come under the scanner, when one of the most prominent “leftist” intellectuals of Assam, Hiren Gohain, wrote an article in an Assamese daily excoriating the Miya poets for using their own “artificial” East Bengal dialects, rather than Assamese, in their poems. The Miya poets in their statements clarified that most of their poems were in the socially and officially sanctioned language, Assamese, and not in any contraband dialect. How does a state come to perceive poetry as a crime? How do powerful members of civil society get to dictate 22

in what language poetry is to be written? Why are poets having to distance themselves from the dialects of their ancestors? Assamese sub-nationalism privileges the language-based Assamese identity as “indigenous,” and has long cast Bengalis in the region as “outsiders,” even though there is scant evidence of any sharp division between the two linguistic identities until well into the nineteenth century. The Bengali and Assamese languages and cultures share many similarities, and the scripts differ by only one letter. Surnames such as Dutta, Chakraborty, Bhattacharjee, Choudhury, Goswami, Talukdar, Gupta, Bhuyan and so on are common among caste Hindus in both communities, as are surnames such as Ahmed and Ali among Muslims. It is difficult even for Assamese and Bengalis to tell each other apart, because pretty much every Bengali who has grown up in Assam’s Brahmaputra valley speaks, reads and writes Assamese. Nonetheless, this assimilation has done little to ease the anxieties of Assam’s sub-nationalists, who in past decades have mobilised “indigenous” people by citing a threat to identities and languages from Bengali immigrants, allegedly pouring in from Bangladesh in the millions. This fear of the Bengali outsider has dominated Assam politics since at least 1979, and paid political dividends for several Assamese sub-nationalist leaders over the years. The insecurity across northeastern India about Bengalis as a community long precedes even the creation of Bangladesh, in 1971. It started first when the Bengali language was imposed on Assam during British colonial rule, between 1831 and 1873. Despite little evidence, many Assamese sub-nationalists believe, to this day, that this imposition was the handiwork of Bengali clerks rather than the British rulers themselves. THE CARAVAN

opposite page: Grieving women and their children in Assam’s Rangaloo village, where many residents were massacred and had their homes put to the torch, in 1983. Assam saw large-scale violence against the Bengali community from 1979 to 1985, during the Assam Agitation.

The British won Assam from the Burmese in 1826. The territories held by the Ahom and Manipuri kings had been overrun and devastated by Burmese forces in 1821. After their victory, the British appended Assam to the Bengal Presidency. At the time, a debate on the government’s language policy was raging across British India. In 1838, the judicial and revenue department of the Company Raj ordered that, in Bengal, the local vernacular was to replace Persian, the previous language of administration in lower courts and revenue offices. Since Assam was now a part of the Bengal Presidency, the language of the province’s bureaucracy and judiciary came to be Bengali. Meanwhile, American Baptist missionaries made their way into Assam in the 1830s and set up the first printing press in northeastern India at Sibsagar in Upper Assam. They translated the Bible into the Sibsagar dialect of Assamese, which went on to become the standard Assamese. This was a decisive turn in the region’s cultural history, given the ancient centre of Assam was Kamrup, which had its own dialects. The missionaries also published the first grammar and dictionary of the Assamese language, and the first Assamese newspaper, and led protests against Bengali. The British administration remained unmoved by the protests, until, in 1874, for mainly administrative reasons, a new province was constituted separate from the Bengal Presidency. The new province comprised districts that were originally in the Ahom and Koch kingdoms; the three largely Bengali-speaking districts of Sylhet, Cachar and

perspectives

East Pakistan during Partition in a controversial referendum, but Cachar and Goalpara remained in Assam, despite a long history of ethnic violence against Bengalis in the state. Following the creation of East Pakistan, Assamese–Bengali tensions came to be articulated in new terms. The ruling elites claimed to be the “indigenous Assamese,” and cast Bengalis as “for-

Bengalis. The Bongal Kheda movement gradually changed its name to “Bidekhi Kheda”—“drive out the foreigners.” In 1979, an agitation began to drive out those considered foreigners, mostly Bengalis and Nepalis. It was called the “anti-foreigner agitation” and is now celebrated as the “Assam Agitation.” Initially, Bengali Hindus were the primary targets. There were several

eigners,” claiming illegal immigration from East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh. The Bongal Kheda—“drive out the Bongals”—movement began soon after Partition. From 1960, the smaller riots of Bongal Kheda turned into major riots aimed at evicting supposed outsiders from Assam. The word “Bongal,” which originally meant any outsider, had by then come to mean

massacres—such as one in North Kamrup in January 1980 in which roughly two hundred people, mainly Bengali Hindus, were killed, according to the historian Amalendu Guha. The worst of the massacres, however, eventually targetted Bengali Muslims. As Sanjoy Hazarika reported in the New York Times, well over three thousand men, women and children were killed over-

getty images

Goalpara; and the Khasi, Garo, Jaintia, Naga and Mizo hill districts. The Baptist mission’s efforts, and the hardening of linguistic identities following the introduction of a census during British rule, contributed significantly to a language-based politics that laid the foundation for the politics of indigeneity in Assam. The demotion of Bengali and the restoration of As-

samese in 1874 did not end anxieties of outside domination, but led instead to an assertive politics of language. As Assamese speakers gained power, the majoritarian character of the movement alienated local minorities. After Independence, the Khasi, Garo, Jaintia, Naga and Mizo hills all broke off from Assam, based on their own identity-based movements. Sylhet went to

AUGUST 2019

23

in the crosshairs · perspectives night in what came to be known as the Nellie massacre. Similar events occured on a smaller scale in Shillong, where the violence against dkhars—outsiders—continued into the 1990s. The discourse of protecting the rights of indigenous people is so strong that few intellectuals have condemned these attempts at ethnic cleansing against Bengalis. Not only do the “indigenous” people control the state machinery, their civil-society groups, militant student organisations and armed insurgent outfits pose a significant threat to the region’s minorities. The differences in position between the region’s sub-nationalist groups are of degree, not kind. The most extreme expression of the indigenous Assamese identity movement was the United Liberation Front of Asom, which fought to establish an independent nation-state of Assam. The ULFA had supporters across the polit-

ister in Assam’s BJP-led government. The Assam BJP’s leadership predominantly comprises former Assamese jatiyobadis—meaning practitioners of jati-based politics. The word jati can be translated as race or caste. The common aversion to “foreigners,” meaning Bangladeshi migrants, helped Hindutva absorb jatiyobadis in Assam. Updating the National Register of Citizens to identify foreigners is a common goal for the BJP and the various strands of Assamese and other northeastern nationalists. Under the exercise, the onus is on those living in Assam to produce documents to prove their citizenship for inclusion in the NRC. The media has reported on numerous cases of people who are evidently Indian citizens, but have been left out of the NRC due to errors or documentation issues. Currently, 4.1 million people who are residents of Assam have been excluded from the NRC, and

Following the creation of East Pakistan, Assamese–Bengali tensions came to be articulated in new terms. The ruling elites claimed to be the “indigenous Assamese,” and cast Bengalis as “foreigners,” claiming illegal immigration from East Pakistan.

ww ical spectrum, including journalists, lawyers, activists, politicians and academics. Its armed struggle was largely against the Indian government and big tea-estate owners, not just petty clerks and traders. Its former general secretary, Anup Chetia, now runs an organisation called the North East Indigenous People’s Forum, an umbrella group of organisations that work for the rights of the indigenous people of the northeast. Many former supporters of the ULFA, and similar other armed extremist movements in states such as Manipur and Nagaland, have now become supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the struggle between the big nationalism of Hindutva and little regional nationalisms, big nationalism has prevailed. Sarbananda Sonowal, once a leader of key bodies of the indigenous-Assamese movement—the All Assam Students Union and the Asom Gana Parishad—is now the chief min24

are at risk of statelessness. The central and state governments had sought to carry out a sample re-verification of 20 percent of the list in light of the evident errors, but their request was turned down by the Supreme Court—led by the current chief justice, Ranjan Gogoi, who happens to be from Assam. According to procedures approved earlier by the Supreme Court under Gogoi, “indigenous” people were given a shortcut to inclusion in the NRC. They can be included as “original inhabitants” if they can satisfy the registering authority that they are Indian citizens. There is no definition of who is “indigenous” or an “original inhabitant,” or how the registering authority, usually a state-government clerk, is to be satisfied about citizenship. Thus, those belonging to an ethnic group considered indigenous are more likely to be declared “original inhabitants,” while anyone who happens to be Bengali or THE CARAVAN

Nepali is prone to being considered a foreigner—from Bangladesh or Nepal— until proven otherwise. The BJP’s plan with the NRC is to eventually disenfranchise only the Muslims from those excluded. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, expected to be passed later this year, would ease the path to citizenship for non-Muslims from this lot. This is where Hindu nationalism is in conflict with the little nationalisms of the northeast, of which Assamese and Naga sub-nationalisms are the biggest. For these northeastern nationalists, providing citizenship to non-Muslims—a large chunk of whom are Bengali Hindus—is unpalatable. Largely, supporters of little nationalisms support the NRC and oppose the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The Hindutva brigade supports both the NRC and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The only people in opposition to both the NRC, because of its evident errors, and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, because of its discriminatory nature, are liberals and sections of the Left. This is a tiny minority. Honourable exceptions apart, there is a familiar, deafening silence even from the local intelligentsia on violations of the human-rights of the excluded. The only safe option for anyone in such a situation is to claim the mantle of indigeneity, which confers citizenship, power and respect in society. If a person of Bengali heritage is able to reinvent herself as “indigenous,” she can immediately go from being a powerless outsider to a powerful insider. Many Duttas, Bhattacharjees, Choudhurys and Goswamis over the decades have made this shift. The Miyas, too, reinvented themselves as “new Assamese” after Partition, and are still at pains to distance themselves from their Bengali roots. In a recent interview with The Wire, Hafiz Ahmed, who is also the president of an organisation of Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam, said, “We are Bengal-origin Assamese Muslims. We are not Bengali. We are not Bengali Muslims.” The writer of the line “Write down I am a Miya” added, “We never asked to be given the Miya identity.” Perhaps this statement will absolve him of his crime of poetry. s

The American Sangh’s affair with Tulsi Gabbard

All in the Family COVER STORY / POLITICS

eric baradat / afp / getty images

PIETER FRIEDRICH

vijay verma / pti

all in the family · reportage

one tulsi gabbard, a United States Congresswoman, entered the historic First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles to the strains of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” She shook hands with her cheering fans, leaped on stage with a smile, accepted a garland of white flowers from a supporter, folded her hands in greeting and said, “Aloha.” It was a sunny Saturday morning in March 2019, and she was campaigning for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Addressing an animated crowd of hundreds, she urged them to “stand together.” The 38-year-old representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district, who frequently refers to herself as a “Karma Yogi,” declared that the nation is divided. “What we are seeing is this dark shadow caused by a corruption of spirit that is ruling our land,” she warned—a clear reference to the polarisation of Trump’s America. 28

Gabbard called for a range of changes in domestic policies: fixing a broken healthcare system, reforming criminal justice, providing affordable housing and addressing the climate crisis. Reckoning with the “cost of war,” she said, is central to carrying out this vision of change. As a major in the US Army National Guard—a reserve component of the US armed forces— and a veteran of the war in Iraq, she denounced “wasteful regime-change war policies.” America’s foreign policy, she argued, is creating a new Cold War that puts it at “greater risk of nuclear catastrophe than ever before in history.” Outside the venue, around two dozen people had gathered to protest. They were neither irate protestors opposing her domestic policies nor activists angered by her stance on America’s wars. They were people such as Baljit Kumar, THE CARAVAN

a young Dalit refugee residing in nearby Riverside. “She supports the people I ran from in India,” Kumar told me. Claiming that Gabbard’s congressional campaign financing is heavily augmented by American affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—the parent organisation of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—protestors held bold red, white and blue signs proclaiming her “Prince$$ of the R$$.” Since 2015, a handful of articles in online Western media outlets have speculated about Gabbard’s perceived closeness to the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the BJP. The mood inside the hall was different. As she concluded her speech, the crowd chanted: “Tulsi! Tulsi!” The emcee, Jimmy Dore—a comedian who hosts a popular YouTube show, and is a Gabbard supporter—opened the floor up for questions. As hands went up all

all in the family · reportage around, he pointed to me. Aware that my prepared question was about to strike a discordant tone, I removed my hat and glasses. “It is getting serious,” Gabbard joked. “In your first two terms in office, you met the RSS spokesperson at least three times,” I said. “You spoke at many RSS events, including two in India. When did your collaboration with the RSS begin and how much money have they given you?” The usually unflappable Gabbard, who speaks with slow deliberation, grimaced. She paused long enough for an audience member to shout, “Speak up.” Finally she responded. “I am a soldier, and I took an oath,” she began. “One oath in my life. That was an oath to serve and protect this country, to put my life on the line for the people of this country.” She grew more emphatic. “We stand for aloha. We stand for diversity. We stand for peace and bringing people together around these shared ideals of freedom and opportunity for all people.” Gesturing to the audience to stand, she continued, “Thank you everybody for standing with me. It is this kind of attacks that are rooted in religious bigotry that we must stand together and condemn. Whether these attacks are being targeted at Hindus, or Buddhists, or Muslims, or Jews, or atheists, or Catholics, we must stand united and condemn this hate and bigotry because an attack against one of us is an attack against all of us.” Again, the crowd chanted, “Tulsi, Tulsi.” This is typical of how Gabbard responds to questions about the depth of her relationship with Modi, her association with affiliates of the Sangh Parivar—the family of organisations working with the RSS—or the identity of many of her key donors. Such queries are dismissed as signs of “Hinduphobia.” When an article in The Intercept described her as “a rising progressive star, despite her support for Hindu nationalists,” Gabbard lashed out with an opinion piece for Religion News Service, headlined: “Religious bigotry is un-American.” She said her critics were “trying to foment anti-Hindu sentiment.” Yet, as they say, the devil is in the details. tulsi gabbard is not of indian origin, but identifies as a Hindu. She has visited India only once—in 2014, on the personal invitation of Narendra Modi. And yet, before she was even elected to office, she promised to be “a strong voice in Congress for improving India–US relations.” When she won a seat in the US House of Representatives in 2012, she made history as the first Hindu ever elected to the chamber. At the outset of her first term, she joined the House India Caucus—a coalition of representatives who support pro-India policies. She now co-chairs the body.

Now, Gabbard hopes to make history in the 2020 election by becoming the first female president. At present, she is a dark horse in the race. She is lagging in the Democratic primaries—internal elections to choose the party's nominee for the presidency—and has to battle high-profile contenders such as Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Gabbard has perhaps the most peculiar personal history of any candidate running. Born in American Samoa, and raised in Hawaii by a Catholic father and a practising Hindu mother, both Caucasians, she was primarily homeschooled. Her parents oversaw a Hare Krishna splinter group called the Science of Identity Foundation, and the family campaigned intensely against gay marriage. She was immersed in the Bhagavad Gita, and kept her childhood copy of it with her when she was deployed as a medical administrator to Iraq. Later, she gifted the same copy to Modi. Gabbard’s critical take on the United States’ interventionism and its offshore wars is unpopular with Washington’s defence lobbyists—and the sort of issue on which primaries are almost never contested. Nevertheless, it has won her support that cuts across party lines and ideologies. She appeals to wide-ranging constituencies: libertarians to socialists, “War on Terror” hawks to white supremacists, Trump supporters to Sanders supporters, and the Hindu diaspora. Gabbard’s manner is measured; her words seem carefully chosen. Her eloquence, poise and ability to stay on point broaden her appeal. Gabbard's rise in US politics came out of nowhere, and is inexplicable until one considers how Sangh donations gave her a leg up when she was a virtual unknown. The first Indian-American donors to her first congressional campaign—who were also among the first non-Hawaiians to support her—are top executives in RSS affiliates in the United States. Donor names provided in filings to the Federal Election Commission, which I collated with lists from Sangh websites and promotional materials as well as media reports, reveal that hundreds of leaders and members of such groups gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gabbard in the formative years of her congressional career. Kallie Keith-Agaran, a Democratic activist in Hawaii, has also compiled a database of Gabbard's donors. Her extensive documentation of their contributions and affiliations closely corroborates my independent findings. Gabbard emerged on the US political scene at a pivotal moment for the Sangh’s aspiration to see Modi as the Indian prime minister. Since 2002, Modi and the RSS had both grown increasingly controversial in the United States, facing protests by academics as well as censure by the US governAUGUST 2019

opposite page: Tulsi Gabbard who visited India on the personal invitation of Narendra Modi has played a significant part in rehabilitating his image in the United States.

29

all in the family · reportage below: Gabbard is a major in the US Army National Guard—a reserve component of the US armed forces— and is a veteran of the war in Iraq.

Meghani, a physician from California—she has been eagerly welcomed at many Sangh fundraisers around the country. “She has proved it at a young age that she is a capable leader,” Barai told me. “When a capable Hindu candidate will contest, sure, I look at it favourably. But, of course, I don’t vote for every Hindu candidate. They also have to be capable.” Pallod told me he liked Gabbard because she was a “moderate” and seemed genuine. “She is not like many politicians who do not keep their word,” he said. Even as mainstream interfaith groups refused to participate in events hosted by the American Sangh, Gabbard repeatedly spoke at its events, in

hugh gentry / reuters

opposite page: On 9 April 2015, Ram Madhav, then a BJP spokesperson, and before that, a long time RSS executive, delivered gifts to Tulsi Gabbard from Modi on her wedding day.

ment. Modi stood accused of complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom that had taken place in Gujarat, while he was the chief minister of the state. Even by conservative estimates, the pogrom took over a thousand lives. Afterwards, he was denied a visa to the country. The greatest diplomatic triumph for the American Sangh was rehabilitating Modi’s tainted reputation in the United States. Gabbard played a significant part in that project. There are nearly 4.5 million Indian Americans in the United States. Just over half are Hindu. Fifty percent are registered Democrats, but they tend to shy away from partisanship—especially those who belong to Sangh offshoots. Constituting less

than 1.5 percent of the population, Indian Americans are not typically considered a significant voter base. Yet they have emerged as a crucial constituency for Indian politics, given their vast support for Modi at his “rock-star” receptions in New York and California, and his dependence on them for “diaspora diplomacy.” Amongst Gabbard’s many donors are various members of the US chapters of groups such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the Overseas Friends of the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Thanks to her connection to leading figures of the American Sangh—such as Vijay Pallod, a businessman from Texas; Bharat Barai, an oncologist from the Chicago region; and Mihir 30

THE CARAVAN

the United States and abroad. While organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published reports warning about the spread of Hindu-nationalist violence under Modi’s administration, Gabbard has called India an “indispensable partner” to the United States, and pushed for enhanced cooperation between the two countries. Gabbard's donors have publicly applauded her for supporting Modi before he was elected, for speaking against the US decision to deny him a visa after 2002 and for working against congressional efforts to recognise human-rights violations in India. Tulsi Gabbard began her six years in office as a liberal Democrat. She is now closely aligned with

all in the family · reportage the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and is campaigning for president with rhetoric about peace and diversity. Yet by the end of her first term, one Indian paper was describing her as “the RSS fraternity’s newest mascot.” Few in the United States realise that Gabbard's relationship with the RSS does not agree at all with the progressive image she cultivates. The RSS, as a mainspring of Hindu nationalism, is an organisation that pushes a regressive ideology at odds with a multicultural society. It campaigns for a homogenous, hegemonic culture it hopes will turn India into a Hindu State, in which minorities such as Muslims and Christians will, at best, be second-class citizens. “The Sangh in America backed Tulsi Gabbard because they understand that the international community is increasingly worried about the sectarian violent politics of the Sangh in India,” Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Sweden’s Uppsala University, told me. “They want some powerful political personalities on their side, particularly in the United States. They believe Tulsi can be one of them, who can provide them cover from international sanctions. Tulsi has also done that in the past.”

national spokesperson for the RSS for over ten years. During the ceremony, Madhav took the stage to convey Narendra Modi’s personal greetings. “All of us here share the happiness of your family and loved ones on this important day,” he read from Modi’s letter. “On behalf of our prime minister, I invite the newly-wed couple to celebrate their honeymoon in the land of devas,” he added. He then delivered gifts from Modi—a pashmina shawl and a Ganesh statuette. It was an illustrious delegation for a junior congresswoman. Gabbard had just begun her second term in January 2015. She had also just returned from a three-week tour of India, where she met Modi, half a dozen cabinet ministers and the chief of the army staff. The month before her wedding, she had begun hinting at presidential ambitions. Described by The Atlantic as a

Post in February 2015. “They can be India’s voice even while being loyal citizens in those countries. That is the long-term goal behind the diaspora diplomacy.” Two people whom Modi has long relied on to be “India’s voice” in America—or, some might argue, the Sangh Parivar’s voice—joined Madhav as guests at Gabbard’s wedding. Ramesh Bhutada and his relative Vijay Pallod made the eight-hour flight from Texas with their wives, as well as Bhutada’s son, Rishi, and Rishi’s wife and son. Ramesh, Vijay and Rishi had all been generous donors to Gabbard’s congressional campaigns since before her first election in 20. Years before Madhav articulated Modi’s concept of diaspora diplomacy, the RSS had embraced a similar idea. In December 2010 in Pune, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh—the RSS’s inter-

“rising star” of the Democratic Party, she disagreed that there was “little hope for a Hindu in the Oval Office in our lifetimes.” Arguing that spiritual practice is not a credential for a presidential candidate, she concluded, “People are looking for someone they can trust.” Modi, meanwhile, was looking to recruit members of the Indian-American diaspora to his unofficial diplomatic corps. “We are changing the contours of diplomacy and looking at new ways of strengthening India’s interests abroad,” Madhav told the Washington

national wing—held a Vishwa Sangh Shibir, a quinquennial summit of HSS members from 35 countries. “Hindus abroad should act as cultural ambassadors of Bharat, and the HSS has been working in that direction,” Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the RSS, said during a farewell address. “This country alone has the capacity to save the world and humanity from the impending dangers.” Bhutada and Pallod were in the audience. Dressed in the traditional RSS uniform of khaki shorts, white shirts and

two one day in the spring of 2015, Tulsi Gabbard was the centre of attention. Some three hundred guests gathered outside the Kahalu’u Fishpond on the Hawaiian island of Oahu to witness her wedding to Abraham Williams. Dressed in a royal-blue lehnga choli, she walked down the aisle alongside her father, the Hawaiian state senator Mike Gabbard. Abraham, wearing a white suit, stood waiting for her at the altar. By his side stood Vinod Dave, the pandit who was to perform the traditional Vedic ceremony. Tulsi’s mother, Carol, also stood waiting—as did India’s acting ambassador to the United States at the time, Taranjit Sandhu, and Ram Madhav, who was then a BJP spokesperson and is now a national general secretary of the party. Prior to his appointment as party spokesperson a year earlier, Madhav had served as the

AUGUST 2019

31

all in the family · reportage black caps, the two Houstonians posed for pictures with the founder of the HSS, Jagdish Chandra Sharda. In his nineties and confined to a wheelchair, Sharda travelled from Canada just to speak at the camp. His memoirs portray his life as part of “the story of Sangh expansion overseas, specially the first steps of Hindu philosophy as a social movement outside Bharat.” When Sharda died in 2017, Bhutada, speaking in his capacity as the vice-president of the US chapter of the HSS, eulogised him as “the first one to start Sangh shakha”—branches—“outside of India.” When KB Hedgewar founded the RSS, in 1925, he explained that “the Sangh wants to put in reality the words ‘Hindustan of Hindus,’” which he compared to a “Germany of Germans.” Hedgewar’s mentor, BS Moonje, reached out to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In 1931, he travelled to Italy to tour institutions run by the National Fascist Party. Professing himself “much impressed” by the “fascist organisations,” he declared, “Every aspiring and growing nation needs such organisations. India needs them most.” In 1939, just before replacing Hedgewar as RSS chief, MS Golwalkar praised Nazi Germany’s racial policies as “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” Soon, however, the RSS decided it had something of its own to offer the world. In 1946, Sharda was a young teacher of Sanskrit and Hindi in Amritsar. An irregular member of the RSS since his teens, he began participating in earnest after attending an officers’ training camp in 1942. After the Second World War ended, he accepted a teaching position in British-occupied Kenya. In his Memoirs of a Global Hindu, Sharda writes that his “Sangh colleagues” were upset at the news that he was leaving at that “crucial juncture”—just before Partition—but did not want him to miss the opportunity. “I also promised them that wherever I go, Sangh will go with me; and wherever I went, I would organize Sangh work.” During the rough voyage to Kenya, he was comforted after spotting a fellow passenger wearing the “khaki halfpants of Sangh.” As the two gathered others to join in community activities, 32

their number swelled to 17, all of whom identified as RSS swayamsevaks— volunteers. “The first Sangh shakha outside Bharat was held on board the ship S.S. Vasna in September 1946,” he writes. In 1947, as he settled into life in Kenya, Sharda founded the Sangh’s first permanent international branch. Eventually known as the HSS, Sharda's new organisation followed the same ideology as the RSS. Its purpose, Sharda writes, was to unite and organise a community, which “possessed all the qualities of a highly civilized and cultured society, except for the stark

By the 1960s, Sangh branches had sprouted up in many erstwhile British colonies—from Kenya to Myanmar, Hong Kong, Mauritius and elsewhere. Decolonisation prompted emigration, and many Indians living in the newly-liberated countries moved to the United Kingdom. In 1966, Sharda inaugurated the UK’s first HSS branch. Meantime, across the ocean, changes in immigration law soon opened the doors for Indians to immigrate to the United States. Asian immigration to the United States was severely restricted before

Sangh activists demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992, setting off communal violence across India. The same year, LK Advani decided that the BJP needed a global presence. He founded the Overseas Friends of the BJP, to help project “a positive and correct image.” absence of unity, discipline, organizational qualities and assertiveness.” His comments reflected the Sangh’s shifting rhetoric. In the mid 1960s, shortly after founding the Vishva Hindu Parishad to serve as the RSS’s religious wing, Golwalkar remarked, “The average man of this country was at one time incomparably superior to the average man of the other lands.” He hoped the Sangh would return India—or, rather, the Hindu community—to that golden age of superiority. As the Sangh expanded internationally, it stopped looking to the outside world for inspiration and instead began insisting that the outside world should look to India and its culture for inspiration. Ian Hall, a deputy director of Griffith University’s Asia Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on Modi’s foreign policy, told me that the ideological concept of a superior Hindu culture motivated the Sangh’s international expansion. Hall called the expansion “part and parcel of spreading the word.” According to him, “The Sangh are convinced that, one day, the world will come to appreciate the wisdom of the sanatana dharma, which is wisdom for the world, not just for India.” THE CARAVAN

Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the height of the civil-rights movement, the United States scrapped its racially oriented quota system in favour of one giving preference to highly skilled immigrants. Around twelve thousand Indians a year began entering the country. New arrivals included Ramesh Bhutada, who emigrated in the late 1960s, just as the Sangh was taking root in American soil. In 1969, Modi’s friend Mahesh Mehta emigrated to New York from Gujarat— where the two shared a mentor and attended the same RSS shakha. Upon arrival, Mehta, an RSS pracharak—fulltime worker—immediately established the first Sangh organisation in the United States. Officially founded in 1970, the VHP of America was the VHP’s first overseas branch. Bhutada was not yet involved. Although his father was an RSS officer in Maharashtra, an IndoAmerican News profile explains the son “never understood RSS properly and was busy in his studies.” That changed when HSS-USA was founded, in 1977. Sharad Amin, described by the India Herald as a leader with “vast experience” in HSS and VHPA, told the newspaper Houston’s

all in the family · reportage first HSS shakha began in Bhutada’s house. Ever since, he has been a cornerstone of the American Sangh. In 1981—the year Tulsi Gabbard was born—Bhutada partnered with Jugal Malani, his brother-in-law, to found Star Pipe Products. It developed as a family business. Bhutada soon hired another relative: his wife’s cousin, Vijay Pallod, who had recently arrived in America. As they settled into Houston, Pallod and his wife briefly moved into Bhutada’s home. “I saw a steady stream of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers giving time and energy

“losing touch with Hindu culture.” In India, the RSS pracharaks Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani founded the BJP. Modi, also an RSS pracharak, was assigned to help build the new party. In Hawaii, Gabbard’s parents began working for a state senator while running a school. In 1988, the former swayamsevak Vinod Prakash, who emigrated to the United States in the 1960s, founded the India Development and Relief Fund in the state of Maryland. Pallod eventually joined the charity as a vice-president, while Bhutada became a major donor and advisor to it.

In December 2010 in Pune, the HSS held a Vishwa Sangh Shibir, a quinquennial summit of HSS members from 35 countries, in which its founder, Jagdish Sharda, spoke. Ramesh Bhutada and Vijay Pallod, prominent leaders of the American Sangh and Gabbard's earliest campaign donors, travelled from Houston to attend it.

to worthy causes,” he told Indo-American News. One of those was Bhagwat himself, someone, Pallod told me, he continues to admire. According to him, Bhagwat is not the hardliner RSS chief his predecessor, Sudarshan, was. “He speaks in a very different tone,” Pallod said. Pallod gained more than an employer in Bhutada. “Yes, we are cousins by marriage,” he told me, “but more than that, he is my mentor.” He soon became an active social worker because of Bhutada’s initiation into the community. The American Sangh grew more firmly rooted throughout the 1980s. In Houston, the VHPA and HSS partnered to begin hosting youth camps to, as Amin writes, keep children from

The 1990s brought more direct Sangh engagement with the growing diaspora. In 1990, the HSS held its first Vishwa Sangh Shibir, in Bengaluru. “Here, we deliberate on the present and future of Hindu society living outside Bharat,” Sharda writes. On the international stage, the BJP was receiving negative press after joining the VHP’s militant campaign to destroy the historic Babri Masjid, which it claimed stood on the birthplace of the Hindu icon Ram. Sangh activists, watched by Advani, demolished the mosque in 1992, setting off communal violence across India. The same year, Advani decided that the party needed a global presence. So he founded the Overseas Friends of the BJP, to help project “a positive AUGUST 2019

and correct image” and “correct any distortions in the media’s reporting of current events taking place in India.” As Vijay Jolly, who was the chief of the BJP’s foreign-affairs cell, later explained, the group intended to “indoctrinate” the diaspora “with the BJP ideology.” “Until the 1990s, there was often a sense of resentment towards those who had left India, especially the highly educated, as they took skills and knowhow out of the country, leaving it—in principle at least—poorer,” Hall told me. “But in the early 1990s, views changed, and the diaspora began to be seen as a potential resource—an untapped well of funds that might be invested in India, in particular.” In 1993, shortly after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the former BJP president, Murli Manohar Joshi, travelled to the United States to explore this resource. Modi joined Joshi. During the tour, the 42-year-old Modi visited several American Sangh activists. One was the Houston-based Ramesh Shah, a friend of Bhutada and Pallod who emigrated from Gujarat in 1970. In Indiana, Modi stayed in the home of Bharat Barai, the physician, who emigrated from Maharashtra in 1974. On a second trip, in 1997, Modi again stayed with Barai and breakfasted with Amrit Mittal of Illinois, also a friend of Bhutada, who emigrated from Punjab in 1971. All three were long-time leaders of the VHPA. In 1998, Tulsi Gabbard was just 17 years old and stepping into the world of politics. It was a pivotal year for her and India, as the BJP came to power for the first time. In the United States, the VHPA’s structure took shape, with a governing council of over fifty elected members, who included Mahesh Mehta, Bharat Barai, Vijay Pallod, Ramesh Shah’s daughter Sonal, and a young physician named Mihir Meghani. Meghani, born in Pennsylvania to immigrant parents, grew up in Michigan with an affinity for the Sangh. As a medical student in his early twenties, he attended the 1995 Vishwa Sangh Shibir in Baroda. He returned to India the following year for a clinical rotation in Shillong that, according to him, was arranged by two pracharaks—one of whom was Sunil Deodhar. Now a 33

all in the family · reportage BJP national secretary, Deodhar made his mark as Modi’s campaign manager in 2014. Meghani was already making his own mark on the BJP in 1998. The party on its website, under a section about its philosophy, featured his essay: “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology.” Meghani later explained that it “reflected my personal thoughts on the Hindu nationalist movement that was sweeping India.” Praising the RSS, VHP and BJP for increasing “pride in being a Hindu,” he proclaimed the coming of a “Hindu awakening” that “will go down as one of the most monumental events in the history of the world.” Describing the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid—built under Mughal rule—as a “dilapidated symbol of foreign dominance,” he applauded the mobs that destroyed it for releasing “thousands of years of anger and shame, so diligently bottled up.” Despite the thousands of Muslim deaths in the riots, he declared, “It is up to the government and the Muslim leadership whether they wish to increase Hindu furore.” With the HSS, VHPA and OFBJP, the Sangh now had international social, religious and political wings. The IDRF served as an economic wing. In 2000, Ramesh Shah founded the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA as the international counterpart of the VHP’s project of single-teacher schools. Speaking to an Indian magazine, a swayamsevak working as an Ekal teacher explained, “The teachers are selected only if they subscribe to the RSS way of thought.” A VHP spokesperson later told a media outlet that Ekal does “not mind even Muslim or Christian students learning in our institutions,” as long as they accept that “they are by birth Hindus.” Modi, meanwhile, was a rising star. In 2001, he was appointed the chief minister of Gujarat—his first ever political office. Months later, in 2002, anti-Muslim pogrom broke out across the state in the wake of the Godhra train fire. Allegations that Modi mishandled the government’s response swiftly tarnished his global reputation even as they scored him political points in Gujarat. According to some, Modi sanctioned the violence. BJP state legislators participated in it, and were later 34

convicted for their role in it. The VHP leader Ashok Singhal reportedly called the carnage a “successful experiment which will be repeated all over the country.” Elsewhere, in Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard was running for the state legislature—her own first political office— while the Sangh was sparking a scandal in the mainland United States. The controversy began in November 2002, when the Mumbai-based Sabrang Communications released a report calling the IDRF “a major conduit of funds for Hindutva organisations in India.” The report accused the group of operating under US laws granting tax-exempt status to charitable organisations in order to raise money—nearly four million dollars in total—for the Sangh. It concluded, “That IDRF supports Sangh organizations in India is thus not a matter of accident but is instead the very purpose for its existence.” This conclusion agreed with Hall’s opinion that “the Sangh internationalised essentially to build political influence among an influential group of people—the diaspora—and to tap them for funds.” Pallod condemned the allegations as “falsehoods packaged by propagandists masquerading as concerned citizens.” A counter-report denounced the attempt to malign organisations such as the VHP and RSS and thanked Meghani “of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh” for serving as a resource. Yet the damage was done. Several corporations, including Cisco Systems and Oracle Corporation, suspended their gift-matching programmes with the IDRF; the US Justice Department launched an investigation; and media across the world reported the news. In 2003, Bhutada co-founded Sewa USA as a counterpart to Sewa Bharati—one of the Sangh groups named as a recipient of IDRF financing. That same year, Meghani co-founded the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group that Gabbard later said she is in touch with, “if not on a daily basis, probably a weekly basis.” In 2005, the US State Department denied Modi a visa to address a convention of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association in Florida. David Mulford, then the US ambassador to India, said Modi was responsible for a THE CARAVAN

“comprehensive failure” to control the 2002 violence. Akshay Desai, a host of the convention and a seasoned Republican fundraiser, protested to the Bush administration that the denial made Hindus “feel humiliated.” Calling it the “height of diplomatic arrogance,” Ram Madhav told an Indian newspaper that the US government “should know that it will not get away with this.” A leaked diplomatic cable from 2006 reveals that Madhav further warned the US embassy in Delhi that “Modi’s ascendancy is not a question of if but when.” Determined to assist in that ascent, Bharat Barai organised a May 2007 videoconference for Modi to address the diaspora. Despite a recently published sting operation in which Sangh members such as the Shiv Sena’s Babu Bajrangi and the VHP leader Anil Patel boasted that Modi sanctioned the 2002 violence, Ramesh Shah organised a December rally in Houston to celebrate Modi’s re-election to a third term as Gujarat’s chief minister. Barai’s loyalty remained unwavering—he made the videoconferences a biennial event. Scandal, however, was sweeping the Sangh in India too. Anti-Christian riots erupted in Odisha's Kandhamal district during Christmas celebrations in 2007, and again in August 2008. The RSS, VHP and BJP were all implicated in the attacks. Madhav reportedly turned to a surprising source for assistance: an American named Michael Brannon Parker, who—an activist who did not want to be named told me—was allegedly hired to write a book detailing the Sangh’s version of events. Parker was raised in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness— popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement. His parents were personally initiated by ISKCON's founder, Swami Prabhupada. Parker settled in Hawaii in 1985, apparently befriending the Gabbard family. In a 2015 interview, he said he had known Tulsi Gabbard “since she was a young girl.” After unsuccessfully running for the state legislature, he began repeatedly visiting India, where he encountered the RSS. “I’ve been working with them since 2001,” he claimed in the interview. The American Sangh, meanwhile, was weathering its own crisis. After

all in the family · reportage The American Sangh leaders returned to Houston in January 2011. Undaunted by the setbacks of the previous years, they began preparations to support the BJP’s electoral goals from abroad. Then, in May, a 30-year-old Tulsi Gabbard announced her candidacy for the US Congress.

below: On 2 February 2019 Tulsi Gabbard announced her candidacy for president. Her parents, Carol and Mike (right), were present by her side.

three tulsi gabbard was born on 12 april 1981 to Mike and Carol, in the US territory of American Samoa. She was the fourth of five children. The family moved to Hawaii in 1983. “I’m guessing they moved to be closer to Chris Butler,” Sina, Mike’s elder sister, told me. Butler is the founder of the Science of Identity Foundation—a controversial Hare Krishna splinter sect, in which Tulsi grew up. “Tulsi was very quiet and sort of shy,” Sina recalled. “Reticent. Lovely.” She liked gardening and reading. However, Sina said, “The only books that I remember seeing in the house were Hare Krishna books. It was kind of a tight ship in terms of the children’s exposure to information and

marco garcia / ap

Barack Obama was elected president, in November 2008, he announced a transition team for his new administration. Among its members was the economist Sonal Shah—the daughter of Ramesh Shah and a former governing-council member of the VHPA. Within days, news of her Sangh links spread across the world. The news channel France24, for instance, published the headline, “‘Obama’s Indian’ slammed with extremist accusations.” Shah initially denied any association with the VHPA, but later acknowledged and formally renounced it. “I would not have associated” with the VHPA, she said, had she foreseen the VHP’s role in the 2002 violence or anticipated that the VHPA “could possibly stand by silently in the face of its Indian counterpart’s complicity.” Her father felt no such compulsion to disassociate. Just two years later, Ramesh Shah joined Sharad Amin, Vijay Pallod, Ramesh Bhutada and other Sangh activists from Houston to attend the Vishwa Sangh Shibir in Pune. At the inaugural session, flanked by other Sangh executives, the VHP chief Ashok Singhal sat centre stage, beneath garlanded pictures of KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar, the RSS's founding fathers.

AUGUST 2019

35

all in the family · reportage below: Chris Butler set up Science of Identity Foundation, a splinter group of the Hare Krishna sect. SIF had vast influence over Gabbard's life, including over her education.

knowledge.” When she was four or five years old, Tulsi’s parents gave her a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Along with her siblings, she was mostly homeschooled. Later, possibly in her early teens, she spent two years at an SIF-run all-girls’ boarding school in the Philippines. Her parents soon entered political life. In 1986, Rick Reed, the former publisher of an SIF-affiliated newspaper, won a seat in the Hawaii state senate. Carol and Mike joined Reed’s staff. In 1988, Mike opened a deli inside the Honolulu outlet of Down to Earth, an SIF-affiliated health-food store. In 1991, he began lobbying on his first public-policy issue when he co-founded a group called “Stop Promoting Homosexuality.” The group’s initial action was a June 1991 press conference at the state capitol. Although Mike is now most closely identified with the group, Carol was its first spokesperson. “It’s nothing to be

proud of,” she said about homosexuality. She later told the media that the SIF was one of the group’s founders. Meanwhile, Mike launched a radio show called Let’s Talk Straight, Hawaii. Soon, his straight talk cost him his business. When a caller to his show asked who he would hire between a heterosexual and homosexual candidate who were equally qualified, he responded, “I would take the one that is not homosexual.” LGBTQ-rights activists began picketing the Down to Earth store. Within two weeks, Mike shuttered his deli. He used the opportunity to expand his political activity. Mike founded the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, in 1995, and began campaigning for an 36

THE CARAVAN

amendment to the state constitution to allow the legislature to prevent same-sex marriage. He appeared in television ads promoting the campaign. A 17-year-old Tulsi joined him for one, in which he says, “We don’t have the absolute right to marry anyone.” Gesturing to Tulsi, he says, “For example, I’m not allowed to marry my daughter.” Then a surfer jogs by, and adds, “And I can’t marry my dog.” The amendment passed in 1998. In 1999, as Mike began filming a television show called The Gay Deception, Honolulu Weekly accused him of doing “more to limit gay rights—and impugn homosexuals—than any single Hawai’i citizen.” The newspaper attributed Mike's position to Butler, whose website then claimed that people are pushed into “active” homosexuality “if the environment and social situation promotes homosexuality.” In the midst of all this, Tulsi partnered with her father in 1996 to found the Healthy Hawai’i Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the environment and promoting healthy living. In 1998, her parents started a candy company called Hawaiian Toffee Treasures—a family business that Tulsi said she worked in “when I was young.” Sometime in her teens, she said, she also began identifying as a Hindu. Her aunt remembers it differently. Sina told me that when she asked Mike during the 1990s if his family was Hindu, he “vigorously denied” it and “emphatically and categorically stated, ‘No, that’s different.’” The first time she heard of Tulsi being a Hindu, Sina said, was after she had won the state primary in the 2012 congressional election. “There was this whole campaign to suddenly publicise herself as the first Hindu candidate for national office.” Tulsi got her first taste of electoral politics in 2000. “I was the first of the Gabbard family to run a race,” Carol told the media about her campaign that year for a seat on the state board of education. Tulsi assisted the campaign. Her older brother, Aryan, also ran. He lost, but Carol won. In 2002, a 21-year-old Tulsi married Eduardo Tamayo. Described by Tulsi as her “best friend,” Tamayo had also grown up in the SIF. They divorced four years later. Perhaps Tulsi’s personal life was eclipsed by her political ambitions. After years of joint activism with her parents, she launched her own political campaign. So, simultaneously, did her father. Mike ran for a nonpartisan seat on the Honolulu city council, while Tulsi ran for Hawaii’s state house of representatives as a Democrat. When both won, in November 2002, Tulsi became the youngest woman ever elected to any US state legislature. She soon made headlines for two reasons—her anti-LGBTQ policies and her enlistment in the Army National Guard. In March 2003, the United

all in the family · reportage States invaded Iraq on the pretext of seizing weapons of mass destruction. In April, a week after her birthday, Tulsi took the oath of enlistment on the floor of the state house. “In this generation, where there’s a war on terrorism, I’m honoured to have the opportunity to give something,” she said. After returning from basic training in Texas, she plunged back into politics. In February 2004, as a committee considered a bill to legalise civil unions between samesex couples, she led a group of picketers outside the room. “As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists,” she later said in committee. Meanwhile, Mike was angling for federal office. In March 2004, the first-term city councillor launched a congressional campaign, running as a Republican against Ed Case, the Democratic incumbent in Hawaii’s second district. Disregarding her own party affiliation, Tulsi made a $2,000 donation to her father. Mike’s involvement in the SIF quickly became an issue. In July that year, Case issued an open letter accusing Mike of concealing his background. Among dozens of questions, he asked, “Are you or have you been a follower of Chris Butler?” A profile by Honolulu magazine said Mike was dodging interviews, suggesting, “He doesn’t want to answer questions he doesn’t like, especially those concerning his ties to a Hare Krishna splinter group that gave rise to a number of political candidates over the past 30 years.” The magazine reported that when it emailed Mike asking about his connections to the SIF, Tulsi emailed back, “You’re acting as a conduit for. … homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.” Although Tulsi faced re-election to the state house that year, she volunteered to deploy to Iraq. She planned to stay in the legislature, but was shocked to learn that only involuntarily activated legislators were eligible to keep their seats. She deployed at the end of the year. In November, Mike lost his battle for Congress, as well as his seat on the city council. Carol had not sought re-election. All three Gabbards were out of office.

For the next 12 months, Tulsi was in Iraq as a medical administrator. When she returned, in 2005, she got a job working in Washington DC as a legislative aide to the senator Daniel Akaka. Mike once again ran for office in Hawaii, winning a seat in the state senate. In 2007, he switched parties—“Tulsi has been twisting my arm,” he said— and joined the Democrats. In 2008, Tulsi deployed to Kuwait for 12 months as a military-police officer. When she returned, she applied for a White House Fellowship. Shortlisted but then denied, she set her sights lower and ran for the Honolulu city council. She won easily. In May 2011, less than six months into her first term, she announced her candidacy for Hawaii’s second congressional district. It was an open seat—since the incumbent, Mazie Hirono, had retired to run for the US Senate—but Tulsi faced an uphill battle as one of six candidates in the primary election. The clear frontrunner was the former Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann, but Tulsi was a young veteran with two overseas tours of duty—an attractive record in a state where military spending reaches nearly fifteen billion dollars per year. Local Democratic activists told me that Hannemann was widely perceived as corrupt. Moreover, he was firmly

tant underdog to victory.” Her rise coincided with a surge in donations from the American Sangh. Reporting that she could be the first Hindu elected to Congress, the newspaper India-West noted that Gabbard was a “disciple of Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa”—Chris Butler—but her connection to the SIF never came up in the race. Instead, she swiftly secured a spot in the national spotlight when she was invited to speak at the Democratic national convention in North Carolina that September. On 6 November, Tulsi Gabbard won the general election. The Hindu American Foundation immediately trumpeted her victory. “Gabbard is an incredibly inspiring leader whose political rise is a testament to the greatest ideals of American pluralism,” Aseem Shukla, a co-founder of the HAF, said. When she took the oath of office, on 3 January 2013, she used the same copy of the Gita that her parents gave her as a child. She was just 31 years old. She was assigned to the house committees on armed services and foreign affairs. Her party awarded her a powerful vice-chair position at the Democratic National Committee. For the next few years, her political career skyrocketed. Senior Democratic leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer,

In August, Tulsi won the primary. It was, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser explained, “an improbable rise from a distant underdog to victory.” Her rise coincided with a surge in donations from the American Sangh. against gay marriage. Positioning herself as a progressive, Tulsi invoked her experience in the military service to declare her newfound support for gay marriage. In January 2012, she said her “metamorphosis” was prompted by “experiences living and working in oppressive countries, not only witnessing first-hand but actually experiencing myself what happens when a government basically attempts to act as a moral arbiter.” In August, Tulsi won the primary. It was, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser explained, “an improbable rise from a disAUGUST 2019

praised her as an “emerging star” with “extraordinary political talent.” Her star appeared to dim when she defied the party leadership at the height of the 2016 presidential election. The establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, was competing against the progressive senator Bernie Sanders. Members of the DNC were prohibited from endorsing candidates, so Tulsi resigned to back Sanders. In Hawaii, some saw it as a calculated move. “Tulsi made a name for herself as progressive but could continue to vote against refugees, to support Modi, and to go on Fox 37

all in the family · reportage below: At an OFBJP banquet celebrating Modi's victory in 2014, Tulsi Gabbard, wearing a BJP scarf and holding up a biography on Modi, posed with Vijay Jolly, a top BJP executive.

38

News parroting Trump talking points,” Shay Chan Hodges, a writer who was her opponent in that year’s Democratic primary for her congressional seat, told me. Hodges argued that “going after the DNC” was Tulsi’s “first move” in preparation for running for president. As a legislator, Tulsi has had little success. The first bill she introduced, to ease air-travel screening for “severely injured or disabled Armed Forces members and veterans,” was one of her two legislative initiatives that passed. She has sponsored a range of pro-veteran bills, a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” to deny federal funding to groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, a bill to recognise the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Pearl Harbour bombing, and a bill to recognise the persecution of Yazidis and Christians by the Islamic State. Outside of Washington DC, her actions have increasingly positioned her as a maverick within her own party. Most recently, she has defended Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and the whistle-blower Edward Snowden. She has also repeatedly undertaken trips to meet controversial heads of state—Modi in December 2014, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in November 2015 and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in January 2017. After the Syria trip, she began denouncing “regime-change” wars. The extent of her engagement with Modi has raised many eyebrows, even prompting her to write about how her meetings with him are “portrayed as somehow being out of the ordinary or somehow suspect, even though President Obama, Secretary Clinton, President Trump and many of my colleagues in Congress have met with and worked with him.” Yet she did meet him four times between 2014 and 2016. In the first meeting, in New York in September 2014, she seemed to demonstrate a degree of fondness exceeding typical diplomatic courtesy. In a media statement Gabbard said that she and Modi discussed “several issues our countries have in common, including how America and India can work together to help combat the global threat posed by Islamic extremism.” Then, the first-term congresswoman gave the newly elected prime minister a gift. “I wanted to give him something that was meaningful to me,” she later said at an HAF event. “I gave him my personal copy of the Gita that my parents gave me. … The copy of the Gita that I kept with me through both of my deployments to the Middle East, that I would crawl under my sleeping bag in my cot in my tent in Iraq and shine my flashlight and read it late at night when I was done with my day, and the copy of the Gita that I took the oath of office on.” Tulsi’s deep identification with the Gita, and the act of presenting such a sentimental item to Modi, entrenched her as a distinctly Hindu politician. THE CARAVAN

Yet, while she has always embraced this label, she has shied away from declaring her association with the Sangh. She is also inconsistent in acknowledging her childhood influences. “my attempts to offer praise to my beloved grandfather, spiritual master, his divine grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, can be likened to a child offering a small torchlight to the sun,” Gabbard declared in a 2015 video message to ISKCON’s fiftieth-anniversary festival in Kolkata. “My Guru Dev, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, has said that while we will never be able to repay the debt of gratitude that we all owe Shri Prabhupada, what we can do is be pleasing to him by always taking shelter in the holy names of Krishna.”

After Swami Vivekananda introduced Hinduism to the United States at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, Paramahansa Yogananda settled in southern California in the 1920s. His ashrams were mostly founded in wealthy cities such as Los Angeles or Hollywood, and his lectures were popular with celebrities. In 1965, Swami Prabhupada arrived in New York and founded ISKCON the following year. For the first time in history, the Hindu religion found mass appeal among native-born Americans. It was the height of the Vietnam war. The baby-boomer generation, born after the Second World War was struggling with the assassination of President John F Kennedy, a military draft, anti-war protests, the civil-rights movement, the sexual revolution and a host of other issues. Across the country, thousands of young people were joining countercultural movements and embracing an anti-establishment spirit. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote that the gurus that proliferated around this time lived in the rich part of New

all in the family · reportage York “and were sponsored by the rich.” Prabhupada did something different. He moved to the working-class Lower East Side, where, Ginsberg said, “the hippies, acid heads, freaks, amphetamine-heads and the meth monsters were.” As the swami reached out to disillusioned youth, the Hare Krishna movement exploded. Today, it counts millions of followers, with hundreds of temples worldwide. In the early 1970s, Tulsi’s gurudev— divine teacher—became one of Prabhupada’s closest disciples. Born Kris Butler, he has held many identities: Chris, Sai, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa and Jagad Guru. His years

“Science of Identity uses tactics nearly identical to Scientology to attack and silence critics, journalists and former members” Christine Gralow told me. “It’s no wonder so many former Butler devotees do not want to be publicly named in the media.” in ISKCON were marred by frequent conflict. He faced near disavowal, rebuke for prioritising his own teachings and denunciation by fellow disciples for encouraging more allegiance to himself than to Prabhupada. In 1977, after Prabhupada’s death, Butler established the SIF, and began initiating his own disciples in the splinter sect. “Science of Identity has always been a highly politically involved organisation in Hawaii,” the journalist Christine Gralow told me. Her investigations have traced the connections between Butler, his foundation and political candidates. “Science of Identity uses tactics nearly identical to Scientology to attack and silence critics, journalists and former members through attempted character assassination, restraining orders, psychological warfare, and even

false police reports,” she said. “It’s no wonder so many former Butler devotees do not want to be publicly named in the media.” The SIF has had an extensive influence on Gabbard. Her association with the organisation began with her parents, and extended into her education and her entry into politics. Through it, she met both her first and second husbands, and several members of her present congressional office staff. Butler’s group was not part of ISKCON, however. While Prabhupada required his disciples to sell books, flowers and incense on the streets, Butler opposed those practices because they “turn people off.” His initiates did not shave their heads or wear robes, and he encouraged them to pursue professions in fields such as law and engineering. That changed when ISKCON’s swami visited Hawaii. Whether as a result of sincere conviction or pressure from the larger group, Butler “surrendered” himself—along with his disciples, properties, and money—to Prabhupada in 1971. His surrender was accompanied by confusion that prefaced years of strife. “For so long, you know, we’ve been worshiping Sai as God,” one of Butler’s former disciples told Prabhupada in March 1970. “So what is our position towards Sai?” Attempting to resolve the conflict, Prabhupada spent several weeks with Butler in Hawaii in June 1975. In a series of wide-ranging conversations preserved in audio recordings, the two discussed levitation, nuclear war, cryonics, the supposed faking of the moon landing, the war in Vietnam—it was “primarily desired by the big corporations,” Butler said—and an idea to turn the Bhagavad Gita into a movie. Butler expressed his disdain for people with “big titles,” such as “psychologist” or “professor,” who deceive people into thinking they are “authorities of some sort.” They also discussed an issue that soon impacted Tulsi’s life: education. “I was writing an article on the educational system and how it should be changed,” Butler said. He wanted to “put the Bhagavad Gita into this present school system,” or alternatively create a “school system apart from it." AUGUST 2019

Butler ventured into politics that year. In a tract titled, “Why Politicians Are Stupid,” he wrote that people were “suffering from the heavy burden of crooked, inhuman, unrighteous political leaders.” So he developed a plan. In 1976, his disciples launched a political party, the Independents for Godly Government, and fielded 14 candidates for office. Bill Penaroza, the party's chairman—whose son, Kainoa, is now Tulsi’s chief of staff—unsuccessfully ran for Hawaii’s second congressional district. Meanwhile, Prabhupada’s health was failing. His disciples grew increasingly concerned about Butler. “They distribute his books instead of your books on the street,” one of them told Prabhupada. Another spoke of the “disease” within Butler’s group. Yet another claimed Butler had “deviated” and “created a faction.” Another asserted that one of Butler’s papers had published an article “against the devotees.” By 1977, when Butler formally founded the SIF upon Prabhupada’s death, the group had developed what the Honolulu Advertiser called a “loose community of businesses.” These included two newspapers—one run by Penaroza, the other by Rick Reed—and the chain of health-food stores called Down to Earth. This prospering network soon proved instrumental to financing the SIF’s dreams of developing a political machine—and the Gabbards’ campaign. “As I recall, they became involved in SIF in the early to mid 1970s,” Sina told me. In the Gabbard home in American Samoa, she remembered, “a centrepiece of the house would be an altar to Chris Butler,” adorned with flowers and incense. She recalled that the family prostrated before it. “Mike made the connection and was the vehicle into Butler’s SIF.” When they moved to Hawaii to join their charismatic young guru, Tulsi’s parents were immediately immersed in SIF enterprises. They founded the Ponomauloa school—with Mike as headmaster—to educate the group’s children. In a 1984 lecture, Butler described his views on schooling. “Screw the history book,” he said. The only purpose of such books was to please the “school board thing,” so that children could “pass the stupid tests that you 39

all in the family · reportage have to pass in order to make it so that the people are saying you’re educated.” Instead, children should learn about “very real-life things” such as politics. “What you’ve got to do is get one of these kids to run for office,” he insisted. “Then you learn what politics is. Make real-life stuff. Find out why you have to be a certain age to run for office.” In a rare media interview in 2017, Butler told the New Yorker that Tulsi—“whom he’s known virtually all her life”—was a young girl who showed “a real gravity and seriousness that was way beyond her years.” She, however, has never been pictured with Butler, and rarely speaks about him. Although she told the New Yorker about her “gratitude to him” for “this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me,” she cancelled a face-to-face interview with New York magazine this year when the journalist said he wanted to talk about Butler and the SIF, and did not answer direct questions about them sent over email. I reached out to Gabbard's office for an interview request multiple times, but received no answer.

four much of gabbard’s early funding, especially before she won the 2012 primary, came from people with traceable connections to the SIF—her family, Rick Reed, the Penaroza family, her future in-laws, and employees of Down to Earth and other SIF-linked businesses, who collectively gave over a hundred thousand dollars. Yet it was the introductions made by leading figures of the American Sangh, such as Vijay Pallod and Mihir Meghani, which opened up a new and untapped nationwide network. They invested time and energy in organising and hosting her at their various events. For a young politician who was still struggling with name-recognition in her home state, it was an expedient—and soon to be lucrative—partnership. Donations poured in from around the country, including from at least three fundraisers held by Sangh groups in two different states. The individual contributions by members of these 40

organisations were often small sums, but they added up to a sizable chunk. Between the start of her campaign, in May 2011, and her election at the end of 2012, Gabbard received nearly ninety-four thousand dollars—almost a tenth of her total itemised individual donations—from clearly identifiable Sangh and pro-Modi sources. That share more than doubled during her first year in office. Her donors included 22 current and former Sangh executives: five members of the VHPA governing council, four members of the national council of the OFBJP (USA), two national executives and two chapter presidents of the HSS (USA), seven Ekal (USA) executives, a Sewa (USA) executive and an IDRF executive. Several of them held positions in more than one of these organisations. As her campaign coffers swelled with their donations, Gabbard announced her India policy and, immediately after winning the primary, took the stage at a VHPA event alongside Ashok Singhal. Meanwhile, many of her new donors organised multi-state tours by BJP and RSS executives to engage the diaspora in anticipation of India’s 2014 general election. The first Indian American who donated to her campaign was Vijay Pallod. “In October 2011, an American friend of mine told me that a young and dynamic woman was running for Congress,” he wrote, soon after Gabbard took office in January 2013. “Her chances of winning were considered remote at that time.” He was referring to Michael Brannon Parker, who, Pallod told me, convinced him to support Gabbard, even though he was “not too keen on politicians.” Pallod eventually donated, winning, as he said, “the title of first donor of Indian origin” to Gabbard’s campaign. He arranged a conference call to introduce her to his network in the mainland. The long-time Sangh leader’s total contribution to Gabbard’s campaign was $1,851 by the end of 2012. “I am not a big donor by the way,” Pallod told me. “Lots of other people gave more than me.” Even then, he said, Gabbard “chose to stay at my home” instead of the houses of the larger donors when she visited Houston. “So somewhere I had a connection with her I think.” THE CARAVAN

Days before Pallod made a second contribution, Mihir Meghani gave $1,001. Meghani became one of Gabbard’s biggest Indian-American backers, with a cumulative sum of $18,550 till date. His contributions, however, were not limited to funnelling money to her campaign. “I want to recognise Mihir,” Gabbard said at a 2013 HAF banquet in California. “When I was just at five percent in my campaign—for those of you who don’t live in this world of politics, I just want to make sure you’re not mistaking: I wasn’t five percent behind the other guy, I was five percent to his 95— these were the odds that we were looking at when Mihir gave me time. We spoke. He then gathered leaders from the HAF community from all across the country. I sat behind my computer at home, in the middle of the afternoon in Hawaii, and met via Google Hangout, gathered in living rooms and office spaces all across the country, leaders within HAF, and we had a very constructive and great conversation that is really what started such a beautiful partnership.” Indeed, it was an uphill battle for Gabbard. Despite the initial donations, Gabbard’s prospects still looked grim in early 2012. But the cash kept coming. In March, Meghani gave another $1,001, while Ramesh Bhutada gave $501. From California, Babulal Bera and his wife Kanta—the parents of Ami Bera, who went on to win election from California’s seventh congressional district that year—gave a combined total of $10,000. Babulal’s simultaneous support for his son later landed him in prison for election fraud, after he illegally funnelled $260,000 to Ami’s campaign through a ring of straw donors. The Beras’ support for Gabbard was followed by a contribution from HAF co-founder Suhag Shukla. In May that year, the US–India Political Action Committee, a platform created to “enable the entry of Indian-Americans in the political process,” contributed $5,000. It was an unusual donation for a candidate in her first primary. Aside from a donation to the VHPA, most of the USINPAC’s other contributions that election cycle went to seasoned congressional represen-

DONATIONS TO TULSI GABBARD’S CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN BY MAJOR SANGH EXECUTIVES VHPA

MIHIR MEGHANI $24,450

OFBJP

RAVI TILAK $25,800

HSS

RAMESH BHUTADA $26,300

EKAL

SHEKAR REDDY $13,700

All sums represent cumulative donations from the individuals and their immediate family members.

tatives who had been in office for decades. The only other exception was Ami Bera, who received a donation after winning the California Democratic primary. Perhaps the group perceived a future ally in Gabbard. Its founder, Sanjay Puri, was later praised for “championing the cause and work” of Modi in Washington while he was still only the chief minister of Gujarat. A few weeks later, Gabbard got donations from Sant Das Gupta, a member of the VHPA’s governing council and

an activist for the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, an RSS offshoot. Shekar Reddy, an advisor to Ekal-Florida, gave $2,500. Ramesh Bhutada and his son, Rishi, contributed a combined $2,999 that same month. Meghani began mobilising his network in earnest, after making another contribution. “Join me in helping elect to the US Congress an exceptional woman who is a decorated war veteran, a bright light in the world of politics, and who happens to be a born Hindu and practicing AUGUST 2019

NAMO NYC, IDRF SEWA-USA, WHEF

ANIL DESHPANDE $25,100

BHARAT BARAI $19,005

source: Federal Election Commission records 2011-2018

Hindu,” Meghani wrote in a July email to his network. He emphasised that it was an easy election to win. Urging people to give, he noted, “The earlier she gets the money, the better her chance of winning.” He added that Gabbard’s candidacy was backed by the USINPAC as well as “community organiser Vijay Pallod.” Donations from Indian Americans, many with key positions in the HSS, VHPA and Ekal, started coming in from Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Maryland and California. 41

all in the family · reportage From May 2011 to August 2012, the surge of funds from Sangh sources, combined with previous donations from SIF sources, totalled over twenty percent of donations to Gabbard’s campaign—about $190,000 out of $923,000. The Sangh had successfully positioned itself as a significant constituency for the aspiring congresswoman. When an Indian paper reported on her primary victory, the only person quoted besides Gabbard was Pallod. Meanwhile, Pallod’s mentor, Ramesh Bhutada, was busy helping to host the RSS sarkaryavah—general secretary— Suresh “Bhayyaji” Joshi, as he made a two-week tour of the United States. Beginning on 6 August, Joshi, visited HSS chapters in six major cities. He was escorted by Saumitra Gokhale, the global coordinator of the HSS and a former RSS pracharak. Joshi’s tour was still underway when Gabbard travelled to California to speak at her first Sangh event: a VHPA conference in San Jose, on 17 and 18 August. It was less than a week since she had won her primary election. Several of her donors were present, including Rishi Bhutada and Meghani. With over three hundred and fifty attendees hailing from across the United States, as well as India, New Zealand, Trinidad and Canada, it was a golden opportunity to reach an international audience. Although the video footage of her speech is unavailable, the California-based newspaper India Post reported that Gabbard received a standing ovation after sharing “her inspirational life story.” The event’s concluding remarks came from Ashok Singhal. Considered one of the architects of the Babri Masjid demolition, he is also known for calling it a “welcome sign” that Muslims were “turned into refugees” after the 2002 Gujarat violence. A few weeks later, Gabbard travelled to Florida for her first Sangh fundraiser. She was hosted by the Indian-American Forum for Political Education, whose then vice-president was Satya Shaw, a member of the national council of the OFBJP (USA). Soon after, beginning on 9 September, campaign-finance records show another surge of donations from Indian-Americans. Nainan Desai, the president of the Tampa Bay chapter of 42

the HSS, donated $1,000. Vishal Gupta, a VHPA coordinator, gave $3,000. Anil Deshpande, the vice-president of Sewa USA, gave $4,000. Pallod donated again, just before the OFBJP held its national convention in New Jersey in September. Days after the convention ended, more Sangh donors contributed to Gabbard’s campaign en masse. Chandrakant Patel, the president-elect of the OFBJP; Vijay Patel, the vice-president of Ekal-Florida; and Satya Shaw gave $1,000 each. Other new donors included Chandresh Saraiya, the president of Ekal-Florida, and members of the VHPA, including its media director, Vijay Narang. Meanwhile, the OFBJP hosted Ram Lal, a BJP general secretary, and the OFBJP chief Vijay Jolly at a 19 September banquet in Tampa, where Kiran Patel, a Gabbard donor, introduced them as “the highest people from the BJP.” Gabbard went to Texas for her second Sangh fundraiser, on 28 October. At Pallod’s house in Houston, around fifty people gathered in the living room. “I have never before hosted a fundraiser for a politician,” he later wrote in the Houston Chronicle. “I made an exception and invited Tulsi to my Sugar Land home.” Recurring donations came from Ramesh, Rishi and Malani. New donors included Amit Misra, the public-relations chief of the HSS, and Gopal Ponangi, a member of the executive board of Ekal-Dallas. From Houston, Gabbard went to Dallas for a “grand reception” hosted by the Indian American Friendship Council. “She is assured a victory to the US Congress in next week’s elections,” Prasad Thotakura, the national president of the IAFC, declared. According to India Post, he described Gabbard not as a future representative from Hawaii, but as someone “who will provide a voice for all Indians in Congress.” By the end of October, Indian Americans from Texas had donated over twenty thousand dollars to her campaign. Although she had not yet issued any other formal foreign-policy position, Gabbard announced her India policy during an October 2012 interview with the editor of India Abroad. She promised to join the US Congress’s influenTHE CARAVAN

tial India Caucus, increase “strategic” ties, advocate “working together as partners in the fight against terrorism” and “unequivocally support” India for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. It was crucial, she insisted in an interview the following month with Religion News Service, for the United States and India to have a “closer working relationship.” Yet, she argued, “How can we have a close relationship if decision-makers in Washington know very little, if anything, about the religious beliefs, values, and practices of India’s 800 million Hindus?” On 6 November, the day Gabbard was elected, Pallod made his last and largest donation of the year: $1,000. Less than two weeks later, she began travelling to visit her supporters—not in Hawaii, but in Florida. On 17 November, she gave a keynote address to the convention of the Asian American Convenience Store Association, speaking alongside the AACSA’s founding president, Satya Shaw, and chairman, Chandrakant Patel—both also OFBJP executives and recurring Gabbard donors. I sent a detailed list of questions to Shaw and Patel asking about their contributions to Gabbard’s campaign, but did not receive an answer. The next day, she attended her third Sangh fundraiser. “More than 100 Indian-Americans from Central Florida gathered at Park Square Homes confer-

all in the family · reportage ence room on Nov. 18 to meet Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,” the website Khaas Baat reported. Not all those gathered came just to meet her, however. Recurring donors included Braham Aggarwal, a former executive of VHPA-Florida and multiple OFBJP councillors. A generous $2,500 came from Akshay Desai—best remembered as the Republican activist who wrote to the Bush administration protesting Modi’s visa denial. In total, she received nearly fourteen thousand dollars from Florida-based Indian-Americans by the end of the month. The following month, Pallod, Ramesh Shah and others hosted an OFBJP victory party in Houston to celebrate Modi's third election as chief minister. The OFBJP's task, reported India Herald, was to "fight the negative impressions about Modi that will be created by his opponents who will lobby US lawmakers." in august 2013, Gabbard was just seven months into her first term and not yet running for re-election. The Honolulu Civil Beat reported that she had been “criss-crossing the nation” to meet “enthusiastic crowds of Indian-Americans,” who “have become a significant part of her fundraising.” Donations were still pouring in. That year, about $112,600 of Gabbard’s itemised individual donations—20.7 percent—came from Sangh and pro-Modi sources. Over ninety thousand dollars of that was given in June and July alone. She attended five Sangh fundraisers in four states. Her donors included 28 Sangh executives—16 new, 12 recurring. Dozens of active members of the HSS, VHPA and OFBJP also chipped in, usually donating at the same time as the executives. That year, Gabbard spoke at three HSS and two VHPA events. When asked about this sudden display of support, the USINPAC’s Sanjay Puri said, “The Indian-American community has a love affair with Tulsi.” However, the timing of his comments— made days after he partnered with Rajnath Singh, then the BJP president, to lobby Gabbard for a reversal of Modi’s visa ban—suggested something more complex. On 17 July 2013, the BJP announced that Singh would visit the United States along with a delegation of top party executives, including Ananth Kumar, Sudhanshu Trivedi and Vijay Jolly. Hundreds of people packed a New Jersey auditorium to hear Singh speak on 21 July. Chandrakant Patel sat at his right hand. Singh called on the diaspora to support the BJP’s bid for election and described Hindutva as an ideal political strategy. The same day, he announced, “I will appeal to the US government to clear the US visa to the Gujarat chief minister.” On 23 July, Gabbard met with Singh in Washington. A photo of the meeting shows Gabbard, tucked in a corner of the room, surrounded

by nine people. Joining Singh and his delegation were Sanjay Puri and Ram Madhav. Her campaign-finance records, meanwhile, showed an uptick in the size and number of contributions from Indian Americans. This was the same period in which Bharat Barai—the long-time VHPA activist who had hosted Modi in his home—entered Gabbard’s political life. In February, he made his first donation of $2,600. To date, his total contribution to her campaign has been $16,005. In the years before Modi became prime minister, Barai worked extensively to rehabilitate his image in the United States. “I think the US did not recognise the importance of Mr Modi until 2014,” he told me. “This was a tactical mistake. … Somebody in the state department should have realised that he is the rising son.” From 2007 to 2014, Barai was one of the lead organisers of large-scale video conferences to connect Modi to the diaspora. That year, in 12 May, over a thousand people attended a videoconference at the Meadows Club, in a Chicago suburb. Another four hundred filled an overflow facility. Modi’s live address was beamed to 20 cities across the United States. Within two weeks, Gabbard flew to Chicago, where Barai introduced her at a convention of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin. The next month, Gabbard was back in Chicago, as the chief guest at an HSS event: a children’s “Dharma Bee,” featuring a play about the life of Vivekananda as well as quizzes about him and Krishna. On stage, she was flanked by Barai and a host of HSS executives, including Saumitra Gokhale and Ved Nanda. Also on stage was Amrit Mittal,

AUGUST 2019

opposite page: Bharat Barai was one of the primary organisers of Modi's reception at the Madison Square garden in 2016. Before that, he organised videoconferences from 2007 to 2012 to connect Modi to the diaspora. below: On 28 October 2012, Vijay Pallod, a prominent community organiser and leader of the American Sangh, organised a fundraiser for Tulsi Gabbard in his home.

43

all in the family · reportage an advisor to the VHPA’s Chicago chapter. Mittal, a former RSS worker, had, like Barai, hosted Modi at his home in 1997. Gabbard stayed for a Sangh fundraiser. New donors included Mittal, Shamkant Sheth, the president of the VHPA-Chicago, and both the vice-presidents of the chapter—Vinesh Virani and Harendra Mangrola. Also donating was Chhotalal Patel, a sponsor of Barai’s video conferences with Modi. That month, Illinois-based Indian Americans gave almost ten thousand dollars. One of those donors was Mihir Meghani’s brother, Sumir. Days later, on 21 June, Gabbard joined Mihir in California for another Sangh fundraiser. “Please support Congresswomen Tulsi Gabbard in her re-election to the US Congress,” Meghani wrote in an invitation to the event. Support came from several leading Sangh executives. New donors included Khanderao Kand, the public-relations coordinator of the HSS; Chandru Bhambhra, the president of the Bay Area chapter of the HSS and a former OFBJP president; Atri Macherla, a member of the national council of the OFBJP; and Thanigaimani Keeran, a member of the governing council of the VHPA. By the next day, California-based Indian Americans had given over twenty-three thousand dollars. “I don’t remember,” Bhambhra said, when I asked him about his contribution to Gabbard’s campaign. “Maybe very long back. … Maybe eight, ten years ago. I don’t know.” Gabbard continued crisscrossing the nation. On 13 July, she was in Houston at Pallod’s invitation, to inaugurate a banquet alongside Ramesh Bhutada. Introduced by Pallod’s son, Bharat, she spoke, the India Herald reported, about “how she won the election as an underdog in the race.” Gabbard’s presence at these events always corresponded with a surge in donations. New donors included Ekal-Houston’s president, Nikhil Mehta. Also donating was Ramesh Shah, the long-time VHPA activist who is also the chairperson of Ekal (USA) and a former OFBJP vice-president. That day, Gabbard netted over twenty-one thousand dollars from Texas-based Indian Americans. Ten days later, on 23 July, Gabbard met the BJP president in Washington 44

DC, who was in the country to lobby for the revocation of Modi’s visa ban. Two days later, Meghani sent a fundraising letter suggesting that he was selectively backing congressional candidates who supported Modi. He wrote that Mike Honda, then the representative for California’s seventeenth congressional district, had refused to remove his signature from a letter “asking the US State Department to continue denying Narendra Modi a visa.” So Meghani urged his network to donate to Honda’s challenger, Ro Khanna. “I have given the maximum donation of $5,200 to only two candidates this year—Tulsi Gabbard and Ro Khanna,” he wrote, asking others to do the same. A few days later, Gabbard received a massive surge of donations from Florida-based Indian Americans, amounting to over thirty-six thousand dollars. I briefly spoke with Meghani by phone, but he asked me to email him questions. He did not respond to my detailed list of queries about his contributions to Gabbard’s campaign. Over the next months, Gabbard went on a speaking circuit of Sangh events, particularly in California. A 25 October campaign expenditure for “catering services” at an Indian restaurant in San Jose corresponded with a surge in contributions from donors such as Ajay Shah, a member of the VHPA’s governing council, and Navneet Chugh, who was later appointed to head the California chapter of the USINPAC. Gabbard received nearly twelve thousand from California-based Indian-Americans. Donations were still coming in when Tulsi arrived in Atlanta on 27 October, to speak at two VHPA events in one day. Kusum Khurana, the president of the VHPA’s Atlanta chapter, introduced her at the first event, a Diwali celebration. The second event—co-sponsored by the United States Hindu Alliance, whose founders include Chandrakant Patel, Ved Nanda and the VHPA’s Mahesh Mehta—swiftly took a political turn. Gokul Kunnath, the president of USHA, is a former RSS swayamsevak who met Modi in 1987 and sponsored him to speak at a 1997 event in Atlanta. The website NRIPulse reported that after Gabbard spoke, Kunnath took the stage to ask the congresswoman “to THE CARAVAN

initiate efforts to have a bipartisan resolution” inviting Modi to address a joint session of Congress. A warning accompanied his appeal: “As India rises to the position of a superpower, the United States should treat India with respect.” Early in November, Gabbard flew to Australia. She was there for her brother’s wedding, but used the opportunity to also speak at another Sangh event. As reported by Indian Link, she spoke “about her plans to travel to India soon” while standing in front of an HSS-Sydney sign. She was, indeed, to visit India soon. Before then, however, the OFBJP mobilised to ensure Modi’s election, while Gabbard worked in Congress to help rehabilitate his tarnished reputation and oppose all attempts to discuss him, the RSS, or the violence of Hindu nationalism.

five when the new york times reported the violence in Gujarat on 2 March 2002, it cited Hindu, Muslim and Sikh residents of Ahmedabad who had identified the VHP as an instigator. Follow-up reportage called it “India’s Latest Nightmare,” while noting that Modi had “blamed Muslims for provoking the mob attacks.” Explaining that Hindu nationalism “has become politically mainstream in this nation and in the West,” the paper named the RSS as the “mothership” of the ideology and the BJP and VHP as the political and religious wings of the RSS. Controversy only deepened when the IDRF scandal—in which the American non-profit was accused of channelling nearly four million dollars to Sangh groups in India—broke in November. In 2004, Ram Madhav visited two prestigious universities on the US east coast to, in his words, discuss “concerns about Gujarat.” One invitation, issued by Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, called Madhav a representative of “the pre-eminent nationalist Hindu organisation of India.” His visit, however, only made things worse. A petition signed by over a hundred and fifty academics compared the RSS to the Ku Klux Klan, calling it “an organisation inspired and modelled on the Italian

all in the family · reportage fascists and the Nazis.” The invitation stood, but students picketed Madhav’s event. The following year, Modi was denied a visa. Over the coming years, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom repeatedly highlighted Hindu nationalism as a leading source of religion-based violence in India. “The increase in violence against religious minorities coincided with the rise in political influence of groups associated with the Sangh Parivar, a collection of organisations that view non-Hindus as foreign to India and aggressively press for governmental policies to promote a Hindu nationalist agenda,” its 2006 annual report said. Subsequent reports included nearly identical language, usually also noting that Modi’s administration in Gujarat was accused of complicity in the 2002 pogrom. In 2009, in the wake of the anti-Christian violence in Odisha, the

Modi “is widely believed to be a serious contender for the 2014 election for Indian Prime Minister,” Walsh wrote in a letter to the then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. “It is time the State Department reconsiders permitting Mr. Modi into the United States.” The next month, speaking as the chief guest at Barai’s biennial video conference with Modi, he promised not to smile until Modi was invited to the United States. At a Chicago press conference, he declared, “I am here because Chief Minister Modi has become a hero of mine.” Flanked by Barai on his right and Shrinarayan Chandak, the vice-president of the midwest chapter of the HSS, on his left, Walsh continued, “No music until Modi is here. … It is an outrage that our government has not issued Mr Modi a visa.” Walsh’s appearances coincided with advertisements in diaspora newspapers reading, “If you love Modi, send

On 18 November, a bipartisan group introduced House Resolution 417. Recognising the violence in Odisha in 2008, in Gujarat in 2002 and throughout the nation following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, it warned that “strands of the Hindu nationalist movement have advanced a divisive and violent agenda that has harmed the social fabric of India.” USCIRF placed India on its watch list, alongside countries such as Somalia and Egypt. Later that year, Madhav allegedly presented the US state department with a copy of Michael Brannon Parker’s book explaining the RSS’s version of events. Meanwhile, the American Sangh pursued—and found— representatives willing to champion Modi in the US Congress. “I was the first member of Congress to advocate for Modi,” Joe Walsh, a former representative from the eighth congressional district in Illinois, wrote in 2014. First elected in 2010, Walsh was a Republican who identified as a member of the conservative-populist Tea Party movement. In 2012, as he campaigned for a second term, supporting Modi became one of his core issues.

Walsh back to Congress.” The ads were funded by a new political-action committee founded by the industrialist Shalabh Kumar. “Kumar’s PAC put up more than $500,000 to support Tea Party Republican Joe Walsh,” India West later reported. The money was wasted. Walsh was voted out of office on 6 November 2012. Barai, meanwhile, performed damage control, assuring a media outlet that Walsh’s loss had “nothing to do with his stand on Chief Minister Modi’s visa.” Gabbard entered office as Walsh exited. By February 2013, Barai turned his attention to her. When I asked Barai about his abrupt transition from supporting a Tea Party Republican to a progressive Democrat, he said, “It doesn’t matter to me, whether it is a AUGUST 2019

Republican or Democrat.” According to the sociologist Arvind Rajagopal, this is an example of the Sangh’s opportunism. “Power is its principle,” he told me. “So the Democratic Party values are only relevant when convenient.” In February 2013, Modi was announced as the keynote speaker at the India Economic Forum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School the following month. Since he was still banned from entering the United States, he was scheduled to speak via videoconference. When local faculty heard the news, they began a petition demanding that the invitation be revoked. “Recently there have been efforts to whitewash Modi’s grim record and to grant him international respectability,” the petition, which was signed by hundreds of academics from around the country, warned. Amidst international coverage of the incident, Modi’s speech was cancelled. The Sangh, though, was undeterred. On 23 March, it staged a “funeral of free speech” at Wharton. Less than a week later, three Republican representatives met Modi in Gujarat. They were the first US officials to engage with him since 2005. While there, they held a press conference with Modi to publicly invite him to the United States. Reuters reported that the press conference was seen by the Indian media “as a public relations coup for Modi, who has been trying to cultivate an image of a statesman.” The visit's legitimacy came under scrutiny when it was alleged that Shalabh Kumar had solicited the three Republicans’ participation. Kumar’s organisation, the National American Indian Public Policy Institute, claimed it had funded the “business delegation.” Kumar accompanied the trio throughout the visit, as did the OFBJP’s Vijay Jolly, who declared, “Modi has won the hearts of the American friends.” By the end of 2013, however, the situation grew thornier for Modi in the United States. On 18 November, a bipartisan group of 15 representatives introduced House Resolution 417. Recognising the violence in Odisha in 2008, in Gujarat in 2002 and throughout India following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 45

all in the family · reportage 1992, it warned that “strands of the Hindu nationalist movement have advanced a divisive and violent agenda that has harmed the social fabric of India.” It praised the US government for denying Modi a visa. He now risked formal censure in the country. The Hindu American Foundation denounced the resolution as “grossly inaccurate.” Sheetal Shah, the HAF’s senior director—and daughter of the Modi backer Dhiru Shah—cautioned against blaming “one ideology,” stating, “Resolutions such as this one, devoid of the necessary context when examining religious violence in India, only serve to provoke and inflame.” The USINPAC also spoke out. Pledging to “spare no effort” to stop it, they complained that the resolution “intended to influence India’s upcoming elections by focusing on the 2002 Gujarat riots some 11 years after the fact.” Both groups took to Capitol Hill to pressure lawmakers. “Each office who signed the resolution received a visit from HAF,” a congressional staffer later told the news magazine Outlook. “They are definitely trying to undermine anyone in Washington who is critical of Modi.” Gabbard soon stepped forward to help stifle the attempted criticism. “It is critically important that we focus on strengthening the ties between the two nations, and I do not believe that H. Res. 417 accomplishes this,” she said on 18 December. The next day, the HAF issued a statement: “First Hindu Member of Congress Opposes Anti-India Resolution.” It quoted Rishi Bhutada, who urged other representatives to “join this latest rebuke” by Gabbard. Over the next two weeks, Amrit Mittal and Bharat Barai—both of whom had hosted Modi—as well as Sanjay Puri all donated generously to her campaign. The battle over the resolution began just as the OFBJP launched its campaign for Modi’s 2014 election. The major players were all Gabbard donors. Bharat Barai, Ramesh Shah, Pallod and the then OFBJP president, Chandrakant Patel, all travelled to India to canvass in person. “Only because of Narendra Modi, I went to campaign in India,” Pallod told me. “Those who did not know him, I shared my personal experience with them and it made a dif46

ference.” Ramesh Bhutada remained in Houston to manage the group’s largest phone-banking centre. “Preparations were almost like that for an Indian wedding,” Bhutada reportedly said. Preferring a martial analogy, India Herald described the operatives deploying to India as “volunteers turned political warriors.” Years of national preparation preceded the operation. in november 2011, the OFBJP held two high-level training camps, in New Jersey and Houston. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe—a political advisor to Nitin Gadkari, the BJP president at the time— conducted both. Vijay Jolly termed this a “first of its kind” exercise. In Houston, India Herald reported, Shah praised the BJP’s initiatives, while Bhutada “reminded of efforts required to build a strong organisation.” I sent Bhutada a series of questions about his role in the American Sangh, Modi and his contributions to Gabbard’s campaign, but he did not respond. In October 2012, over eight hundred people gathered in New Jersey at a reception for LK Advani, who praised the RSS and promised that the BJP would provide voting rights to overseas citizens of India. Jayesh Patel, then the president of the OFBJP, urged the community to support the BJP in the 2014 election. Five months later, in March 2013, the OFBJP organised gatherings in both Chicago and New Jersey for a special video conference with Modi. “Whatever you do, wherever you work, India should be the top priority for all its citizens,” Modi told the audience. In June, Dhiru Shah hosted the BJP leader Subramanian Swamy to speak about the elections at a conference in Atlanta. “He will be the prime minister,” Swamy said of Modi. He urged the diaspora to get involved in the process. In July, Rajnath Singh visited the United States, meeting Gabbard and speaking in New Jersey. In September, Smriti Irani, then a BJP vice-president, travelled from India to inaugurate the OFBJP’s convention in Florida, where Modi spoke— for the third time that year—via videoconference. “Only the BJP can save THE CARAVAN

the country from the current crisis,” he told an audience of over a thousand people. He urged them to participate in the election, concluding, “As soon as I finish, they will start.” Six other speakers, including Barai, were all Gabbard donors. In December 2013, after the BJP won three of the five elections to state legislatures, the OFBJP organised victory parties around the United States. Nearly three hundred people gathered in Houston. “Modi is what India needs,” Ramesh Bhutada declared. Indo-American News reported that Ramesh Shah called it “critical to campaign aggressively on the phone from here.” Speaking to the Times of India, Pallod said, “Today we pledged to work to bring BJP to power and make Modi the next Prime Minister of India.” In the first week of January 2014, the OFBJP held a global meet at the party’s headquarters in Delhi. Jolly, Advani, Gadkari, Rajnath Singh and the future vice-president of India, N Venkaiah Naidu addressed 160 delegates from around the world. “This is the first time that a programme to connect BJP with the global Indian diaspora is being organised on such a scale,” Jolly said. Meanwhile, around seven hundred volunteers began phone-banking in Houston. “We had volunteers calling up their relatives, friends, and friends of friends in India,” Bhutada said. At another call centre in Florida, Chandrakant Patel explained, “Each volunteer is expected to make at least 200 calls.” In March, many of Gabbard’s donors prepared to leave for India. Chandrakant Patel led a team of over a thousand OFBJP volunteers who, one paper reported, “travelled to India at their own expense to campaign for BJP.” Barai led a team of over six hundred volunteers. From Houston, Pallod joined a team of thirty. India Herald reported that Ramesh Bhutada encouraged the volunteers as they left, saying, “This is the moment to pay our debt to our motherland.” One last action in Washington DC cast a shadow over Modi’s chances for success. On 4 April, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, a bipartisan caucus of the US House of Representatives, held a hearing to discuss

lucas jackson / reuters

the plight of religious minorities in India. “Many religious minority communities fear religious freedom will be jeopardized if the BJP wins and the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, becomes Prime Minister,” Katrina Lantos Swett, the vice-chair of the USCIRF, and the opening witness, warned the commission. Witnesses from human-rights outfits spoke about the impunity and governmental complicity in the 2002 violence. Both the HAF and the USINPAC submitted statements denouncing the hearing as an attempt to “influence” India’s elections. The HAF criticised the hearing’s “stated scope and purpose,” while the USINPAC called it “extremely unjustified and untimely.” Gabbard echoed their rhetoric. “I have grave concerns about the timing of this hearing,” she said. “The goal of this hearing ultimately is to influence the outcome of this election. … I am concerned that an outcome or effect of this hearing could begin to foment such fear and loathing used for political purposes that we have seen occur in other places.” In a later interview with the HAF, Gabbard called herself the “lone dissenting voice,” and said that there were not "a lot of friendly faces in the crowd.” Yet, she suggested, she played a crucial role in correcting “misperceptions that were be-

ing furthered about India and about … Modi.” She added, “My taking five minutes out of my day to go there and speak on this was a very small thing when you look at the impact that it had.” The following day, Venkat Rao Mulpuri, an OFBJP executive in Washington DC, donated $1,000 to Gabbard’s campaign. The results of the general election were announced on 16 May 2014. The BJP won with the first simple majority India had seen in 30 years. On the other side of the world, celebrations erupted in the United States. “I never thought it would happen,” Pallod, who had been so excited that he had not slept that night, declared. “There’s never a majority.” Ramesh Bhutada trumpeted "a second Independence for India.” Gabbard issued a statement the same day. “I recently spoke with Narendra Modi by phone and congratulated him and the Bharatiya Janata party for winning,” she said. Why a first-term congresswoman had a direct line to Modi before he even assumed office was an unanswered question. “I look forward to working with Mr Modi,” she continued. “A partnership between the world’s two largest and greatest democracies is necessary for us to successfully address the many global challenges we face.” AUGUST 2019

above: Leading figures of the American Sangh, including Bharat Barai, put their weight behind organising a grand reception for Modi at the Madison Square Garden, for his first visit to the United States as prime minister, following the revocation of the visa ban.

47

all in the family · reportage When Modi was sworn in on 26 May, the OFBJP organised parties around the United States—in California, New York, Texas, Florida and elsewhere. “I have never seen a visionary person like Shri Modi,” Chandru Bhambhra said. Three days later, Gabbard partnered with the three Republican representatives who had visited Modi to co-sponsor a resolution promising to work with him to “advance shared values and interests.” At a June victory party in Atlanta, speaking to an audience of seven hundred people, Dhiru Shah argued that Modi would “require the support” of the United States in order to “perform.” He said, “That we can achieve only if we NRIs were to influence the foreign policy makers in the United States.” He had one person in mind: Tulsi Gabbard. She had criticised “a resolution against Narendra Modi” and was “a lady who has been doing work for you.” So, he said, “Open up your check books. Write a check for her because she’s fighting election in 2014.” At another party, on 16 May—the day the BJP’s victory was announced—Shah urged a hundred celebrants to support Gabbard in her upcoming re-election in gratitude for her opposition to the resolution. Indeed, Gabbard’s fortunes rose with Modi’s in 2014. Over the year, $123,000 of Gabbard’s itemised individual donations—about 24 percent of the total— came from Sangh and pro-Modi sources. She attended five fundraisers in four states. There were calls to finance her campaign at three separate BJP victory parties, all of which cited her opposition to H Res 417 as a pre-election service done for Modi. In June, after Dhiru Shah urged his Atlanta audience to support Gabbard in order to “influence the government,” Ramesh Bhutada wrote an article for the Houston Chronicle. “Indian voters have put forward a leader who recognizes their aspirations for themselves and for India,” he said. “The US government should recognize this and end its current policy of ostracizing Modi,” who had won because of his “RSS training.” Because of Modi’s “upbringing in the culture of RSS,” he concluded, “Critics should revisit the RSS.” Gabbard, meantime, was felicitated by the OFBJP. On 21 June, she was the 48

keynote speaker at a banquet hosted by the group’s Los Angeles chapter. India West reported that she spoke about supporting “India’s war against all forms of terrorism,” and answered questions about how Indian-Americans could get more politically involved in the United States. Throughout the event, she wore a saffron scarf emblazoned with the BJP logo. The attendees donated generously. New donors included Vinod Ambastha, the president of the HSS (USA), as well as Ravi Tilak, Paresh Shah and Manohar Shinde, committee members of the OFBJP’s Los Angeles chapter. Sucheta Kapuria, a trustee of the Dharma Civilization Foundation, also contributed. The DCF’s board includes Shinde—one of many senior Sangh pracharaks, according to the HSS founder, Sharda—Ambastha, and Ved Nanda. The DCF made headlines when the University of California, Irvine rejected a $6-million endowment from the group after the faculty accused it of having RSS ties. By the end of June, Gabbard received $11,800 from California-based Indian Americans, plus a generous donation from the DCF president, Kalyan Viswanathan. In August, the American Sangh focussed its attention on organising a grand reception for Modi at Madison Square Garden, a massive arena in New York City. It would be his first trip to the United States following the revocation of his visa ban, which came only in recognition of his position as prime minister. Vijay Jolly had begun a 12-day tour of the country to generate diaspora anticipation. “The Sangh plays a key role in organising this diaspora diplomacy—and, in particular, Ram Madhav,” Ian Hall told me. A five-person committee was entrusted with organising the reception. All of its members were leaders of the US-based Sangh affiliates: the HSS general secretary Yelloji Rao Mirajkar, Mahesh Mehta from the VHPA, Chandrakant Patel, Ramesh Shah and Bharat Barai. Speaking of his role in planning the event, Barai told me he was chosen because it had to be “somebody that [Modi] could trust.” That month, Gabbard was in Atlanta as a keynote speaker at an OFBJP banquet celebrating Modi’s victory. The master of ceremonies was Dhiru Shah. THE CARAVAN

Noting that she was campaigning for a second term, Shah urged, “It’s necessary that we support a person like Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. And whatever the donations you make is not enough, because she needs to win.” Shah asked Gabbard to push Congress to pass a resolution apologising to Modi and “affirming that it was a mistake on the part of the United States to have cancelled his visa.” Then Gabbard spoke. “I met so many of you almost a year ago,” she said. “Huge congratulations on the elections held in India, to Prime Minister Modi taking his position, and to all of you for your hard work in making that possible.” She called the election result an impressive outcome. “All across the country, I heard different people saying that Narendra Modi would not be prime minister of India. He is. Why is that possible? Because people like you stood up and said, ‘We’re gonna make this happen.’” Jolly, who was present at the banquet, spoke next. “I’m a swayamsevak,” he said. “I am a soldier of the Bharatiya Janata Party.” Addressing Gabbard, he said, “The whiff of fresh air which was evident after landing on the soil of Hawaii is the same when I sit over in your company.” Then Jolly, a politician from India, assured Gabbard, a first-term US congresswoman, that she would be re-elected. “We are sure, with the support of the people of Indian origin, the non-resident Indians and, of course, the US citizens, your victory later this year is a foregone conclusion,” he declared. “I’m predicting today for your victory.” He compared her to Modi, explaining that he once told US officials that Modi would one day be “the supremo” not only of the BJP, but of India. “We were proved correct then, and we will be proved correct later this year.” Gabbard posed for pictures with Jolly while holding up a biography of Modi. She once again wore a saffron BJP scarf. According to her filings with the federal election commission, her campaign also paid at least part of the bill for the banquet—$1,500 for catering at Ashiana Restaurant. Her campaign coffers reflected the gratitude of the attendees. By September, Gabbard got over seven thousand dollars from Georgia-based Indian Americans.

all in the family · reportage On 14 September, Gabbard’s campaign received more funds from New Jersey. She does not appear to have been present, but it was a de facto Sangh fundraiser—recurring donors included Rakesh Shreedhar, the president of the New York chapter of the HSS, and Balram Advani, an advisor to Ekal-NY. Other donors included prominent industrialists as well as committee members of a youth camp run by Advani. Gabbard pocketed nearly thirty-five thousand dollars. Two weeks later, she went to New York to meet Modi at his rock-star reception and gift him her childhood copy of the Gita. The heavily hyped event cost an estimated $1.5 million—eighteen thousand people attended. Modi’s “entrance after a series of musical and dance warm-up acts sent the audience into a frenzy,” Time magazine reported. “The 2014 election was colossally expensive,” Hall told me. “A conservative estimate put party spending at $5

ganza. … Hindutva is a way of life, and our PM will pave the way.” Several hundred people protested outside the Madison Square Garden. “Mostly Americans of Indian descent, both Hindu and Muslim, gathered across the street,” The Telegraph reported. They chanted, “Modi, Modi, you can’t hide, you committed genocide!” Gabbard spent the next month collecting donations from across the United States. In early October, she flew to Texas for a fundraiser in the Dallas region, hosted by the local leadership of the HSS, HAF and DCF. She left with nearly fourteen thousand dollars in contributions from Texas-based Indian-Americans. Soon after, she was in Chicago for a 26 October fundraiser, co-hosted by Barai and Nirav Patel, the youth coordinator for the OFBJP’s Chicago chapter. “She is a staunch supporter of Narendra Modi even before he assumed PM post,” Barai said, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. Gabbard

Gabbard’s fortunes rose with Modi’s in 2014. Over the year, $123,000 of Gabbard’s itemised individual donations—24 percent—came from Sangh and pro-Modi sources. She attended five fundraisers in four states. There were calls to finance her campaign at three separate BJP victory parties, all of which cited her opposition to H Res 417 as a pre-election service done for Modi. billion. Some think it was more. Some of this money did come from sources within India, but it is thought that a considerable amount came from the diaspora, who overwhelmingly backed Modi.” Hall suggested that Modi spoke at diaspora events in New York, London and Sydney to—among other reasons—“thank them for their financial as well as political backing.” His support base in the United States loved it. “This event is a hallmark to show how emotionally bonded he is with the community here,” Barai said. Pallod, who flew his whole family out from Texas to attend, praised Modi’s training as an organiser with the RSS. Speaking to Al Jazeera, he said, “Modi deserves all this fanfare and extrava-

praised Modi’s “dynamic leadership,” explaining that despite having “other engagements, I adjusted to meet him personally.” She got over twelve thousand dollars from Indian-Americans in the Chicago region. On 4 November, Vijay Jolly’s prediction proved correct: Gabbard was re-elected to a second term. However, she did not rest on her laurels. She kept fundraising throughout that month, garnering $22,000 from Indian-American donors in Texas and California alone. She also returned to Houston, to speak at a fundraiser for a textbook-revision campaign, spearheaded by the HAF in California. In an on-stage interview with Jay Kansara, the group’s director of government relations, she AUGUST 2019

spoke about meeting Modi, the Bhagavad Gita, and “human-rights atrocities that are occurring to Hindus.” Kansara praised her as “one of the only members who took a firm stand against legislation and hearings that were attempting to influence India’s elections.” The HAF, he said, had played “a central role in planning the prime minister’s visit.” Revealing that she had booked tickets to visit India, Gabbard said, “The prime minister personally invited me to go and said he would help plan my trip.” Ramesh Bhutada also spoke, saying, “Hinduism must be projected in the right way in this country.” Joining him was Murali Balaji, the HAF’s director of education and curriculum reform—the position was created with grants from the Uberoi Foundation, a trust chaired by Ved Nanda—and Rishi Bhutada. A few days later, Rishi again donated to Gabbard’s campaign. In Delhi, from 21 to 23 November, Gabbard—as well as textbook revision— were common themes at the first World Hindu Congress. A project of Swami Vigyananand, a joint general secretary of the VHP, the event was inaugurated by Mohan Bhagwat and Ashok Singhal. While Bhagwat argued that “only Hindu society” could deliver the message that the “world is one family,” Singhal declared, “Proud Hindus have finally come to rule Delhi. … It’s time to create a Hindu superpower in the world.” While various speakers insisted that India’s textbooks must focus on the “inculcation of value system,” the activist Arvind Kumar talked about the HAF’s textbook campaign in California. “Communists from Bharat recruited 17 Democratic Party assembly members to fight against HAF,” he alleged. Samir Asthana offered a solution. “We need leaders like Tulsi Gabbard,” he said. Sanjay Puri echoed him. Speaking at the WHC’s “political conference,” he urged his audience to “take inspiration from Ms Tulsi Gabbard.” As the year came to a close, the OFBJP hosted its annual convention in California and Gabbard flew to India. “We want to make sure our organisation is strong in the United States,” Chandrakant Patel said at the convention. India West reported that Vijay Chauthaiwale, Jolly’s replacement as head of the BJP’s 49

all in the family · reportage foreign-affairs cell, called the event “vital to the party’s growth and evolution.” On 16 December, Gabbard arrived in India. Her first meeting was with Modi; her next was with Rajnath Singh, who was now the home minister. Then, she flew to Goa to attend the India Ideas Conclave. While her office called the conclave “India’s most eclectic and thought-provoking platform for global leaders and experts,” the event’s own journal called it “a maiden attempt” by the RSS-affiliated think tank India Foundation—whose driving force is Shaurya Doval, the son of India’s national security advisor Ajit Doval—to get “nationalist thinkers across the world to spend a few days together.” The India Foundation had just helped organise Modi’s reception at Madison Square Garden. It was their inaugural conclave. Gabbard spoke at a special plenary to launch the conclave. “The majority of the country’s right-wing intellectual elite was present, besides Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers and leaders,” the Hindustan Times reported. The other speakers included David Frawley—labelled by the Indian journalist Kaveree Bamzai as the “RSS’s favourite western intellectual”—and the Belgian writer Koenraad Elst. “You should make it uncool to be Muslims,” Elst said. His comments outraged one of the few Muslim delegates, who walked out as he praised the VHP’s “re-conversion” campaign, adding, “We need to liberate Muslims from Islam. Every Muslim is an abductee and must be brought back.” From Goa, Gabbard went to Bengaluru. There, she gave the keynote address at an event organised by Manthana, which the RSS’s Samvada calls “an RSS-inspired intellectual forum.” Calling Modi a “man on a mission,” she assured her audience that “the past is buried.” She concluded, “There was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.” Hours before leaving India, on 3 January 2015, Gabbard again spoke at an India Foundation event—this time a Delhi forum organised specially for her on “the future of Indo–US relations.” As she returned to the United States, The Telegraph published an article with the headline: “Sangh Finds a Mascot 50

in American Tulsi.” Her reception in India, the paper reported, “went way beyond the ritual courtesies an Indian MP—her counterpart in India—would be extended abroad.” She was becoming “the best advertisement the Sangh can hope to get.” “we all know tulsi gabbard from Hawaii,” Saumitra Gokhale said in Los Angeles, during a May 2016 lecture on the global growth of the RSS through the work of the HSS. “She attended a few of our events,” he said. “She has been a very close friend of Sangha and always been there for us.” Gokhale’s comments came just two months after Gabbard, for the first time, discussed her ties to the RSS and the BJP, in an interview with Quartz India. “I have no affiliation with the RSS,” she said. Without directly addressing it, she discounted the significance of her wearing a BJP sash at OFBJP banquets in 2014. “Sometimes people on both sides, for their own purposes, try to say I somehow favour, or am part, of the BJP, or take photos of me at Indian events and circulate them for their own promotional reasons,” she said. A year later, in November 2017, the VHPA’s Abhaya Asthana announced Gabbard as the chairperson of the second World Hindu Congress, to be held in Chicago in September 2018. “I am so honoured to be joining you as the chair,” she said in a video message to the VHPA. A few months later, Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS's supreme leader, was announced as the keynote speaker. By June, various diaspora groups began protesting Tulsi’s presence at the event. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency labelled the VHP a “religious militant organisation.” Finally, four days before the event, Gabbard announced that she had already withdrawn many months before, “due to ethical concerns and problems that surround my participating in any partisan Indian political event in America.” Politically, it was a safe move. The WHC was beginning to attract negative press. One report noted that a speaker on education had recently called critics of the RSS “cockroaches”—a term infamously used in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The event also attracted proTHE CARAVAN

testors. Over two days, hundreds of South Asians—Dalits, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and many others—picketed. “Prosecute Mohan Bhagwat for crimes against humanity,” one sign said. It might have appeared that Gabbard was finally distancing herself from the Sangh. But things were not that simple. Gabbard, ever the deft politician, set about managing her constituencies. Immediately after she won re-election to a fourth term, in November 2018, the news channel NDTV reported that Gabbard was quietly “reaching out to prospective donors, including a large number of Indian-Americans” in anticipation of running for president. An article in The Intercept reported that Bharat Barai and the HAF’s Suhag Shukla met Gabbard privately in her Washington office to discuss, among other things, the fallout from the WHC. Barai told the journalist that they had reached a “happy consensus to put that episode behind us.” Many in the diaspora, however, do not appear ready to forget the past so quickly. Gabbard, of course, faced protests in

It might have appeared that Gabbard was finally distancing herself from the Sangh. But things were not that simple. Gabbard, ever the deft politician, set about managing her constituencies. Los Angeles in March this year as the “Prince$$ of the R$$.” She faced protests again in April, when she joined a forum of presidential candidates at Southern Texas University in Houston. Outside the historically black university, protesters waved signs claiming she was the “Mascot of India’s KKK.” Given the international attention she now enjoys, Gabbard speaks more reservedly when pressed for her opinion about Modi. In 2016, she told Quartz that “Modi impressed me,” calling him “a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere.”

all in the family · reportage

courtesy pieter friedrich

left: In March 2019, around two dozen Indian Americans protested outside the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, where Tulsi Gabbard was campaigning for Democratic Party's nomination for president.

In May 2019, after the journalist Glenn Greenwald noted her “strong praise for Modi,” he asked Gabbard if she believes that “the government of India persecutes Muslims and other religious minorities.” “I don’t pretend to support or approve of or endorse all the practices of the ruling party in India,” Gabbard replied. Pressing her again, Greenwald asked, “Do you agree that that’s happening?” She responded, “I don’t dispute that these things are occurring.” Just one month later, Gabbard was in New York for a fundraiser at the home of Raj Bhayani, a Brooklyn-based surgeon who is a member of the OFBJP’s social-development committee as well as a core-committee member of ModiForPM.org. In April, he helped organise an OFBJP campaign kickoff for Modi's re-election this year. Gabbard is investing all her efforts in her run for the presidency. Compared to the many heavyweights still in the race, she is ranked near the bottom. The party has set a combined polling and donation threshold for participation. Gabbard has qualified for the first two debates, but is struggling to meet the thresholds for the third. With luck, she may still stay the course until September. In my conversations with Sangh leaders, I sensed some distancing from Gabbard when I spoke to them about her presidential campaign. Barai emphasised that he is an independent with

no formal party affiliation. “I’ll wait till whoever comes into the primaries, and gets the party’s nomination, and then choose between the two,” he told me. In the crowded Democratic primary, he listed several contenders he favours: “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Tulsi Gabbard—but again, I will have to see what the Democratic Party puts up.” Barai’s rhetoric diverges from his campaign donations. There are over twenty Democrats running for president, but the only one he has donated to is Gabbard. Since January this year, he and his wife have contributed $6,400 to her campaign. Many of Gabbard’s other original Sangh donors, including Ramesh Shah, Shekar Reddy and Vijay, are also donating to her presidential campaign. Ramesh and Rishi Bhutada—along with their wives—have contributed $10,900. Mihir Meghani, his wife and his parents have contributed $22,400. Even if she fails to win the presidency, Tulsi Gabbard’s future looks bright. She is positioned to run for the US Senate—or even secure a cabinet position. And besides, the Sangh is a gift that keeps giving. s Disclosure: The writer has participated in protests and organising for civil rights and minority causes in the United States, including with South Asian organisations opposing Hindutva. AUGUST 2019

51

•A MARKETING INITIATIVE•

PILLARS OF THE NATION

PSUS AND NATION BUILDING

I

n the years that followed India’s independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of the nation, sought to establish a robust foundation for the development of a flourishing modern nation with a strong economy. To realize this vision, he set the ball rolling with the introduction of India’s first ‘Five Year Plan.’ Inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam in 1954—one of the ambitious projects included in the First Five Year Plan—Nehru christened it a “temple of modern India.” He would later repeat the gesture while laying

the foundation for the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, saying “When I lay the foundation stone here of Nagarjuna Sagar, to me it is a sacred ceremony… This is the foundation of the temple of humanity in India, a symbol of new temples that we are building all over India.” Thereafter, in another speech, four years later, Nehru would state that, “The small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places.”

Nehru wasn’t merely overstating an affinity for cultural symbols while referring to these infrastructural developments as ‘temples.’ Instead, he was referring specifically to India’s Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs)—a new array of state enterprises, which were to be an integral part of his vision for India’s future. In the initial years of nation building, Public Sector Undertakings were established to usher in a rapid socio-economic transformation for industrialising and modernising the newly independent nation and propel-

•A MARKETING INITIATIVE• ling it towards self-sufficiency. Understandably, during ‘The Nehru Era,’ from 1950 to 1964, a major chunk of national investment went into the public sector, and the primary developmental focus was on strengthening basic and heavy industries. There was also a perceivably socialist turn in the imagination undergirding India’s developmental journey, as evidenced by The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956. The key goals of the resolution included: the promotion of balanced regional development, generation of surpluses for development and measures against the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. The initial success of the Soviet experiment was an important source of inspiration during The Nehru Era which enjoined the idea of the state becoming an entrepreneurial presence. Not only did this lead to the state providing capital to private industry in the absence of established financial markets, but it also boosted its political autonomy, as it remained free from foreign interference. Owing to the economic policies undertaken during The Nehru Era, India’s economy was showing truly encouraging signs for the first time since the turn of the 20 th century, despite a substantial increase in the population. Between 1952 and 1965, particularly, the Indian economy began to grow at a rate of 4.09, while also witnessing a substantial increase in its per capita income. Fur-

ther, the period also saw the successful reversal of the trend of declining agriculture that had been crippling the economy. The Nehru Era, for all intents and purposes, had left an indelible mark in the socio-economic advancement of India, and the PSUs had a major role to play in it. In the initial phase of nation building, public sector undertakings were restricted mainly to core and strategic industries. Heavy industry, steel, oil and gas, and banking and insurance fell under these categories. It was during this phase that some of India’s largest and most successful PSUs were set up, including Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, State Bank of India, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited, Indian Oil Corporation, Steel Authority of India Limited, Bharat Electronics and Oil India. Moreover, India’s first PSU, Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), which pioneered the telecommunication industry and India’s foremost insurance and investment company Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), also owe their genesis to this period. Later, during the second phase, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, Indian PSUs began to grow on an unprecedented scale. It was also during this period that key events of the transition, including the nationalization of banks and the state takeover of ‘sick’ private units (i.e. industrial units that had been consistently accruing losses) were initiated.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, PSUs kept expanding and diversifying further, thereby becoming a formidable presence in sectors of national importance such as power, irrigation, infrastructure, transportation, healthcare, education, science and technology and oil and gas refineries. India’s largest power company NTPC, India’s apex developmental bank NABARD, Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), the Rashtriya Ispat Nagam and National Aluminium, were all set up during this phase of industrial development. PSUs were considered the lodestars guiding the Indian economy towards a period of high and sustainable industrial growth, amply aided by the Five Year Plans, as well as associated policy and welfare initiatives. In 1987, the well-known categories of Maharatnas, Navaratnas and Miniratnas were introduced to assess the performance of PSUs by the newly setup Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction. The Department of Public Enterprises confers these titles on various PSUs, and their respective status determine the degree of autonomy they can exercise. As on 26 February, 2018, eight PSUs have been accorded the Maharatna status: BHEL, CIL, GAIL, IOC, ONGC, NTPC, SAIL and BPCL. Navaratnas are 16 in number, with the likes of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Oil India Limited among its ranks. Further, 74 organisations have been recognised as Miniratnas, in addition to over a 1000 state-level PSUs and municipal public companies. Until the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, India’s tightly regulated market was dominated by the public sector and a few private firms. However, post-liberalization, several sectors of the economy were opened to the private sector, which led to increased competition from private firms, both domestic and multinational. Notwithstanding, when the global economy was experiencing a financial meltdown in late 2008, five of India’s largest PSUs continued unaffected and reaped high revenues. It must be noted here that during this tumultuous period, the PSUs admirably buttressed India’s economic growth.

•A MARKETING INITIATIVE• PSUs have also played an invaluable role in the development of the country’s infrastructure. Not only did they address the entrepreneurial void in the infrastructure sector following India’s independence, but they also contributed immensely to India’s post-colonial economic trajectory and also paved the way for the establishment of sundry other enterprises. Moreover, PSUs have been instrumental in the success of governmental schemes aimed at improving transportation, roads, irrigation facilities, public health and sanitation, medical facilities, education etc. More than 60 per cent of ‘Central Public Sector Enterprises’ (CPSES) continue to be actively involved in infrastructure-related services. Public Sector Enterprises have also provided the much needed economic backbone to infrastructure spending during times of crises, thereby checking the unemployment levels and providing financial security. For instance, in recent years, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has been aiding the development of public infrastructure in rural areas through a dedicated Fund called Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF). RIDF primarily operates by funding State Governments for taking up rural infrastructure projects. Cumulative sanction under the facility stands at Rs 3,44,141 crore as on 31 March 2019. It has resulted in additional irrigation potential of 330 lakh ha. and additional rural road network of 4.68 lakh kms, inter alia. In recent times, NABARD has also taken steps to support GoI in finding solutions to various problems in rural areas such as lack of irrigation, housing and sanitation. A separate Fund by the name Long Term Irrigation Fund (LTIF) has also been created by NABARD for the completion of 99 medium and major irrigation projects. Further, additional irrigation potential of 81.37 lakh ha. is estimated to be created upon completion of these projects. Recently, it has also been announced that LIC has offered a cumulative Rs. 1.25 trillion line of credit, over a period of five years, to fund highway projects

across the country. At a time when India’s infrastructure demands are colossal, LICs funding would definitely help ease the burden on the government. Furthermore, the national insurer was second only to the Tata group, in the list of India’s most valued brands published by Brand Finance, a Londonbased independent business valuation and consultancy firm. LIC moved up four places with a 22.8 percent jump in its valuation to make it to the second spot. Profitable PSUs have also helped the state overcome fiscal deficits through their revenues and have been instrumental in helping India achieve its budget deficit goals. They also help rejuvenate underperforming sectors of the economy by providing investment opportunities. For instance, last year, 10 per cent equity stakes in BHEL and OIL were planned to be sold to raise 9,000 crores. At present, with the decrease in regulations, the share of the public sector in India’s Gross Domestic Product has been on the decline. Regardless, legacy continues to hold sway, inasmuch as, as recently as 2018, four of the eight Indian firms that featured in the Fortune 500 list were IOCL, ONGC, SBI and BPCL. As per another study conducted in 2017, 53 per cent of the existing PSUs have been recording better profitability, as compared to other units within the specific industry they belong to. However, PSUs have also increasingly encountered constraints on several fronts over the last decade or so. These

include allegations of fraudulency, accusations of bureaucratic bottlenecks, and structural and functional impediments. Complaints have also surfaced regarding the absence of a rigorous appraisal system, the shortage of manpower and, most recently, the case of sick PSUs which have been consistently underperforming. However, with the government opening up more CPSEs for strategic participation by the private sector, public spending seems to be offering more exciting opportunities for reviving the Indian economy. Since their inception, Public Sector Undertakings have played a crucial role in India’s economic development. The growth of public sector enterprises has also consistently helped propel the holistic growth of the country. Although, the role and functions of these undertakings have undergone drastic transformations in recent years, they continue to remain vital players in India’s evolving market. In spite of the fact that several limitations pertaining to the sector remain unaddressed, India’s nation-building experience, foregrounded by the advent of PSUs, illustrates that the macro-economy could, in the present day, lose its vitality without public sector enterprises, which have the power to reduce inequalities of income and wealth, bring about gargantuan social welfare programmes, significantly augment state revenue, and create strong, sustainable and planned economic growth in the country.

•A MARKETING INITIATIVE•

NABARD

TAKING RURAL INDIA FORWARD NABARD is India’s apex development bank, formed by an Act of Parliament in 1982 and wholly owned by the Government of India (GoI). Its mandate is to promote sustainable and equitable agriculture and rural development. NABARD’s activities can be broadly categorised into three heads: Financial, Developmental and Supervision. Through these initiatives, the institution touches almost every aspect of rural economy.

FINANCE ROLE NABARD provides refinance to banks for financing farmers and rural entrepreneurs for their production needs as well as investments. During FY 2018-19, Rs 55,000 crore has been sanctioned for seasonal agricultural operations and Rs 35,000 crore against other short-term lending. Similarly, NABARD provides long-term refinance to financial institutions for capital formation in agriculture and rural sector. It is meant for a wide gamut of activities encompassing farm and non-farm sectors with tenors of 18 months to 5 years and above. During FY 2018-19, refinance of Rs 90,254 crore has been extended to financial institutions taking the total outstanding to Rs 1,54,000 crore. The refinance is extended to develop irrigation facilities, land development, farm mechanisation, animal husbandry, fisheries, warehouses & cold storages, market yards, etc. The bank has also been funding creation of public infrastructure in rural areas through a dedicated Fund called Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF). RIDF funds State Governments for taking up rural infrastructure projects. Cumulative sanction under the facility stands at Rs 3,44,141 crore as on 31 March 2019. It has resulted in additional irrigation potential of 330 lakh ha. and additional rural road network of 4.68 lakh kms, inter alia. RIDF has been in existence for the last 25 years. In the recent period, NABARD has also taken steps to support GoI in finding so-

lutions to various problems in rural areas such as lack of irrigation, housing and sanitation. A separate Fund by the name Long Term Irrigation Fund (LTIF) has been created in NABARD for completion of 99 medium and major irrigation projects. Additional irrigation potential of 81.37 lakh ha. is expected to be created upon completion of these projects. Similarly, the GoI’s initiative to provide housing for all by 2022 through Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Gramin (PMAY-G) is also supported by NABARD. Rs 18,008 crore has been extended to GoI to constitute 85.31 lakh houses. NABARD has also been supporting the sanitation initiative of the GoI through Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin by providing credit to GoI for construction of toilets. During FY 2018-19, Rs 8,698.20 crore was released facilitating construction of 2.23 crore household toilets. Realising the importance of infrastructure development in rural areas to accomplish speedy growth, NABARD has instituted a separate Fund called NABARD Infrastructure Development Assistance (NIDA), which provides loans to State Governments and State Government entities as well as corporations and cooperatives for various infrastructure projects with longer-term repayment.

DEVELOPMENT FUNCTIONS NABARD has been involved in creating various developmental models in rural areas. This included skilling of rural youth, cluster development, microfinance, farmers clubs, producer organisations, financial inclusion, climate change adaptation and mitigation projects, watershed development, tribal development, etc. Producer organisation is a major step in mobilising unorganised primary producers in farm and off-farm activities with a view to gain from economies of scale and collective bargaining. There are more than 4000 farmer producer organisations and 30 off-farm producer

organisations supported by NABARD. SHG Bank Linkage Programme (SHGBLP) promoted by NABARD since 1992 is the world’s largest microfinance programme. There are more than 10 million SHGs promoted by NABARD, which benefits around 120 million rural families. So far, 50.77 lakh SHGs have been credit-linked. Of late, NABARD has embarked on a programme called EShakti by which SHGs are being digitised for better efficiency and easy loaning. Conservation of soil and water has been a major initiative of NABARD. It has supported development of 1642 Watersheds across the country, which has benefited over 20 lakh ha. of land from degradation. It has also provided better livelihood options to rural populace. Tribal development is one of the flagship activities of NABARD. It has developed a programme called WADI wherein one acre of land of tribal people is supported to be developed into an orchard, which provides sustainable income to tribal people. There are 746 projects supported by NABARD, which have benefited 5.23 lakh tribal families.

SUPPORT TO AGRI BUSINESS ENTERPRISES With a view to support development of agri business entrepreneurs, NABARD has been assisting start-ups in agriculture and rural areas. It has been funding Alternate Investment Funds (AIFs), which fund the agri start-ups. So far, 16 funds have been provided financial assistance of Rs 230 crore that has benefited over 50 start-ups. Further, to take this movement forward, NABARD has launched a separate subsidiary called NABVENTURES, which will fund agri start-ups directly. NABVENTURES has launched its first category II AIF with a corpus of Rs 500 crore and green shoe option of Rs 200 crore. The first closure of the Fund has been done with Rs 200 crore and it is expected to benefit social start-ups in the country.

reportage

Jatt Like That How Diljit Dosanjh helmed the rise of Punjabi comedy

REPORTAGE / FILM

kshitij mohan / indian express archive

MANIK SHARMA

sometime after the 2005 release of his third Punjabi pop album, Smile, a young Diljit Dosanjh, only a musician then, gave an interview to Channel Punjabi, dressed in maroon from head to toe, wearing a turban, shirt and bell-bottoms. The interviewer asked him about the song “Aa Gaye Paggan Pochvian Waale”— The turban lovers are here. “In these times, most people believe that wearing a turban does not look glamorous,” he said. “But you remained confident in how you look. Tell us about how you have this confidence.” “Most people seem to believe,” Dosanjh responded in Punjabi, “that if a sardar boy ties a turban, he cannot be called good-looking or glamorous. I have nothing against those who have cut their hair. To each his own. But I have no inferiority complex about the turban, as if we are lacking something. Hum kisi se kam nahin”— we are no less than anyone else. Over the next decade, Dosanjh not only released several hit albums, but also began acting in Punjabi films, becoming one of the biggest celebrities in the region. In 2016, as his first Bollywood film, Udta Punjab, was about to come out, Dosanjh appeared in another interview with the famous film critic Anupama Chopra. While Chopra asked questions in a mix of Hindi and English, Dosanjh, who does not seem uncomfortable in Hindi, often chose to answer in Punjabi. He repeated a version of what he had said in 2005. “People used to tell me, ‘Since you wear a turban, there’s no way you can work in Bollywood films. There will never be a role for you.’ So I also believed that Bollywood would never have a role for me … but anything can happen if god wants it to happen.” AUGUST 2019

61

parveen negi / the india today group / getty images

jatt like that · reportage

“I’m still being asked, ‘Don’t you think you will get limited roles because of the turban?’ Well, I only want to do limited roles then,” Dosanjh said with a grin. “I don’t want to do too many roles anyway.” Dosanjh’s pride in the turban and Sikh culture struck a chord with the community. Several Punjabi film protagonists began appearing on screen wearing turbans. An article in the British daily The Guardian noted the increase in turban-tying services in the United Kingdom, and attributed the trend to “younger members of the Sikh community displaying increasing pride in their roots and the rise of Bollywood stars such as Diljit Dosanjh bringing turbans into the spotlight.” A Facebook group called “Paggan Pochvyian Wale,” the title of Dosanjh’s hit song, has about thirty thousand members, and YouTube is flooded with videos with titles along the lines of “How to tie the turban like Diljit Dosanjh.” Dosanjh 62

has emerged as the first sardar to have carved a space for himself in films on the national stage, without having to give up his Sikh identity. Dosanjh’s rise has paralleled the growth of the genre of Punjabi comedy. The 2012 film Jatt and Juliet, starring Dosanjh and Neeru Bajwa, quickly became the highest-grossing Punjabi film upto that time, and did remarkably well across India and in several countries with high Punjabi diaspora populations. His most recent Punjabi film, Shadaa, still in theatres, has already made over R50 crore worldwide and has broken several previous records. The national and international prominence of Punjabi pop music and comedy—there is often an overlap, as many Punjabi musicians are also actors—entails several stories of the triumph of Punjabi innovation and humour. However, its flip side has been the recurrence of themes of caste pride and the glorification of drugs, violence THE CARAVAN

and blatant misogyny across Punjabi music and film. Dosanjh’s output has been no exception. In a state that is grappling with a serious drug menace, senseless gun violence and rampant crime against women, its film stars and musicians are often questioned on whether their art contributes to these problems. Unfortunately, Dosanjh’s answers to these questions have often come up short. dosanjh was born in Dosanjh Kalan, a village in the district of Jalandhar, and completed his schooling in Ludhiana. Initially named “Daljit,” he began singing gurbani—Sikh hymns—which require training in Hindustani-classical music and knowledge of the ragas, at local gurdwaras. In 2004, at the age of 20, Dosanjh released his first album, Ishq Da Uda Ada, produced by the Ludhiana-based Finetone Casettes. He also changed his first name to Diljit. As he explained in

jatt like that · reportage an interview, the change of name was “thoda cool rakhne karne ke liye”—to keep it a little cool. In the album’s title song, which also got its own music video, a young Dosanjh looks largely out of place, jiving alongside professional dancers. The album failed to make any impact. But in the years that followed, Dosanjh steadily grew in popularity with his music featuring themes of love and Sikh pride. Dosanjh belongs to the Jatt Sikh community, a dominant, agrarian Sikh caste that comprises roughly sixty percent of all Sikhs. The Sikh pride in Punjabi popular culture often amounts to Jatt pride, with films and songs repeating the traits of a good Jatt—some recurrent ones include a generally happy disposition, pride in one’s community, an ability to consume large quantities of alcohol, being unafraid to speak one’s mind and being quick to confrontation and sometimes even violence.

In 2009, Dosanjh began collaborating with the music producer and rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh, the most prominent among the musicians infusing elements of hip hop into Punjabi music. The collaboration had an immense impact on Dosanjh’s aesthetic and image. His album that year, The Next Level, was a marked departure from his previous work. Dosanjh appeared alongside Singh as a brash, cocky gangster in the video for the song “Panga.” Dosanjh was seen toting guns, and the lyrics said, “aasi rehne de aa rab kolo darr ke, gun rakhi di ae golian naal parr ke”—we are god-fearing men, but we keep our guns loaded. The glorification of drugs, sex and violence became an intermittent feature of his songs. Dosanjh’s popularity soared, especially among the young. The music videos also proved that Dosanjh could not only sing, but also act. Two years later, Dosanjh made his film debut in the director Guddu Dhanoa’s action film The Lion of Punjab. Though the film, produced by the Norwegian company Tanda Films, collected a poor R2.5 crore at the box office, Dosanjh’s song “Lak 28 Kudi Da”—The girl’s waist size is 28—produced again with Honey Singh, became the first song by a non-Bollywood singer to top the BBC’s Asian Download Chart, which cumulates data from various downloading websites. Dosanjh’s acting, though passable, borrowed from his gangster image, built in partnership with Honey Singh. In the title song of the film, which he did not sing, he is seen dancing with a gun resting on his shoulder with what can be read as the boldness of the Punjabi Jatt. With gun culture on the rise in Punjab, Dosanjh has often been questioned for contributing to it. In March 2018, in an interview with Indianews Punjab, Dosanjh uncharacteristically lost his cool after the interviewer pointed how the poster for a film he was headlining had a weapon in it. Dosanjh responded, “Ee hathyar na honge taan apne haq kinna milange?”—how would we get our rights if we were not armed? This discourse of “haq” here is not about a noble political goal, but refers to the feudal realities of Punjab. Since land continues to be the most important asset, land feuds are common among the Jatt Sikh community. It is not uncommon to kill rivals while claiming one’s land. Dosanjh’s music video for the song “Jatt Fire Karda”—The Jatt opens fire—approvingly dramatises a revenge killing of a land usurper. Not just Dosanjh, several other musicians appear wielding guns in their videos and glorifying similar violence. When Anupama Chopra brought up his musical output, however, Dosanjh tried to distance himself from it. “This is my profession so I have to make these songs to make money,” he said. “In a few years, maybe even I wouldn’t want to hear these AUGUST 2019

previous spread: Diljit Dosanjh has emerged as the first sardar to have carved a space for himself in films on the national stage, without having to give up his Sikh identity. this spread: Dosanjh’s collaboration with Yo Yo Honey Singh had an immense impact on his aesthetic and image. While he became more popular, he was also criticised for glorifying violence and for the songs’ sexist content. 63

jatt like that · reportage songs. But I make these songs for the people, not for myself. … When you’re from a middle-class family, you always think, ‘I hope those bad times don’t come back again.’ Once I am feeling secure, and I have other sources of income, maybe I’ll make different songs. But I’m not there right now.” Dosanjh’s first veritable hit as an actor was the director Mandeep Singh’s 2011 romantic comedy Jihne Mera Dil Luteya, alongside Gippy Grewal, the other rising star of Punjabi music and films. Both Grewal and Dosanjh were lauded for their roles in the film, and now have a healthy rivalry going. Dosanjh’s real breakthrough came the following year, through Anurag Singh’s romantic comedy Jatt and Juliet. The film was not only Punjabi cinema’s biggest hit, but also did well in the Hindi belt, and overseas, collecting about twenty-five crore rupees in total. The film gave Punjabi cinema a handbook for filmmaking, and a genre that has since enthralled and gripped the country. Most believed that the turban would stall Dosanjh’s journey into stardom, but by sticking with it Dosanjh not only made it big in Punjabi cinema, he also penetrated the insular Mumbai film industry. In the process, he became a style icon for Punjabi youth. With the release of Udta Punjab, in 2016, Dosanjh truly arrived on the national stage. In the same year, he entered Forbes magazine’s list of the 100 most popular people in India, and was the only Sikh in it. He has acted in several successful Bollywood films since then, and starred in Arjun Patiala, which was released late last month. In February 2017, the website Catch News reported Dosanjh’s net worth to be around twenty-five million dollars. Though Dosanjh has acted in several serious, critically acclaimed films, such as the National Award-winning Punjab 1984, and Soorma, he has become synonymous with the idea of comedy. If his many interviews are anything to go by, Dosanjh’s persona in comedy films gels well with his own personality. “Dosanjh paaji was Fateh Singh even in real life, I realised later,” Anurag Singh told me, referring to Dosanjh’s character in his film. “The role was made for him.” dosanjh’s success with Jatt and Juliet seems to owe nothing to the image of the proud Jatt gangster he cultivated alongside Honey Singh. Instead, it was the product of the affable charm and joie di vivre from Dosanjh’s early days. The film was also part of a revival of comedy writing and films in the region, coupled with innovative filmmaking. Dosanjh features in the film as Fateh Singh, a young, unemployed, rambunctious man, whose only dream is to travel to Canada, marry a gori and become a Canadian citizen—a fantasy shared by many young men in today’s Punjab. Fateh Singh cannot speak English, has been spoilt silly by his 64

THE CARAVAN

Most believed that the turban would stall Dosanjh’s journey into stardom, but by sticking with it Dosanjh not only made it big in Punjabi cinema, he also penetrated the insular Mumbai film industry. In the process, he became a style icon for Punjabi youth. mother, whom he calls “bebe,” refuses to follow rules and remains disdainful of any kind of etiquette. While unqualified assertion of the Jatt identity remains a feature, as evident in the film’s title, it is the self-deprecating humour that makes the character charming. In a scene midway through the film, the female protagonist, Puja, played by Neeru Bajwa, tells Fateh Singh that his inability to speak English does not take anything away from his other qualities. “Tu khushdil banda hai,” she tells him. “Gallan battan na dil nahi rakhda hai. Dil da saaf hai. Jo man vich hai oh hi muh te”—You keep a happy disposition. You’re good-hearted. There’s no difference in what you say and what you think. Much of the humour comes from Fateh’s disdain for norms of acceptable behaviour. In one scene, where he is picking his nose, Puja is disgusted. “Rab ne ungliyan aisliye ni dittian”—that’s not what god gave you fingers for, she says. “Achchha ji?” he responds. “Je aisliye ni dittian te eh das, ki unglian te naslan da size barabar kyun hai?”—If that’s not what he gave them for, then tell me why did he make fingers and nostrils the same size? Perhaps the most memorable comic character from the film, though, is Shampy, a foil to Fateh who reappears in the sequel. Shampy calls himself Raja Beta, and is a short, skinny and whiny manchild, who also has a speech impediment to make his comparative lack of masculinity amply clear. He spends both films getting slapped and being bullied, appearing randomly throughout, on each occasion being splattered like a bug on the windshield of the narrative. “We wanted to create the duo of Shampy and his father,” Dheeraj Rattan, the writer of the film, told me. However, Anurag Singh “asked me to write him a little differently. Turn him into something the hero is not, or the exact opposite of him.” Thus, Shampy is the opposite of what a good Jatt should be. “I think Shampy has stuck in memory because he has that honesty about him,” Rattan told me. “He has aspirations but can’t get to them.

courtesy white hill productions

opposite page: Jatt and Juliet gave birth to what has now become the biggest production house in the Punjabi film industry—White Hill Productions— which has produced several massive hits over the last eight years.

jatt like that · reportage

He understands little of the world but is good at heart. He is like that squirrel in the Ice Age films, chasing something we know he won’t get, but that is what makes it lovable.” While Shampy also wants to go to Canada to marry a gori, he is unable to accomplish either of those goals. Fateh does make it to Canada and is able to make a white woman fall for him, only to realise that he would rather be in Punjab and marry the Punjabi woman he loves. “It is all about how you write your characters,” Rattan added. “If you know your characters well, if you can 66

write them the way you see them in your head, they will stick in the audience’s minds. People who look at Punjabi cinema from the outside may think that it is all about a lot of gags or jokes that we list on a whiteboard. But we work on our characters just like any writer writing a screenplay would.” Rattan was born and brought up in Amritsar, and moved to Mumbai at an early age. While doing odd jobs to make ends meet, he started assisting directors. Jihne Mera Dil Luteya was his first writing credit, before Jatt and Juliet the following year. THE CARAVAN

Rattan told me that humour comes quite naturally to Punjabi culture. He pointed to a trend in Hindi comedies of setting families in Punjab or as Punjabi, such as in Jab We Met or Tanu Weds Manu. But Rattan finds these portrayals to be superficial. “Hindi writers who try to write about Punjabi families think of Punjabi culture through tokenisms,” he said. “The pairi-pauna type of culture, where they think that authenticity can be arrived at by introducing these standard tropes. Some of the comedy written in this way might be funny, but it will rarely be funny for the

courtesy white hill productions

jatt like that · reportage

above: The cousins Gunbir Singh Sidhu and Manmord Sidhu, both 38 years old, who run White Hill Productions, have become the most powerful men in Punjabi cinema.

The hero of the film is often someone who is rooted in his culture, is not very well educated and struggles to speak English. Dosanjh has described this character as “Urban Pendu”—a term that literally means a villager, but is sometimes used in a derogatory manner.

film is often someone who is rooted in his culture, is not very well educated and struggles to speak English. Dosanjh has described this character as “Urban Pendu”—a term that literally means a villager, but is sometimes used in a derogatory manner. The Urban Pendu, however, has no inferiority complex about these shortcomings. The female protagonists, however, are well-educated, speak English and are from comparatively wealthier backgrounds. There is often an arc of the heroine initially being disgusted by the pendu’s lack of sophistication, and eventually coming around to liking him for his good heart. Punjabi films are yet to award women the luxury of being a good-hearted pendu.

Punjabi audience. They want humour that is raw, gruff, loud, without it necessarily being physical. Such comedy is best written through dialogues.” The difference between Hindi and Punjabi audiences, he said, was that “while the Hindi audience is dying to have a laugh the Punjabi audience wants to die laughing.” According to Anurag, Punjabi comedies can only be written by someone who is rooted in Punjab, and knows what will be funny both in the villages and in the cities. Rattan, who was a salesman of paging devices in Ludhiana through the early 1990s, seems to fit the mould. He told me it was his interactions with ordinary people that gave him most of his characters. “I was in a job where I had to talk to people, no matter who he or she was. I was always trying to sell a product. Maybe, that is where I understood the way Punjabis talk, having to establish a rapport with them, trying to sell them something. I had to make them smile before they would even begin listening to me carefully. Isn’t that what we are doing as writers in film?” Since Jatt and Juliet, Rattan has delivered comedy hits such as the 2013 films Singh vs Kaur and Tu Mera 22 Main Tera 22. What stands out in Rattan’s writing is his ability to take the mickey out of his own culture. There are, for example, the alcoholic Punjab policemen in Jatt and Juliet 2, and the dhaba-running couple in Canada in Jatt and Juliet— characters straight out of Punjabi lore. These films do little to challenge the stereotype of the Jatt Sikh, constructed over centuries—in local folklore, in the glorification of martial races by the British, and more recently in the Deol family’s Bollywood oeuvre. But it is the local knowledge of people such as Rattan that imbues these characters with a little more complexity. Despite several breaks from conventional writing, most Punjabi music and film remain centred on the journey of the male protagonist. Jatt and Juliet also carries forward another trope common in recent Punjabi music and film. The hero of the

besides making dosanjh a crossover celebrity, Jatt and Juliet also gave birth to what has now become the biggest production house in the Punjabi film industry—White Hill Productions, run by the cousins Gunbir Singh Sidhu and Manmord Sidhu, both 38 years old. Gunbir and Manmord started out as line producers of the film, which was initially being produced by the Ludhiana-based Darshan Grewal, owner of the Punjabi music channels Josh and Tadka. In 2011, it was Grewal who brought together the team of Anurag, Dosanjh and Rattan. However, after the film overshot its initial budget, Grewal could not provide more funds. “The film had a stop-start journey,” Anurag, whom I spoke to on the phone while he was shooting the Akshay Kumar-starrer Kesari, told me. “We ran out of funds on multiple occasions. Our Canada leg of the shoot began without a producer, which meant we had to be innovative and adapt in the way we were going to shoot.” A large portion of Jatt and Juliet takes place in Canada, specifically Vancouver. While there are few roving shots of the city or overhead surveys of its landscape, the viewer gets other cues that establish the location as Canada. A majority of the film takes place either inside a bungalow, or in what looks like two restaurants. “When we were looking for a bungalow to shoot in Vancouver, the line producers couldn’t get us anything because of uncleared payments,” Anurag said. “I then contacted my mother, who had once told me about a student of hers who had bought a house in the city on a hill. This family opened up their house for us and even though we turned it upside down we managed to finish the shoot within ten days.” To ingrain Vancouver in the viewer’s mind, Anurag kept returning to a bench with the city as its backdrop. Punjabis living in the city still visit the spot and take photos, he told me. The Punjab leg of the film, as well as post-production, was not smooth either, Anurag said. “We

AUGUST 2019

67

jatt like that · reportage were squeezed for funds at each point.” Gunbir and Manmord took on the role of producers and the responsibility of arranging funds to finish the film. Jatt and Juliet was put together on roughly four crore rupees, and around half the cost was borne by the cousins.

“Shooting in the winter saves me several lakhs of rupees because then I don’t have to worry about air conditioning and all those issues.” In June last year, I met Gunbir, a postgraduate in electrical engineering, in the hall of the JW Marriott hotel in Chandigarh, the site of a press meet to publicise Carry On Jatta 2, produced by White Hill. Though the hall was swarming with people, and cast members were being interviewed in each corner of the room, Gunbir told me that this was a part of the process they struggle with. “We don’t have a general-entertainment channel in Punjab,” he said. “That presents a huge problem for the producers. You have to spend your own money on gatherings like this. There are only a handful of news channels, and a couple of newspapers that cover film. That is why we have to choose our films carefully and plan our production schedules smartly.” Manmord studied fimmaking at the Vancouver Film School. Jatt and Juliet running out of money is perhaps the greatest thing to have happened to the two. Today, White Hill Productions is the biggest studio in the region, and is referred to as the “Yash Raj Studio of the Punjabi film industry.” They have an office in Chandigarh, and another in Vancouver. “After Jatt and Juliet we knew there was potential in the industry, so we decided to open our own studio,” Gunbir told me. The film, along with Gippy Grewal’s comedy Carry On Jatta, which had released a month earlier, made Punjabi comedy visible across India. Both films were made on similar budgets and both more than quadrupled their initial budgets in collections. While Carry On Jatta brought back the trend of out-and-out comedies, Jatt and Juliet’s makers claimed they had invented Punjabi romantic comedy. White Hill released Jatt and Juliet 2 within a year of the first film—a sequel, but with a completely new storyline. Dosanjh went on to become part of other franchises, such as Sardaarji and Sardaarji 2, and starred in comedy hits such as the 2014 film Disco Singh. The boom also helped the careers of several comedians, such as Gurpreet Ghuggi, Binnu Dhillon and the almost forgotten BN Sharma, who once 68

THE CARAVAN

shared the spotlight with the comedy legend Jaspal Bhatti in the television programme Flop Show. “Punjabis especially love to laugh and at times laugh at themselves,” Anurag told me. “I think that is what sets it apart from Hindi comedies, and also what makes Punjabi comedies better.” By better, Singh also meant more successful. Since then, a number of studios in Punjab, such as Amrinder Gill’s Rhythm Boyz or the Jalandhar-based Kapil Batra Studios, have tried to replicate White Hill’s success, but have failed. Gunbir said that this is because Manmord and he do not just provide funds, they know each part of the process of filmmaking. “We are completely hands-on,” he said. “We will get into the script, we will get into the film. Most producers or studios here think that all they need to do is throw money at a big face. Even a Diljit Dosanjh or a Gippy Grewal needs a good story, a good character for them to play and you need to understand what you are making. We are involved in the filmmaking, the production and distribution, the complete process.” White Hill has produced 12 films in the years since Jatt and Juliet, most of which have been successful. White Hill’s strength, according to Gunbir, is planning. Each of the studio’s big comedies in the past seven years has been released in either May or June. “People want to step out in the summer, because they are tired of sitting under the fan or in front of the AC,” Gunbir said. “And they want to especially step out at night. They want to laugh, have a good time, and forget the heat. Summers are also a time where we know that even the late shows will see good bookings, because people want to have that freedom of going back home late.” Unlike with the Hollywood summer blockbuster, the logic here is based on necessity. “It is a cycle: shoot in the winter and premiere it in the summers,” Gunbir told me. “Shooting in the winter saves me several lakhs of rupees because then I don’t have to worry about air conditioning and all those issues.” Gunbir said that this is what he and Manmord have brought to the industry—structure, management and professionalism. There are creative ways of cutting costs, Gunbir said. A scene at the airport, for example, could be shifted to a bus stop. A car chase is not needed when a chase on foot can make the same point. Films are tightly strategised for month-long shoots, and are wrapped as soon as possible. A good understanding of the diaspora also allows the studio to exploit both local and international markets. “Punjabis living outside want the quintessentially Punjabi experience,” Gunbir said. “They probably miss the community or the places where they grew up, or the people that

jatt like that · reportage they knew but have now left behind. All writers that we work with, including Dheeraj, are people who have seen rural Punjab through and through. They understand its language and they know what is funny there, and would similarly fit for an international audience.” Gunbir is touted as the most powerful man in Punjabi cinema today—during our conversation, at least three grown men came to touch his feet by way of greeting. His studio has also taken over the distribution of Bollywood films in the region. “We know the market,” he said. “And we have always played it safe. We either distribute films in the Punjabi communities, or in north India in the Hindi-speaking belt. I would never pick up a film, however good, for a market that I do not understand.” In the couple of weeks after our conversation, the Sidhu consins’ position got even more solidified. Carry on Jatta 2 would go on to become the biggest ever hit in Punjabi cinema, raking in almost sixty crore rupees at the box office. Meanwhile, distribution of Bollywood films provides the studio a channel for steady cash inflow. I asked Gunbir why his studio does not make more serious films, especially on Punjab’s recent history—Partition, the insurgency and the drug menace. “We made Punjab 1984, and it was a box-office success,” he said. “But, yes, it was a one-off, an exception. Even we weren’t expecting the kind of response we got. The National Award and everything, it was worthwhile. But can such films be made on a regular basis? I don’t think so, not yet.” Just a few months before our conversation, Dosanjh’s Sajjan Singh Rangroot, produced on a big budget, an estimated twenty crore rupees, by Vivid Art Studio, had not fared as well as expected. The movie was based on the experiences of Sikh soldiers who fought for the British during the First World War. Punjabi film journalists have also questioned filmmakers for only roping in popular musicians as actors, instead of hiring specialists. “We don’t want to continue doing films with only singers,” Gunbir told me. “We want to bring in talent from theatre and acting backgrounds as well. It’s just that when as a producer your margins are so narrow, and the risks so big, only popular figures like Dosanjh and Grewal can guarantee a big opening. We have only once had an opening below R1 crore, and even that isn’t poor by numbers in the industry here. So it is a system that has proven it works.” White Hill is still trying to do its bit, Gunbir told me. The studio has been helping budding directors and writers make short films for release on its YouTube channel. It is the only studio in Punjab that produces short films.

But giving one of these directors or actors the reins of a big-budget film remains a risk that the studio is not yet willing to take. While White Hill’s average budget for a film has increased to R10 crore over the years, Gunbir said that the studio still cannot afford a major flop. “Even after the years of success that we have had, that is the life of a producer,” he told me. “I still at times struggle to put funds together, because it is crucial to make money from your investments. I would love to do a film on Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It has been my dream. But we can’t afford for it to be a flop, or it at least has to be free from the limitations of the box office. Only then will I be able to make it the way I have always wanted to.” Meanwhile, Dosanjh is about to face another test on the national stage, with the comedy Arjun Patiala. His success would bode well for Punjabi cinema, and the brand of filmmaking that has produced oddities such as Fateh Singh, who prefixes his retorts with “chaped maarni main tere”—I’ll give you a tight slap—a phrase that can perhaps only be endearing in Punjab.

When Chopra asked him why the urban pendu character resonated with the audiences, Dosanjh said, “Ab sab pendu banna chahte hain”—now everyone wants to be a pendu. “Even the shehri”—city people—“are trying to be pendu. That’s because the pendu has swag, and the shehri doesn’t.” in the 2016 interview, Anupama Chopra asked Dosanjh to explain the term “Urban Pendu.” “So is that a character you have created?” she asked Dosanjh. “How close is that to the truth? Are you really Urban Pendu?” “I’m definitely the Pendu,” Dosanjh said, causing Chopra to break into loud laughter. “But the urban part is what I’m trying to be. That is just something where I observe my city friends and young people—what they eat, drink, wear and so on. So the urban part is a bit fake, but there’s a real pendu inside.” When Chopra asked him why the urban pendu character resonated with the audiences, he said, “Ab sab pendu banna chahte hain”—now everyone wants to be a pendu. “Even the shehri”—city people—“are trying to be pendu. That’s because the pendu has swag, and the shehri doesn’t.” Dosanjh paused for a second as Chopra laughed at the remark. “Sorry yaar,” he added, “but I love everyone—Punjabi, shehri, pendu. Everyone.” s AUGUST 2019

69

Tears of a Thousand People Exploring the violence of displacement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts PHOTO ESSAY / COMMUNITIES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMSUL ALAM HELAL TEXT BY SURABHI KANGA

in one photograph in Samsul Alam Helal’s project “Disappearing Roots,” two women stand against a hilly green expanse, their faces covered by shiny aluminum foil. Helal, a Dhaka-based photographer, made this image in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in southeastern Bangladesh. When asked about his decision to hide the women’s faces, Helal said it gestured towards the “silencing and obscuring of the indigenous experience as well as the denial of normal, national protections to vulnerable communities and victims of violence … As members of minority communities in Bangladesh, they are already living behind an invisible curtain.” Helal’s photographic series focusses on the ethnic communities indigenous to the CHT—the Chakmas, the Marmas, the Tripuras and the Mrongs, among other smaller non-Bengali ethnic groups. It attempts to spark a dialogue about their disappearing way of life in the face of continued displacement and gentrification. The project symbolically gestures to a long history of violence faced by these minority ethnic communities, which includes state-sponsored repression and militarised occupation. One of the incidents that informed this work, Helal said, is of two young women from the Marma community, who were assaulted and raped by Bangladeshi security personnel last January. The project, which is still ongoing, takes off from a major flashpoint in the CHT’s history. In 1962, the East Pakistan government constructed

opposite page: A near-exact plywood replica of the Chakma king’s palace, which Helal designed based on a photograph of the original palace. right: A still from a single-channel video installation at an exhibition held at the Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka. It shows a threedimensional model of the Chakma king’s palace being submerged under water.

the Kaptai dam on the river Kanafuli, in the CHT’s Rangamati district. The construction proved to be calamitous for the region’s indigenous residents, displacing eighteen thousand families and a hundred thousand people overall. In Kaptai Badh: Bor-Porong Duborider Attokothon, a book with interviews of those displaced by the dam, a retired teacher, Priyobala Chakma, is quoted saying, “We were drowned in the water of the dam and swam towards different countries.” Several thousands moved to the surrounding areas, including parts of India and Myanmar. Waters from the river submerged 40 percent of the CHT’s fertile land, as well as the town of Rangamati and the palace of the local Chakma king. The displacement also upended the livelihood of indigenous farming communities, though few received appropriate compensation. The Chakma people, who formed about seventy percent of those displaced, termed the event the Bara Parang—the great exodus. The aftermath of the dam’s construction and continuing displacement it set off is essential to Helal’s work. For his exhibition at the Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka in March 2019, he built a three-dimensional structure modelled on the palace that was submerged. In a video installation at the exhibition, he showed this model being submerged by water, reigniting public memory of the incident. Speaking at the opening, Sayeed Ferdous, a researcher and professor, commented on the significance of Helal’s

choice. “On one hand it is the symbol of power that belonged to the local people, the symbol of their prosperity,” Ferdous said. “On the other hand, if a king’s palace can drown in this way, then what will happen to the local people?” Helal designed a red chair to represent the Chakma throne, which he then placed in the natural landscapes of the CHT that he photographed. “I am attempting to indicate to prior communities, prior societies, prior cultures—not only Chakma culture but also that of the many other indigenous communities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts—that are now lost,” he said. “I show a chair that appears to be travelling to different places, apparently in search of the displaced, dispersed people for whom it had originally been made.” His photographs also reference other incidents of violence that the ethnic communities have faced. In the early 1970s, as Bangladesh took its first steps as an independent nation, leaders from the indigenous communities campaigned for the CHT to have administrative autonomy, but the military-ruled government rejected their demand. The result was an insurgency that continued until the late 1990s, leading to a militarised civil war between the indigenous communities and Bangladeshi armed forces. Reports of killings and rapes abounded, as did those of crackdown on indigenous activists. A photograph in Helal’s project speaks to a particularly grim incident—he depicts drowning arms holding up a portrait of the activist Kalpana Chakma. In the dead of night in June 1996, just hours before general elections began in Bangladesh, army personnel abducted Chakma from her home. She was never found or heard from again. As the conflict was ongoing, the government reportedly forcefully settled Bengali people in the CHT, triggering demographic change in the region. In the years that followed, these changes wrought another evil: gentrification, and the slow death of the hill way of life. Helal repeatedly alludes to this gradual erosion. In one image, plastic flowers intrude upon the local flora; in others, a deer’s antlers and a bird, both wooden, appear. In yet another photograph, a caged bird references the talking mynah—a species indigenous to the CHT, which are taken out of their habitats and sold for large

sums of money in urban centres. The animal forms, Helal explained, “refer both to the destruction of nature and wildlife through the encroachment of human settlements and economic activity into natural areas and … to [the] erosion of a way of life that was deeply connected to and defined by a cultural and proximal connection to the hills.” But even as the impact of historical events continues, newer forms of violence affect the indigenous groups of the CHT. A 2017 report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council described the CHT as the most militarised region in Bangladesh. The same report noted that between 2014 and mid 2017, nearly three hundred incidents of violence against indigenous women were reported, including physical attacks, sexual assault, rape and gang rape. The uprooting of the indigenous hill people continues even “when we claim that democracy has been instilled in Bangladesh,” Rani Yan Yan, the present Chakma queen and an indigenous-rights activist, said at the opening of Helal’s show in March. The 2017 paper further noted, “There is a culture of impunity for perpetrators, particularly because most perpetrators are non-Indigenous and are often Bengali settlers”—an observation that is echoed in Helal’s deliberate use of an unnatural material such as foil, to cover the faces of the women he photographed. He references the ongoing violence in

other images as well. In one, a red cloth, signifying the Buddhist faith practised by many indigenous groups, is on fire— an allusion to incidents where entire villages have been burnt. In June 2017, for instance, in a pre-planned attack, Bengali settlers vandalised four indigenous localities, burning over three hundred houses and killing several people. Helal’s images subvert the dominant visual representation of indigenous communities. Unlike mainstream aesthetics that often employ vibrant colour, costuming and performance in treating this kind of subject matter, Helal uses a muted palette and composes scenes devoid of dramatic incident. He chooses to depict the violence of gentrification and displacement in landscapes that bear no signs of these severe changes. His metaphors, too, are not easy to decode, often relying on localised cultural symbols. An image of a man and woman tied together by a gamcha—cloth towel—for instance, alludes to families that were separated by displacement. To make sense of the historical and political references embedded in his work, the viewer must strive to familiarise herself with the manner in which such events convulsed life in the CHT. As Priyabola— who also suffered separation from her siblings in the aftermath of the dam’s construction—put it, “This Kaptai dam, this Kaptai lake is the tears of thousands of people.” 73

BOOKS

INSIDE STORY

Rajat Gupta’s appeal to the court of public opinion / BUSINESS SANJANA RAMACHANDRAN 84

THE CARAVAN

spencer platt / getty images

books

on the evening of 9 april, a select group of Delhi’s dapper elite gathered at the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency. After about a half hour’s socialising, aided by an assortment of teas and starters, Chiki Sarkar, the co-founder of Juggernaut Books, introduced the evening’s speakers. “Whenever we now think of Rajat Gupta,” she said, “we think of a simple question—did he or didn’t he?” Juggernaut was releasing Mind Without Fear, Gupta’s memoir, which charts his rise to becoming the first Indianorigin managing director of McKinsey, and his subsequent felony conviction in a high-profile insider-trading scandal that shook business circles in 2012. The conviction resulted in a two-year prison sentence, which Gupta completed in 2016. After his release, Gupta sought to overturn his conviction, but in January this year, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—one of the United States’ 13 appellate courts, which includes judicial districts in New York, Connecticut and Vermont—ruled against him. His memoir, and its accompanying media campaign, seemed to be a final attempt at public rehabilitation. Until his conviction, though, Gupta’s story was the quintessential template of corporate success that Indian parents envision for their children before packing them off to an engineering college and, later, a business school. He was born to a middle-class family in Calcutta, in 1948. His father, Ashwini Kumar Gupta, was a journalist involved in the freedom struggle. The family soon moved to Delhi, where Ashwini helped start the Delhi edition of the Hindustan Standard, which was, incidentally, owned by Sarkar’s family, as part of their Ananda Bazar Patrika Group. Gupta was orphaned at the age of 19, when he was still a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He began caring for his siblings with the help of an aunt who moved into their home, which he visited every

weekend. Gupta ran the household on a strict budget while carrying on with his active campus life—he was a member of the dramatics club and head of the student government. In his final year, he applied to business schools while simultaneously sitting for campus placements, bagging and then rejecting a coveted job at what was then the Indian Tobacco Company—now ITC Limited— for Harvard Business School. “One of the things that memoirs do is that they show you the man behind the CV,” Sarkar said. Mind Without Fear, she added, “tells you the story of a shy, diffident young student who goes to Harvard Business School, and when he first goes, he finds that he’s lagging—he’d always been a very brilliant student—because he doesn’t speak up as much as the other Americans do.” Gupta would overcome this and other tribulations to land another enviable position right out of Harvard—that of a consultant at McKinsey and Company, reverently known in the management world as “The Firm.” There, he recalls in the book, Gupta proved himself multiple times over the next twenty years, eventually securing election as the managing director in 1994. As applause for Gupta subsided at the launch, Sarkar introduced his interviewer for the evening: Madhu Trehan, the founding editor of India Today and a co-founder of the news website Newslaundry. Trehan warned the audience that despite the empathy she had for a man who had been through so much, it was her mandate as a journalist to ask tough questions. She quoted an old friend of Gupta’s who had commented that ever since Gupta finished his third term as managing director, in 2003, and returned to being a senior partner, his “sense of having lost sway and influence was palpable.” Gupta clarified that it was he who had instituted term limits for the position, believing that every leadership position benefits from change and a rotation of responsibilities. “So I wasn’t AUGUST 2019

hankering for the loss,” he said. “I could’ve become CEO of a number of different organisations, but that was not my objective. My objective was to put the skills I’d learnt, the leadership skills I’d developed and the network I’d developed to actually work for the good of society.” During this period, Gupta co-founded the Indian School of Business; the American India Foundation, with the former US president Bill Clinton; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and the Public Health Foundation of India. Around the same time, he became friends with Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil and fellow immigrant to the United States. This friendship would lead to his eventual disgrace, as Gupta was indicted for his business ties with Rajaratnam. In the early 2000s, Rajaratnam was a Wall Street star and the owner of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund called Galleon. He had a reputation for being a talented trader with an incredible work ethic. Gupta met Rajaratnam through Anil Kumar, a senior McKinsey partner whom he had mentored and set up ISB with, and who had gone to business school with Rajaratnam. After consulting his close friends Hank Paulson and Gary Cohn—both holders of top economic posts in the US government and, respectively, the chief executive and president of Goldman Sachs—Gupta acted upon their positive endorsement of Rajaratnam’s character and entered into an investment with him in 2005. The investment fund was called Voyager, and it was worth $50 million. A year later, Gupta and Rajaratnam started a new venture called New Silk Route, aimed at investing in Indian companies. New Silk Route was to have two halves—one dedicated to private equity, and another to hedge funds— with Gupta as chairman. However, investors seemed to be against this two-pronged strategy, and there was talk of carving out the hedge-fund wing 85

inside story · books into Galleon International, perhaps as an arm of Galleon itself. Six years after their first investment together, Rajaratnam was found guilty of insider trading. It turned out that his stratospheric success had less to do with his impeccable work ethic than with his well-placed friends within the corporate world. These friends, one of whom was Anil Kumar, would pass him confidential information—“tips”— about the goings-on at various Fortune 500 companies, for which they were paid generously, to the tune of millions of dollars, through dubious offshore channels. The investments Rajaratnam made based on the tips bore him over twenty million dollars—Galleon Group was worth $7 billion at its peak, in 2008—making for the biggest insidertrading scandal in history. Proportionately, Rajaratnam received the longest ever sentence for insider trading. The lead prosecutor was Preet Bharara, then the US attorney for the southern district of New York, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “proud immigrant” and a “patriotic American.” In the anger that gripped the United States after the 2008 financial crisis,

accused parties to testify against their co-accused in exchange for a lighter sentence. In an interview with the news channel NDTV in March this year, Gupta called himself a “political prisoner,” a pawn to service Bharara’s political ambitions. He referred to a book called The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, written by the journalist Jesse Eisinger, in which Bharara was featured. The book’s title refers to prosecutors who never lose cases because they always choose the easy ones. soon after he was charged, Gupta found himself frozen out by McKinsey. It was the only company he had ever worked for, and for 34 years. At that point, Gupta had only been accused, and all the evidence against him seemed circumstantial. His swift removal from the company’s alumni directory and the revocation of his McKinsey email account rankled, he writes, being “so uncharacteristic of the principled firm I’d always so deeply respected and antithetical to the partnership values.” Gupta has steadfastly maintained his innocence, then and now. In

It turned out that Rajaratnam’s stratospheric success had less to do with his impeccable work ethic than with his well-placed friends within the financial world, who would pass him confidential information. Bharara assumed the role of the crusading lawyer who would stop at nothing to punish those guilty of corruption and Wall Street crime, no matter where they were from. In his own memoir, Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law, Bharara describes being criticised for being anti-Indian, since a number of his high-profile cases dealt with defendants of Indian origin, but he calls such criticism “colossally stupid,” since his team had “prosecuted a rainbow coalition of defendants and organisations” during his tenure. Bharara was able to get Anil Kumar to agree to a plea bargain—a concept Gupta described at the launch as one of the biggest flaws of the American justice system, because it incentivises 86

the first twenty pages of his memoir, he acknowledges how ill-advised his relationship with Rajaratnam had been, despite the glowing endorsements. “He did have a certain arrogance, an above-the-rules air that should have been a red flag,” he writes. He blames his trusting nature, which had held him in good stead throughout his career. “Treat people as if they are worthy of trust and respect and they will prove themselves to be so. I wasn’t always right, but I’d been right so many times that it had become a point of pride— perhaps more so than I realised.” In this case, Gupta was irrefutably wrong. His relationship with Rajaratnam had begun deteriorating ever since he learnt, in April 2008, that the latter had withdrawn nearly fifty million dolTHE CARAVAN

lars from the fund without informing him. “Not only had Raj lied to me but his withdrawals had left the fund without a cushion in the turbulent markets, and eventually the banks shut it down,” he writes. “My entire stake looked like it was gone.” Rajaratnam, he adds, “continued to be evasive, telling me that he was working with the banks to try to recoup the equity, but by early 2009, it was clear that all such attempts had come to nothing. I was forced to accept that the money was gone, and that was the last I heard of Rajaratnam until the news of his arrest.” He asserts that his calls to Rajaratnam were not to provide him tips but “to try to figure out what had happened to the Voyager money.” The prosecution built its case primarily around a series of phone calls between Gupta and Rajaratnam, most of which took place after board meetings of two companies in which Gupta was a director: Goldman Sachs and Proctor & Gamble. Soon after these calls, Rajaratnam traded the companies’ shares, profiting to the tune of five million dollars. Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyer, was initially optimistic—there had never been an insider-trading conviction based on only circumstantial evidence. Naftalis maintained that the burden of proof lay with the government, and advised Gupta not to testify. At the launch, Trehan asked him if he regretted his choice of lawyer. Seeming quite pained, Gupta answered, “So, he always insisted there was no case, and, if you look objectively, there was no case. You have to meet three things in insider trading: one is actual insider, market-moving information has to be passed; second is that there has to be real benefit, a quid-pro-quo arrangement; and the third is there has to be criminal intent. And they had proof of none of this.” He said that the government had been tapping Rajaratnam’s phone for a year and a half, but there was not one recording of Gupta giving out insider information. “There was not a single witness. There was not a single email or communication they could find. They combed over my finances for certain years; they couldn’t find a single benefit. They kept claiming I owned 15 percent of Galleon International; I

inside story · books and discussing the world’s problems with his fellow inmates. When his five-year-old granddaughters visited him in prison, they were told that he was staying in a camp. It was in prison that someone suggested he write his memoir, an appealing idea considering his silence throughout the trial. Ever since his release, in 2016, Gupta has talked about reforming the US criminal-justice system. While in prison, he interviewed around forty of his fellow inmates, and concluded that a quarter of them should not have been incarcerated. He is disdainful of the absolute power that prison guards wield over the inmates, having been sent to solitary confinement twice—one time, for using a rolled-up towel to ease his back pain. Gupta also met Rajaratnam in prison, strolling up to him one day to give closure to their past. Rajaratnam was still defensive about Voyager, but Gupta was eager to move on from the case. After all, Rajaratnam could have shaved five years off his 11-year sentence by testifying against him, but had not. “Did you forgive him for cheating you out of $10 million, or for getting you into prison?” Trehan asked Gupta at the launch. “I don’t think the two are necessarily unrelated,” Gupta said. “But, as I reflected on things… This actually comes from my experience with my own father. He went to prison during ten years in the freedom struggle, in and out of jails. I never

previous spread: In 1994, Rajat Gupta secured election as the first managing director of Indian descent at the consultancy firm McKinsey and Company. below: In 2011, Raj Rajaratnam was found guilty of orchestrating the biggest insidertrading scandal in history.

brendan mcdermid / reuters

owned zero. They couldn’t prove any of it. I had forty years of board secrets; there was not ever any incident of me giving insider information. So there was no history. They couldn’t really prove criminal intent in any way. It’s not my practice. So Gary would say, ‘You’re innocent until proven guilty, and they have no proof.’ And I kept saying, ‘They are confusing the issue!’” “So did you confront him about it?” Trehan asked. “Of course I confronted him about it. He convinced me then not to testify, which I regret. I’m not sure if the outcome would’ve been different, because the government played a very clever strategy, which was to confuse the issue completely.” The court was inundated with mountains of irrelevant documents, he said, by a prosecution that “outmanoeuvred Gary, no question about it,” and kept presenting untruths in the absence of hard evidence. In the end, the jury—“consisting of, you know, hairdressers and babysitters and schoolteachers; only one juror had any experience with the financial world”—was bored, perhaps misled, into producing a guilty verdict. Of the five counts of securities fraud and one count of general conspiracy that Gupta was charged with, he was found guilty of three counts of the former, as well as the conspiracy charge. After his appeal was rejected, in 2014, he went to prison, where he spent his time playing Scrabble

AUGUST 2019

87

inside story · books heard him say a bad word about the British or his jailors. He embodied forgiveness, always. I don’t want to hold anything against [Rajaratnam]. I don’t like that.”

a 30-day wiretap on Rajaratnam’s cell phone. It threw up enough incriminating material to justify extensions running well into the next year. During Rajaratnam’s trial, the prosecution submitted over eighteen thousand recorded conversations with over five hundred people. Among these was an 18-minute phone call between Gupta and Rajaratnam, on 29 July 2008. The recording was repeatedly played at both their trials, but Gupta was not charged for it.

Corporation of America, who passed on inside information in order to expose an accounting fraud. However, because some of his confidants used this information to avoid losses, he was charged with insider trading. He was eventually acquitted, establishing the precedent that one had to receive some personal benefit in order to be found guilty of insider trading. By March 2008, federal authorities had gathered sufficient evidence of illegal profiteering by Galleon to procure

There were four other phone calls for which Gupta was formally charged. The first took place on 12 March 2007, when he participated in a Goldman Sachs board meeting from the New Silk Route office, which was located in the same IBM building in Manhattan that housed the Galleon Group. Twentyfive minutes after the meeting ended, Rajaratnam told his traders to buy 350,000 Goldman shares. Due to insufficient evidence, Gupta was acquitted of this count, but it was important in

peter foley / bloomberg / getty images

insider trading is the practice of using confidential, “insider” information to make profits on the stock market. For example, if a director on the board of a company lets slip to his gardener the news of a soon-to-happen lucrative merger, the gardener can then leverage

has violated his fiduciary duty of trust and confidentiality to the board by disclosing non-public information; second, that he has benefitted in some way, such as if his gardener has been generous enough to compensate him for the information. These conditions come from the Dirks test, which emerged from the seminal 1983 insider-trading case, Dirks vs SEC, and two subsequent cases. Raymond L Dirks was a securities trader and analyst at the Equity Funding

this information to buy up shares in the company at current prices and make a profit once the stock rises, after the information is made public. This garden variety of insider trading is a felony under US securities law. It implicates both parties: the tipper and the tippee. The gardener, the tippee, is guilty of using material, non-public information to make a profit, which is unfair to other investors. But the director, the tipper, is also liable so long as two conditions are met—first, that he 88

THE CARAVAN

inside story · books establishing how close Rajaratnam and Gupta had grown, showing that the latter had a key card and easy access to Galleon’s office. The second call was far more incriminating. On 23 September 2008, Gupta participated in a Goldman Sachs board meeting, which discussed an agreement by Warren Buffet’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, to invest $5 billion in the bank, a major show of trust at the height of the financial crisis. The board unanimously approved the investment, and Gupta signed out of the meeting at 3.54 pm. Sixteen seconds later, records show, there was a call from his phone to Rajaratnam, which was not recorded by the wiretap. Following the call, Rajaratnam ran onto the trading floor and shouted at his employees, “Buy Goldman Sachs!” With two minutes to go to the close of trading for the day, Rajaratnam bought enough shares to net a million dollars in profit when he sold them the next day, after the news of the investment broke. He was heard gloating on the wiretap, “I heard something good might happen to Goldman.” Gupta’s lawyers pointed out that Goldman stocks had been rising since 1 pm that day, and that it was not unusual for a man as busy as Gupta was to return phone calls immediately after a board meeting. He was, they said, looking to get in touch with Rajaratnam for some official documents regarding Voyager, which he had to submit to his own financial advisors at JP Morgan. He had entered the investment on such a conviction of trust that he did not use a signature authority. The third call happened a month later, on 23 October. Again, it was immediately after a Goldman Sachs board meeting on the impending layoff of about three thousand employees. This time, the call took place after trading for the day had closed, but the next morning, Rajaratnam sold hundreds of thousands of shares within a minute of markets opening, to avoid losses of $3.6 million. In another call recorded on wiretap, he told a colleague that he had heard from “somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs” that the company’s earnings statement, which “they don’t report until December,” indicated a loss of two dollars per share. “I’m gonna whack it, you know,” he told the colleague. Again, the defence claimed that the news of the layoffs had been reported in that day’s Wall Street Journal, which indicated that the share price was going to drop. Gupta’s lawyers asserted that earnings were not even discussed at the meeting in question. However, Lloyd Blankfein, who was then the CEO of Goldman Sachs, testified that it was customary for him to discuss earnings at board meetings. As for the phone call itself, Gupta maintains in his memoir that it was about the Voyager fiasco. “I don’t remember the exact conversation,” he

writes, “but the general theme of our communications during that period was me pressing for a resolution but trying to be courteous, not wanting to alienate him, and him asking me to be patient, insisting that he was working on it.” Thus, in the summer and fall of 2008, it was unsurprising to Gupta that the first person on his call list was Rajaratnam. It was, he adds, the busiest period of his life, during which he struggled to keep up with the demands of his philanthropic work, his investment ventures and his various board positions. “That was the real story behind many of the events referenced in the charges,” he writes. “It was the story of a ridiculously busy, overstretched man trying to manage his personal financial affairs while also guiding numerous major companies and non-profits, at home and abroad, during one of the most volatile periods in our economy’s history.” Gupta certainly had a more challenging time articulating his proof in court, especially that his relationship with Rajaratnam had indeed soured at the time of these conversations. He was found guilty for the two alleged tips, with a crucial part of the prosecution’s narrative centring on the call Gupta was not charged for—perhaps because there were no records of transactions immediately following the call. This was the phone call on 29 July. In the conversation, Rajaratnam mentioned rumours he had heard of Goldman wanting to buy a commercial bank. Gupta confirmed the rumour, and added that it was discussed at the board meeting. “I cringed to think about this being played at the courtroom,” he writes. “In this instance, I should have been more careful.” Galleon was an important client for Goldman Sachs, and he told Rajaratnam that the bank would go for a good deal. “Perhaps I said more than was strictly appropriate for my role as a board member, but my motives were to support, not betray, the bank,” he writes. “Would anyone in the courtroom realise this though, when I was given no opportunity to explain myself?” The even more damning part of the conversation took place a few minutes later, when they begin discussing their mutual friend, Anil Kumar. “I’m giving him a million dollars a year for doing literally nothing,” Rajaratnam said. Gupta responded, “I know, you’re being… I think you’re being very generous.” “When I listened back to the tape, I could hear in my voice that I wasn’t fully taking in what Raj had said, or taking it literally,” Gupta writes. “Quite frankly, I was tired of their complaining about each other.” He adds that the payments could have been legitimate. “McKinsey had no explicit rule against partners advising friends AUGUST 2019

opposite page: Rajat Gupta’s lawyer, Gary Naftalis (right), maintained throughout the trial that the burden of proof lay with the government, and advised Gupta not to testify.

89

inside story · books or family members unless there was a conflict of interest that would take away work that the firm might otherwise do. Whatever the case, I just didn’t want to get into this with Raj—it was their business, not mine.” Contrary to his account in the book, however, it was not Rajaratnam who called him, but Gupta’s secretary who called Rajaratnam, asking if he was free to speak to Gupta. When Rajaratnam mentioned the rumours, Gupta went on to answer his doubts by not only clarifying that it was “a big discussion at the board meeting,” but also by divulging how the board was split in opinion, and its motivations behind the purchase. He then confirmed the two companies being considered for acquisition—Wachovia and AIG. They almost disconnected, before Gupta himself mentioned Anil Kumar. He seemed unhappy of late, Gupta said, which set Rajaratnam off on a lengthy complaint about their mutual friend’s greed. Before Kumar had begun accepting money for tips to Rajaratnam, McKinsey had solicited Galleon as a client in the wake of its success as a hedge fund. Rajaratnam ignored their repeated emails, pulling Kumar aside one day to offer him half a million dollars for his exclusive “advice.” As these payments increased, so did the amount of confidential information Kumar passed him. In 2006, Rajaratnam was one of the few on Wall Street to anticipate a deal involving the microchip companies AMD and ATI. Kumar was AMD’s McKinsey consultant, and Rajaratnam called him to express his gratitude, wanting to give him a million dollars as a bonus for this tip. Following Rajaratnam’s instructions, Kumar had set up a Swiss bank account for a shell company that would transfer the payments to a Galleon account under the name of Kumar’s housekeeper. In the 29 July phone call, Rajaratnam alluded to such payments not once, but twice. The second time, he spelled it out. “Now, for the last three or four… I mean, four or five years, I’ve been giving him a million bucks a year, right?” “Yeah, yeah,” Gupta chimed. “After taxes, offshore cash.” “Yeah, yeah.” 90

After they finished discussing Kumar, Gupta asked Rajaratnam if he had two more minutes. Despite his supposed anger with Rajaratnam, whose treachery in the Voyager matter had been thoroughly established by then, Gupta wanted some career advice—on whether he should accept a board position at the consultancy firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Rajaratnam offered Gupta a well-rounded opinion, considering such aspects as managing the expectations of existing business partners and whether he would enjoy spending his time on KKR amidst his various other commitments. Rajaratnam added that Galleon International could be one such commitment, to which Gupta quickly interjected, “By the way, I want us to keep having that dialogue as to how I can be helpful in Galleon International. By the way, not Galleon International, Galleon Group.” “Galleon Group, right.” “I mean, you’ve given a position in Galleon International. That’s good enough.” “Yeah, but you know what, I’m now at a point where in the last couple of years, I’m building, right?” “Yeah.” “Rather than just making returns, and not building, right?” “Right. Right.” Sounding more than a little dismissive, Rajaratnam steered the conversation back to career advice. through the 29 july phone call, the prosecution was able to firmly cement two things. First, his claims of carelessness notwithstanding, Gupta surely broke the law by parting with confidential information about the Goldman Sachs board meeting. Bill George, a Goldman director, testified that the information passed on was confidential; Gupta had violated his fiduciary duty to the board. The first condition to establish insider trading had therefore been met. Second, the prosecution was able to establish Gupta’s ability to receive some benefit from having passed on this information. Although he cites the millions of dollars in payment that Rajaratnam’s other informants received, and the total THE CARAVAN

absence of any such compensation in his own financial records, as proof of his wrongful conviction, here was a conversation with Rajaratnam acknowledging Gupta’s position at Galleon International, and Gupta openly angling for one at Galleon Group. Any profits that Galleon made, therefore, would have been personally beneficial to him. The prosecution also furnished notes from the diary of one of Gupta’s financial advisors, with one entry stating, “Chairman, Galleon International. $1.3bn, owns 15% of it. Invests in long/short equity in Asia, entitled to performance fees.” However, as Rajaratnam’s tone during the phone call indicated, he probably never intended to fulfil his promise, so the prosecution was never able to prove that Gupta owned part of Galleon. But it was able to prove an expectation of ownership, of future business together, amounting to an expectation of personal benefit. This, therefore, met the second condition to prove insider trading. In 2012, Rajat Gupta’s trial made history for producing the first ever conviction for insider trading based on largely circumstantial evidence. In his appeal, Gupta challenged his conviction based on two errors he accused the trial court of making. First, the court had admitted the wiretaps of phone calls on 23 September and 23 October, in which Rajaratnam had confirmed to other Galleon traders that he had a source on the Goldman Sachs board. Gupta’s lawyers claimed that the statements of other Galleon traders were inadmissible hearsay because those traders were not part of any alleged conspiracy involving Gupta and Rajaratnam, or because their statements had not been made to further the conspiracy. Second, Gupta claimed that the court had excluded evidence proffered by Gupta in his defence. The second circuit disagreed with both reasons. It agreed with the trial court’s decision that the wiretaps were admissible, since the prosecution had established that the conversations were in furtherance of a conspiracy, of which Gupta and Rajaratnam were not the only members. Also, Rajaratnam had incriminated himself in the phone calls by revealing that he had received tips

inside story · books that he had acted upon. Under the US Federal Rules for Evidence, declarations against one’s own pecuniary, proprietary and penal interests—admitting to having committed a felony falls under the third category—are admissible in court, even if they count as hearsay. The exculpatory evidence Gupta claimed had been erroneously excluded by the court, in turn, centred on four points. First, the trial court had not allowed his daughter Geetanjali to testify about his state of mind regarding Rajaratnam, based on a conversation she had had with Gupta on 20 September 2008. The appellate court found that this decision had not been irrational or arbitrary—Rajaratnam’s treachery in the Voyager matter had already been established through other evidence, and Geetanjali had no personal knowledge about Voyager, so allowing her to testify would have only served to prejudice the jury in Gupta’s favour. Since

evidence. Moreover, it argued, Gupta had not proffered any evidence to show that Loeb was privy to the confidential information that had been passed to Rajaratnam on 23 September and 23 October. In fact, Loeb was part of the securities division at Goldman Sachs, which was kept separate—both physically and technologically—from the equity-capital division, which had developed the Buffett deal. Rajaratnam’s assistant had also testified that the man who called asking to speak to him urgently before the markets closed on 23 September was not Loeb. Further, the only call Rajaratnam received in the ten minutes before 4 pm that day came from Gupta’s phone. The third and fourth points regarded, respectively, the exclusion of parts of the financial advisor’s diary that established Gupta’s charitable intentions and the trial court’s refusal to allow him to call character witnesses

In complaining about the partnership values McKinsey corroded in “excommunicating” him even before he was found guilty, Gupta ignores that it was his violation of these values, on multiple fronts, that the 29 July phone call with Rajaratnam embodied. her testimony would not have served any purpose other than confirming undisputed facts, the court held that even if excluding it was erroneous, it would have been a harmless error. Second, Gupta had argued that Rajaratnam had another informant on the Goldman board: David Loeb, a vice-president in the company. He had sought to include taped conversations and emails that established that Loeb had passed inside information about the technology companies Intel and Apple to Rajaratnam. Like Gupta, Loeb was on Rajaratnam’s list of ten people who were always to be put through to him, no matter what he was doing. However, the trial court had refused to include this evidence, on the grounds of hearsay, relevance, lack of foundation and the likelihood that the documents would confuse the jury. The appellate court respected the trial court’s discretion in excluding the

to testify to his integrity. Again, the appellate court refused to accept that the judge had abused his discretion on these matters. The next opportunity that Gupta had to exonerate himself was after his release from prison. In a recent case, United States vs Newman, the secondcircuit court had reversed two convictions of insider trading. Gupta’s lawyers claimed that the reversal was based on the concept that personal benefit should be tangible, consequential and of a pecuniary or valuable nature. They argued that the judge in Gupta’s case had biased the jury with his instruction that it would suffice to establish a personal benefit if Gupta’s purpose had been simply “maintaining a good relationship with a frequent business partner.” However, as with Gupta’s appeal, the court upheld the original verdict, finding that the judge’s instructions were consistent with the Dirks AUGUST 2019

test, and noting that the formulation of what constitutes personal benefit in the Newman case had been expressly rejected by the Supreme Court in a subsequent ruling as being inconsistent with Dirks. The only way that he could now overturn his conviction was by proving actual innocence, rather than legal insufficiency. Gupta could not. in mind without fear, Gupta is able to present his story on his own terms. He can mention repeatedly that he was given no opportunity to explain himself, even though it was ultimately his decision not to do so. While he has admirably, even presciently, tried to address in the book any holes that one might poke in his narrative, there is only so much that 315 pages can hold, especially when it also includes his personal and professional history, and all his philanthropic endeavours. For instance, the mention of another organisation Gupta co-founded, called Mindspirit, slips through its pages. Mindspirit was founded by Gupta and Kumar, in 2001, when the former was still the managing director at McKinsey. It was established in their wives’ names, purportedly to handle their families’ investments. However, in the same year, Mindspirit entered a consulting agreement with InfoGroup, “to provide advice and guidance” to its head Vinod Gupta—no relation—a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and a co-founder of the American India Foundation. In 2011, McKinsey’s director of communications told Bloomberg News that “it had always been a clear violation of our values and professional standards for any firm member to provide consulting or advisory services outside of McKinsey for personal monetary gain.” However, there was no explicit rule to this effect in the “Firm Policies” document that McKinsey consultants had to sign, as of 2008. In complaining about the partnership values McKinsey corroded in “excommunicating” him from the firm even before he was found guilty, Gupta ignores that it was the violation of these very values, on multiple fronts, that the 29 July phone call embodied, killing McKinsey’s appetite to debate the rights and wrongs of his situation. 91

In the book, Gupta establishes his early sense of Rajaratnam’s above-therules air. He also says of that phone call, “This was early in the Voyager saga, and although Rajaratnam was being evasive about providing information, our relationship had not yet deteriorated to the point that he avoided my calls.” By the end of October, “our relationship was strained, to put it mildly,” he writes, “but Raj tried to placate me, suggesting, as he’d planned with his colleague, that he could make a deal with the banks to recoup our money.” Although he had documentary proof of Rajaratnam’s deception by 4 July, and of his own $10-million loss in Voyager by 16 October, there was still the friendly 18-minute phone call, in which the two discussed Goldman, Anil Kumar and his payments, and Gupta’s potential career at KKR and Galleon. By assigning the broad dates of “spring 2008” and “mid-to-late October 2008” to his discovery of the Voyager fiasco, the book maintains a semblance of internal consistency. Gupta is able to freely move back and forth in the narrative, explaining one call as friendly, but the subsequent ones as belaboured. Unfortunately for Gupta, it was the jury’s job to scrutinise his version of events, and it did. Gupta was charged in relation to four phone calls, on 12 March 2007, 23 September and 23 October 2008, and 29 January 2009. The 12 individuals Gupta belittles as a collection of “hairdressers and babysitters and schoolteachers” sifted through piles of evidence and managed to segregate these calls into two types: those that implicated Gupta beyond reasonable doubt, and those that did not. The 23 September and 23 October calls were of the former type. In addition to the count established by the 12 March call, Gupta was found not guilty of indulging in insider trading through the 29 January call, even though it had followed the same pattern as the others. Gupta called Rajaratnam after a Proctor & Gamble board meeting, in which the previous quarter’s losses were discussed. Rajaratnam shorted his shares, avoiding a loss of half a million dollars. This time, however, Gupta was able to present a wit92

mike segar / reuters

inside story · books

Anil Kumar accepted a plea bargain to testify against Gupta, a long-time friend and colleague.

ness to testify that his relationship with Rajaratnam had soured by this point. This witness was Ajit Jain, Buffet’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, to whom Gupta had opened up earlier in January 2009 about his fallout with Rajaratnam. Gupta worries about the jury in his book: “Would they be able to follow the complex discussions of securities law, trading processes, business deals and more?” However, Sandipan Deb, a former editor at the Financial Express who has written a book about Gupta’s trial, told me, “in this case, there wasn’t much financial nitty-gritty to understand, really. One didn’t have to understand what financial derivatives are or anything. It was a pretty simple case, of giving you information that others are not privy to, so that you can make a quick buck before others come to know of it.” In fact, the foreman of the jury said at the time, “We looked at him and what he had done professionally. We were hoping he would walk out of this courthouse.” However, “on the counts we convicted, we felt that there was enough circumstantial evidence that any reasonable person could make that connection.” The judge in Gupta’s trial was Jed Rakoff, reputed to be one of the fairest in the second circuit. He disallowed the use of the words “malaria,” “tuberculosis” and “AIDS” in court, and also THE CARAVAN

barred portions of the diary of Gupta’s financial advisor that referenced his intention to give away 80 percent of his wealth to charity. Rakoff instructed the jury not to be swayed by Gupta’s reputation, arguing that the history of the world was filled with good men who did bad things. However, once the jury pronounced its verdict, he was permitted to take into account that reputation during sentencing. Over four hundred people—ranging from Bill Clinton and the former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan to Gupta’s barber, domestic help and personal trainer— wrote to the judge, attesting to Gupta’s character. Rakoff observed during the sentencing, “The court can say without exaggeration that it has never encountered a defendant whose prior history suggests such an extraordinary devotion, not only to humanity writ large, but also to individual human beings in their times of need.” “No one who has met Gupta would think he is capable of this,” Deb told me. “When you meet him, he just comes across as a humble guy. If you talk to anybody who knew him—his friends, associates—many of them would still be in denial. Even I couldn’t believe it, before I started researching it.” Indeed, Gupta seems to embody humility and authenticity. In interviews, he speaks in a measured tone and often delivers thoughtful, self-effacing an-

inside story · books swers. Touting his giving, trusting nature as the reason for his success makes it easier for the listener to believe that it was this same nature that landed him in prison. It lends him credibility when he then goes out of his way to criticise someone, such as Bharara or Kumar. While at Harvard, soon after Gupta grew comfortable with speaking up in class, he began to be ignored by his professor, who told him that his complex ideas were confusing the classroom. Finding it unfair that he was being disadvantaged for his advanced understanding, Gupta proposed to the professor, “Grade me on only my final exams and I’ll stay quiet in class.” He was one of two students who got an “Excellent” grade in the subject. At IIT Delhi, Gupta was rejected in the first round of ITC’s group interviews. He felt “galvanised by the sense of unfairness,” believing he was a worthy candidate, and told the interviewer, “Excuse me, sir, but I think you are making a mistake.” The move worked, as it did two years later, when he was initially rejected by McKinsey. This time, a professor found him troubled in class. He sent McKinsey a threesentence recommendation, urging them to interview Gupta again. Any respect Gupta may have had for Rajaratnam as a fellow immigrant and successful businessman perhaps stemmed from a genuine appreciation for Rajaratnam navigating challenges in a seemingly unfair, often alien, world. It may even have fit into his idea of a meritocratic worldview, where the person who best uses whatever he can get should succeed the most. Gupta has clarified in multiple interviews what his memoir is not—that it is not an attempt to clear his name in the court of public opinion, but merely to tell his side of the story. By talking about his professional life, he hopes that readers would learn from his experiences. However, the story of his long career

is sandwiched between Gupta’s experience of the trial and prison, in which he presents himself as a maligned innocent. As Deb put it, “He has had seven years to spin a story.” The first time Gupta was sent to solitary confinement, it was as punishment for bending down to tie his shoelaces just as a correctional officer was commencing his check. “It doesn’t take much at all,” he writes. “A moment of carelessness. A misjudgement. Bad timing.” The phrases have the striking effect of doubling up as an encapsulation of Gupta’s entire defence, in the book and in the media. However, this argument does not apply as neatly to his crime, leaving one to wonder about the not-so-thin line between understandable human error and a deliberate antipathy for rules and values. Gupta met his difficulties in prison with stoicism, wanting to emulate his father, who contracted the tuberculosis that would end his life while he was jailed by the British. While still in Calcutta, Ashwini Kumar Gupta had privately tutored college students. One day, an invigilator at a Calcutta University examination caught him in dark glasses, impersonating one of his students to help him pass the exam, in exchange for money that would go to the revolutionary cause. Here was another admirable man with a blameless reputation, marred by a single infraction, perhaps committed with the belief that it was the right thing to do. This dichotomy in character and crime, as Rakoff said, “presented the fundamental problem of this sentence, for Mr Gupta’s personal history and characteristics starkly contrast with the nature and circumstances of his crimes.” Proving a motive was never a necessary legal element of Gupta’s offence, but the question lingered: why would the poised, bespectacled man on stage at the Regency ballroom get caught up in such a typically avaricious

By assigning broad dates to his discovery of the Voyager fiasco, the book maintains a semblance of internal consistency. Gupta is able to freely move back and forth in the narrative, explaining one call as friendly, but the subsequent ones as belaboured. AUGUST 2019

act? In his sentencing order, Rakoff permitted himself to speculate: Having finished his spectacular career at McKinsey in 2007, Gupta, for all his charitable endeavors, may have felt frustrated in not finding new business worlds to conquer; and Rajaratnam, a clever cultivator of persons with information, repeatedly held out prospects of exciting new international business opportunities that Rajaratnam would help fund but that Gupta would lead. There is also in some of the information presented to the court under seal an implicit suggestion that, after so many years of assuming the role of father to all, Gupta may have longed to escape the straightjacket of overwhelming responsibility, and had begun to loosen his self-restraint in ways that clouded his judgment. But whatever was operating in the recesses of his brain, there is no doubt that Gupta, though not immediately profiting from tipping Rajaratnam, viewed it as an avenue to future benefits, opportunities, and even excitement. Thus, by any measure, Gupta’s criminal acts represented the very antithesis of the values he had previously embodied. At the launch, Trehan reflected on a portion of the memoir where, having lost everything he once held so dear, particularly his reputation among his friends and colleagues, Gupta realises that one is only unhappy as long as one remains attached to such concepts. Detachment from reputation is liberating. “How is that possible?” she asked. “Isn’t reputation your conscience?” “I think, to me, they are two very different things,” Gupta said. “Reputation is other people’s view of you, whereas conscience is your own.” He said letting go of reputational concerns was liberating “because I don’t have to conform to some view just because other people want me to. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about doing the right things. That doesn’t mean that I want to knowingly commit a crime. That just means I want to do the right thing and I don’t care whether it creates a good reputation, a so-so reputation or even a bad one—as long as I’m doing the right thing.” s 93

THE BOOKSHELF

FEAR OF LIONS

I SAW MYSELF

JOURNEYS WITH SHAH ABDUL LATIF BHITAI

Amita Kanekar

Shabnam Virami and Vipul Rikhi

Set in 1673, during the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir, this novel follows two young siblings from Shahjahanabad who leave their town on secret missions. On their travels, they encounter, and are drawn into, rumours and stories about a quelled uprising, led by women and inspired by the poet Kabir, against Aurangzeb and his regime of heavy taxation.

The authors translate and compile several poems by Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, an eighteenth-century Sindhi Sufi scholar, poet and mystic. The volume also includes their experiences of travelling through Kutch to meet folk singers and lovers of Latif’s poetry, and explores the various epics and legends that the Sufi poet wrote about.

hachette, 348 pages, S399

penguin ananda, 428 pages, S599

MODINAMA

SITA UNDER THE CRESCENT MOON

ISSUES THAT DID NOT MATTER

A WOMAN’S SEARCH FOR FAITH IN PAKISTAN

Subhash Gatade

Annie Ali Khan

The writer and activist Subhash Gatade examines the recent victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2019 general election, the rise of Hindutva politics, cow-protection vigilantism and the spate of lynchings that have occurred over the last few years, as part of a larger exploration of growing communalisation in India.

The late journalist and photographer Annie Ali Khan wrote this book recounting her travels with women pilgrims and devotees of Sati—a variation of the figure of Sita from the Ramayana. She explores the origins of this mode of worship in Pakistan, Balochistan and Sindh, and the folklore behind it.

leftword, 128 pages, S195

simon and schuster india, 312 pages, S599

94

THE CARAVAN

THE BOOKSHELF

TAWAIFNAMA

THE POLITICS OF MARRIAGE IN MEDIEVAL INDIA

Saba Dewan

GENDER AND ALLIANCE IN RAJASTHAN Sabita Singh

In this multi-generational chronicle of a family of tawaifs—courtesans—with roots in Bhabua and Varanasi, Saba Dewan explores the critical role they played in North Indian cultural life. The book, which sprang from Dewan’s extensive engagement with the subject through her documentary filmmaking, also examines how colonial administration and feudal structures fostered the eventual criminalisation and stigmatisation of the tawaif community.

This book examines the workings of marriage, widowhood and sexual morality in medieval Rajasthan. It looks closely at various rituals and practices, including sati, polygamy, marriage alliances and dowry, and how they have been interpreted and written about since.

context, 800 pages, S899

oxford university press, 320 pages, S1195

RIVERS REMEMBER

TWO MASTERPIECES OF KUTIYATTAM

#CHENNAIRAINS AND THE SHOCKING TRUTH OF A MANMADE FLOOD

MANTRANKAM AND ANGULIYANKAM

Krupa Ge

Edited by Heike Oberlin and David Shulman

This volume looks closely at two masterpieces of Kutiyattam, an ancient Sanskrit theatre form that has existed for around a thousand years and continues to be performed in Kerala. Written by scholars and performers of Kutiyattam, it looks at the form’s features and its relationships to religion and literature.

Krupa Ge weaves together her and others’ experiences during the Chennai floods of December 2015, when water from lakes, canals and sewers submerged large parts of the city. She combines personal stories with her extensive research about the factors that provoked the calamity, drawing upon archival and government documents as well as interviews with journalists and residents of the city.

oxford university press, 348 pages, S1795

westland, 218 pages, S499 AUGUST 2019

95

SHOWCASE

Film

National Film Festival of Kerala The National Film Festival of Kerala, organised by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, brings together independent and regional films. This year, the eleventh edition of the festival will feature around thirty movies, with a focus on Kashmiri films such as Hamid, Half Widow and Inshallah Football.

courtesy ridham janve

10 TO 14 AUGUST ERNAKULAM, KERALA

courtesy musa syeed

courtesy swarnavel eswaran

For further information, write to [email protected]

Theatre

Old World Theatre Festival 16 TO 25 AUGUST INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI

courtesy india habitat centre

Considered one of the oldest and most distinguished theatre festivals in the country, the eighteenth edition of the Old World Theatre Festival brings a new generation of theatre practitioners to prominence. The ten-day festival will bring together significant strands of theatre forms from across the country. It will seek to reflect the contemporary Indian stage in all its diversity.

96

For further information, write to [email protected] THE CARAVAN

SHOWCASE

Exhibition

Frame of Reference The Mumbai-based artist Aaditi Joshi’s works have been influenced by the city’s rapid development. In her latest exhibition, Frame of Reference, Joshi uses diverse materials, such as polypropylene bags, wood and cement to create artistic frames. For further information, write to [email protected]

all images courtesy ashish chandra

22 AUGUST TO 28 SEPTEMBER TARQ, MUMBAI

Exhibition

Blurred Lines 8 AUGUST TO 7 SEPTEMBER PROJECT 88, MUMBAI

all images courtesy neela kapadia and ajit patel

The Australian artist Maggie Baxter has worked in India with traditional artisans for over twenty years. In this exhibition, she attempts to translate her preoccupation with heavily textured, paint-flaking, pockmarked walls into artistic expressions, using embroidery as a medium. These works use various iterations of stitches, such as Kutchi embroidery, uneven scrawls and scratches in thread. For further information, write to [email protected]

AUGUST 2019

97

afp / getty images

Editor’s Pick

on 18 august 1988, a Burmese demonstrator addresses a large crowd of pro-democracy protesters gathered outside the general hospital at Rangoon. Twenty-six years of one-party military rule, under the Burma Socialist Programme Party, had left the economy in tatters, fanning discontent among students, Buddhist monks, activists and disaffected soldiers. The protests forced General Ne Win, who had taken power in a 1962 coup d’état, to resign as chairperson of the BSPP on 23 July 1988. Even as he promised elections and handed over the reins of the state to his successor, Sein Liwn, Ne Win warned opponents of the regime: “When the army shoots, it shoots to kill.” Ne Win’s resignation spurred attempts to establish multi-party democracy and civil oversight of the military. Large sections of the populace, even in rural areas, united under the fighting peacock insignia of the All-Burma Federation of Student Unions. A general strike and mass demonstrations were planned for 8 August 1988, because of which

98

the protests are known as the 8888 Uprising. The National League for Democracy, under Aung San Suu Kyi, rose to prominence by organising some of the largest political rallies. However, Ne Win’s warning soon came to pass. The military responded by shooting unarmed demonstrators. Estimates of the death toll range between three thousand and ten thousand. On 18 September, the military top brass was reconstituted as the State Law and Order Restoration Committee. The junta allowed multi-party elections in 1990, but ignored the result after the NLD won by a landslide. Suu Kyi eventually led the NLD to form a government after a legislative election in 2015. However, she has kept in place a number of the junta’s repressive laws, and her government is seen to be appeasing the military and Buddhist nationalists. She also faces international condemnation over her failure to prevent—or even condemn—the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Rohingya.

THE CARAVAN