MOVE OVER LSP, INDIA NEEDS LJP!

They are rich, they are famous, they are powerful. Their debating skills are unbeatable, their ability to twist facts unparalleled, their talent for dramatising the mundane unmatched. Their ideology is as flexible as a snake’s spine, ethics never seem to hold them up, money drives them crazy.

Together, they have everything that it takes to make the most explosive political combination India has ever seen. If ever there was an opportunity for them to lead the India of their, repeat their, dreams, it is now, what with Congress falling apart and BJP trying harder to fall faster and lower.

Move over poverty-stricken, value-driven LSP, – Lok Satta Party – your time is up at the starting block itself. Jayaprakash Narayan, the studios gave you air time but plain air was never going to get your political plane to fly. The fuel of values – probity, integrity, unity – that you put into the tank was never going to get it to even taxi on the runway. You were destined to remain in the hangar of your imagination while others were making their ‘Dreamliner’ built of and fuelled by stuff that the ‘unsuccessful’ secretly envy – that’s what they say – but publicly deride. All that they need to do now is to paint and unveil their gleaming machine. And unleash it on a despondent India.

Imagine Kaapi Zibal, I Cheetambaram, A-one Jeetley, Mu-salman Khurshit, Sookshma So-raj, Annoy Roy, Shikhar Gupt and Radias Hajdeep Sardard, Pir Sanghi and Burka Butt on a political stage, each others' hands firmly clasped and raised high in solidarity, nay, victory. The Terrific (Terrifying, if you are still awake) Ten Together! What an electrifying picture! one that will drive every television channel and newspaper to multiple orgasms of an intensity never witnessed ever, not even when Mahatma Gandhi picked up a fistful of salt in Dandi or when Nehru raised free India’s flag for the first time in Delhi.

India is ready for the LJP – the Lawyer Journo Party – the first such political outfit formally launched anywhere in the world, the first such official acknowledgement of the clout of opponents and adversaries who are effectively running India together, while pretending to be at each others’ throats. Lawyers fake-fighting lawyers in different parties, journos doing the same with journos in different media houses and also lawyer-politicians -- what a waste of quality hamam and precious national time.

Come on guys, give us this exciting party, a party with a real difference, a party that will party better than Vijay Mallya, fly higher than Kingfisher, and even make all poor Indians rich. By setting and selling a sexy “Zero” Poverty Line! Tell us why corruption is cool and how this nation is actually becoming richer faster due to multi-billion dollar scams because the corrupt are saints engaged in creating wealth for the country! Expose the honest who outrage only because they are jealous of the rich and do not have it in them to do anything constructive for India. Celebrate those who have billions in Swiss banks as great Indians who have saved all that money only for India and will bring it back the moment India needs it badly enough to beg them for it. Above all, present yourselves as the finest examples of India's genius for making money.

No existing political party will stand a chance in front of LJP! With the best legal and media minds working together in the political and media landscape to paint India in the most vivid and beautiful of colours, even as they laugh all the way to Swiss vaults, the new well edited India will start looking classier than a K Jo film, and those shouting “Lies, Lies” will be removed like black-and-white irritants of the silent film era. In this 24/7 movie, the hidden India will also quietly move up, though slowly – if the corrupt get so much richer, so will their maids and drivers. A raise of a hundred for every million is fair, no? – after all, how much do these poor people need, and what for?

The only problem – and this is almost insurmountable – with the launch of the LJP is the one that bedevils the Congress (after Rahul’s failure) and the BJP: who should be PM?

A-one Jeetley won’t give up his burning desire for Annoy Roy, no matter how much how much the latter may have pushed for him as a Bekaar Jhagdaalu Party (BJP) candidate. Why will 200 IQ Cheetambaram leave it all for the less gifted? Hajdeep Sardard tripped Roy once (Annoying him forever), will trip anyone given a chance, whatever it takes. Burka Butt has had enough of asking “What should I...?”; she would want to be the one telling now – doesn’t she have the highest numbers of followers on Twitter after Pir Sanghi who is, for now, in no position to claim the post, but won’t accept anyone else in that chair? Sookshma So-raj, for long in the shadow of Jeetley, would rather remain in BJP than let any one of them overtake her. Shikhar Gupt is not one to be underestimated by anyone anywhere, and Mu-salman Khurshit has The Trump Card that even Buka can’t use against him! Kaapi Zibal may have nothing going for him, but the magician with Zero will not just throw in the towel!

Can The Terrific Ten, then, not agree to becoming PMs by rotation for, say, six months at a time? No one will want to be the last one to take the shot – little juice and much headache will be left for him and, worse, he might never get there at all, as someone is bound to try and stay on and trip the rest!

Avarice is such a bitch.

There will be, alas, no LJP, it seems. India ain’t so, so lucky. It has to keep suffering them all where they are, just as they are!
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ADVANI'S VYARTH YATRA

It is not Sonia Gandhi alone who has returned to a changed India after spending five weeks at an undisclosed location for an unknown surgery. Lal Krishna Advani too is in the same boat, despite having been in Delhi all the time.

Whether Sonia Gandhi will be allowed to see the clear writing on the wall by the wall of advisors who have kept her insulated from the people for all these years, will only be known in the days and months, not years, to come. But there is clear evidence that Advani’s advisors are hell bent on guiding him into cuckoo land.

The grand old man of the Bharatiya Janata Party, manifestly enthused by the unexpected popular upsurge against UPA's corruption, -- and sensing an early collapse of Sonia’s government-- wants to drive his Rath into it, in the hope that he will be able to capture the imagination of the people once again, and ride on the tidal wave that Anna has generated, to 7 Race Course Road, at long last.

Perhaps he needs a badly needed reality check, to finally realise that he is Mr. Rip Wan Winkle waking up in a new, restless India, impatient with and unaccepting of the ways and intentions of politicians, and the slow pace at which most of them are delivering less than satisfactory results. No longer can Indians be fooled with worn out clichés and excuses; dramatically better results of good, clean governance are there for all to see in some states, and there is no place for the rest to hide. Series of scams have only heightened the culpability of the corrupt and the inefficient focused on making quick mega bucks.

Advani is a pillar of the old guard, of continuation of the old ways, of status quo -- anti-change. Ironically, that is precisely what a man half his age also symbolises, despite perfunctory and half-baked noises to the contrary. That is mainly why Rahul Gandhi has failed to enthuse India despite seven years of perhaps the most sustained and carefully calibrated media campaign to project him as a modern youth icon, as the great new hope for India. Neither Advani nor Rahul have anything new to offer to India; neither of them carry the credibility that is needed to carry the masses with conviction. For different reasons, both are trapped in and bound to the past, both have skeletons on their backs.

Surprisingly, it has taken a 73 year old man to awaken We The People -- the youth, the poor and even the privileged -- to the realisation that politicians across the spectrum are retarding India’s growth. Army man and Gandhian Anna Hazare has most unexpectedly emerged from a small village in Maharashtra to shake Delhi’s politicians like no has since 1947, like no politician thought was possible before August 16, 2011. In 13 days flat, he has forever changed India, and there is no going back. Unless, of course, Anna’s advisors too fall prey to inducements of different kinds and corrupt the purity of the energy that he has generated and spread across India.

The stench of corruption emanates from all parties. The Congress smells the foulest because it is in power and also because its government, micro-managed by a paranoid Sonia Gandhi, has broken all records of plunder with an air of arrogance and shamelessness that has sent shudders down India’s spine. The BJP too now looks no better than a clone of the Congress. Its dramatics in Jharkhand, Karnataka and Uttarakhand have been as bad as those of the Congress anywhere. The manner in which its central leadership has scored self-goals repeatedly and made the party look even worse than an exposed Congress, has not escaped attention of the people.

In this light, for Advani to undertake a a rath yatra against corruption is akin to a corrupt man protesting against his own corruption! That he has manifestly been motivated to do so by the caucus that has his ear exposes another yawning hole in BJP’s armour: it has no other leader who believes he/she can connect to the people and carry them along his/her rath, much less to the voting booth – the real reason for the nautanki no one is going to buy any longer.

Does anyone believe Sonia Gandhi when she says she will fight corruption? Similarly, it seems they don't believe Sushma Swaraj or Arun Jaitley, BJP's self-appointed prime contenders for the Prime Minister’s chair. The duo tested their ability to convince and lead people in two popular causes they thought they would be able to: protest against price-rise and the Tiranga Yatra to Lal Chowk. They know they cannot connect and that people will most likely boo them should they lead a copy-cat anti-corruption campaign. Hence they have put Advani’s head on the block; if he succeeds, they get the spoils; if he fails, the brickbats will be his alone. Win-win.

Yes, some surveys show that there is a huge swing away from the Congress. But Advani should not mistake it as a swing for the BJP. The swing is for real change, not for BJP, not for continuation of the old ways, no matter which political party is in power. If people are punishing Congress today, they will doubly and even more swiftly punish BJP tomorrow if it continues to remain no more than ‘B’ team of the Congress.

Advani needs to realise that the wind of the anti-corruption movement is in Anna’s sails, not his. He is only becoming a fall guy for BJP’s self-goal scoring, self-centered caucus. People of Anna’s India are not going to vote for Advani as PM now. They are yearning for change; he represents stasis. He will, therefore, do well to put his personal ambitions aside, call off his Vyarth Yatra and deploy his energies to get his party rid of dead wood and worse.
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INDIAN DEMOCRACY: CHANGE IS HERE

Well before Change arrives, discrete signs of the impending tumult start appearing, with increasing frequency and magnitude. Unfortunately, it is often in hindsight that seemingly stray straws are seen for what they really are: pearls on one string.

In 1947, we inherited -- and have persisted with -- 19th century colonial laws, administration, judiciary, police and other institutions of governance. In 1950, we gave ourselves a constitution that promised democracy to the people, but through a copy-pasted model that was developed over centuries by and for a tiny, almost-unitary, and culturally very different society for itself.

In sum, for creating an India of tomorrow, we placed our trust in instruments of yesterday.

The constitution has held till now, as have the electoral process and other institutions of state. And this achievement, more than anything else, is being used by those who have most benefitted from it to resist sorely needed changes which will, and must, pull them down from the colonial perches they seamlessly slid into after Independence.

Ironically, the Change that is threatening them was actually unleashed by them to shape public opinion and discourse to suit their requirements.

The completely unexpected and unprecedented support that Anna Hazare’s fight against corruption has generated contains some extremely important lessons, some of which I had discussed in the previous post. Perhaps the most fundamental message that the hundreds of thousands of young men and women out on the streets today are conveying is that they are no longer ready to wait indefinitely for politicians to deliver on issues that affect them directly, and are ready to force Change, if required.

Supremacy of Parliament and sanctity of the electoral process are the two arguments that opponents of Change offer to deride this upsurge, if not uprising. MPs are elected by the people to frame laws, win elections if you have a problem with what they are doing: this is their standard line.

Unfortunately for them, this is not 1947 or 1950, when a long oppressed, diffident people, led by outstanding, unelected leaders, were elated with the first flushes of freedom. The world has changed beyond imagination in the last six decades, and two generations later, the youth are not timorous like their grand parents -- they have as direct a memory of colonial rule as they have of other periods long past – and they see leaders of today as plunderers disinterested in, and disconnected from, them.

But above all, the most profound change that is driving the Change we are beginning to experience is the information revolution. 850 million mobile phones and a rapidly growing access to the internet have ushered in a social media revolution whose impact and power is re-writing the rules of democracy itself.

There were huge expectations when visual media was freed of government control. People were fed up of tightly controlled government manipulation of news and discussions, and were excited by the prospect of getting ‘real’ news from a free media. Daily voting on questions picked and debated by various news channels empowered them for the first time beyond the ballot box, and gave them a sense of participation like they had never experienced. Every day they got a real idea of the views of a significant section the population on live issues.

Politicians quickly realised that they could use free media by a mix of inducements and threats to shape and distort public opinion enough to alter voting choices of a critical numbers, to change defeat into victory. The people would never get to know, they reckoned, that it was almost DD all over again, without the give-away logo.

Tehelka's sting operation of 2001 and the Pink Chaddi drama of 2009 were two politically motivated campaigns that successfully achieved their objectives of damaging the BJP, and underlined the enormous power of the visual media in influencing, even determining, electoral outcomes.

Media business in India has been slave to the government of the day, and is now even more so, because the stakes are higher than ever before, making paid news and worse extremely lucrative. Media is, therefore, as status quo loving as politicians. The Anna phenomenon would have been successfully discredited and buried by it had a new 'media moghul’ not burst upon the scene from nowhere and fundamentally altered the rules of the information and opinion-making game.

Almost a crore and a half missed calls to Anna’s anti-corruption team, crores of sms messages exchanged about Anna and his anti-corruption campaign, and a free, informed, unbiased debate by well-informed netizens -- 21st century, often-ahead-of-the-curve reporters and opinion makers whom people trust – are the prime drivers of the revolution that we are seeing at Ramlila Maidan and all over the country.

The media – honorable exceptions apart – is being compelled to cover Anna; for the first time, it is following, not leading a campaign. Even more importantly, for the first time, people are not being influenced by the propaganda regularly unleashed by ‘experts’ and shallow, opinionated anchors who have held sway till now: the fast-growing web of social media is their new voice, one that will only grow louder. In fact so stung are some media stars by the almost brutal manner in which they have been sidelined, and their ‘Radia’ agenda lit up, that they have refused to cover this unfolding of history from Ground Zero right outside their doorstep.

What we are seeing on the streets is, at one level, the largest ever ‘opinion poll’ or survey ever conducted in India on an issue. Till now, the media was setting the agenda, quoting votes, blogs, tweets etc. of a few thousand – sometimes ever creating false handles to fake results/trends – to tell a believing India as to what its 'real' opinion was on various socio-political issues. Aided by unprecedented connectivity, Anna and his team have snatched that initiative from the middlemen-messengers by reaching people direct with their message.

Elections are a lot less about issues than they are about arithmetic. That is why politicians have become so arrogant and dismissive of the people. They have gamed this deeply flawed process to near-perfection by dividing themselves and voters along every usable fault line. This has effectively removed people from the process of governance and turned them into subjects who, even if they vent their anger after five years, can do little more than choose from among the small pool of the ruling elite that has realised that it can keep doing what it wants to, till election time, and that an election loss is temporary; no matter what they do, their opponents will do no better, and a helpless minority of voters will swing back and give them one more chance.

It is this effective disenfranchisement of the people that emboldened the government to do what it did to Anna Hazare in April, to Baba Ramdev in June and again to Anna now. It is this dis-empowerment that people are revolting against. It is this Change that politicians are either unable to grasp or unwilling to submit to.

The age of real-time connectivity and dissemination of information is here. And it is not one-way. A citizen with a mobile phone or an internet connection is no longer a passive, isolated recipient of news; he is also a creator and disseminator of it. He is an independent, one-man media house. He is not going to wait for five years to express his opinion through a vote that, for 65 years, has not addressed issues that touch him. He is not going to accept the argument that a ‘supreme’ Parliament is the private property of a few hundred individuals between elections.

These are ideas and instruments that were developed in, and were suited to, the age of pigeon carriers, horse-driven carriages and ships powered by oars and wind, by societies tentatively breaking free of the clutches of absolute monarchy. In 21st century, politicians cannot hide behind them and deny to people the power that should be theirs in a democracy. People have a right to demand day-to-day accountability from the people they have chosen to govern their nation. Thanks to technology, they now can.

Anna's movement may be crushed again by politicians. But what is of real significance is that, for the first time, people have come together, and experienced and expressed their power, without latching onto a political leader or party. They will come back again and again, stronger, better organised. If politicians do not learn, at some point they will turn violent too, with unpredictable results.

The days of treating a distorted democracy like a fixed-term dictatorship are over. Change is here. The sooner our politicians get a fix on this, the better.
'

ANNA AWAKENS 'WE THE PEOPLE'

Anna is everywhere. Everyone has something to say about him. And almost no one has read the anti-corruption Jan Lok Pal Bill (JLPB) they are supporting or savaging. The debate, therefore, is, for most part, along the same ideological, political, religious and social fault lines that emerge in their ugliness whenever any contentious issue comes to the fore.

This time, however, another participant has entered the arena. And he is not another op-ed writer or a member of a handpicked studio audience taking part in a motivated and tightly controlled discussion. He is -- many differ—the real “We the People.”

Why has Anna Hazare, a soldier and a Gandhian who was barely known beyond Maharashtra till April this year, so caught the imagination of the people?

We are possibly witnessing and are part of a rare moment when a core issue has got the just the right amount of Oxygen it needs, in the form of a spotless leader who can keep it aflame without burning down everything and also not let those who have successfully extinguished it in the past do so again. In such moments history is made; in such moments events occur that seemed impossible just a few days back; in such moments cynics, critics and collaborators are swept by a Tsunami in their pajamas.

Government corruption is an issue that has touched almost every one -- even the destitute -- who has had some contact with someone from the government. Yes, we have all paid bribes at some point of time; some of us have even taken them.

Is, then, this unprecedented outpouring of support for Anna’s war against corruption a reflection of our hypocrisy, as some are suggesting with naked derision? Or has Anna struck a deeper chord in the collective consciousness of India because of the kind of man he is being seen as, because of the very Spartan life he has lived, because of the energy that only a spiritually cleansed ascetic karma yogi can emit?

Is Anna awakening a set of values that we as a people had forgotten, resigned as we were to the rot of corruption because, till April this year, there was not even a ray of hope that things would ever improve? Is Anna giving vent to a primordial anger, even curse, that has been long buried in us against our elected representatives who have not only failed us but mocked us by their increasingly obscene abuse of power and a plunder, nay rape, of their motherland, the one they, for good reason, flinch from calling Bharat Mata anymore?

Never before has India so spontaneously rallied together like this against its rulers – and that includes politicians presently in opposition – since they they took on the British. Now, as then, collaborators of the regime who have benefitted from it are staying loyal to their masters, aided by vocal and visible ideologues obsessed with alien theoretic constructs that sound very impressive but work very poorly, if at all, in India's civilisational and cultural cauldron. Like then, arrogant and disconnected rulers are confident they can once again beat back the surge by deceit.

In April 2011, Congress leaders easily succeeded in diffusing the situation when they broke Anna Hazare’s protest with a last-minute personal appeal from Sonia Gandhi that led Anna and his team to believe that she was on the side of those fighting the most brazen plunder India has ever seen, under her protective eye and pallu. In June, again they managed a repeat, this time with brutal force against sleeping men, women and children, after leading Baba Ramdev up the same path and agreeing to most of his demands, only to break them with lathis, and completely forget them thereafter.

This is the third time Sonia’s lieutenants tried the same trick. But this time, the people, prepared for their deceit, have not let them get away. The old cliché about not being able to fool all the people all the time has caught up with them, and they have nowhere to hide. The sordid drama of Anna’s arrest and release has not shown the government’s ineptitude in the absence of Sonia Gandhi but the determination of a people who refused to let it suppress their voice against its arrogance and high-handedness again.

The action has since shifted to Ramlila Maidan, where Anna has continued his fast, and spread like a prairie fire to cities, towns and villages across the length and breadth of India. As the flames are leaping higher and higher, so are voices against Anna and his team, most from usual suspects and a few from most unexpected quarters. But that is only to be expected, and their fury is only going to increase. Till it is consumed in the non-violent flames that Anna has fanned or till it suppresses and extinguishing them, one more time.

Parts of the JLPB may be flawed. But all of those who have read it – and also have real experience of the working of the government – know in their hearts that, at the core, the bill attacks a significant dimension of an enormous problem with the focus and sincerity needed to deal with it. Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, the two brains behind the bill, have detailed insider information about the functioning of the well-oiled machine of government corruption and, therefore, know well the right instruments that are needed to tackle it.

On the other hand, the government’s Lok Pal Bill, drafted by the likes of Kapil Sibal – more need not be said – is, 64 years after Independence and 42 years after it was first mooted, an instrument designed to actually encourage corruption, making prosecution virtually impossible, particularly of big ticket offenders like ministers, politicians and bureaucrats. Every one knows that the real, almost unbridgeable gap between Anna's team and the Sonia's government is of intentions, not provisions of the two bills. Therefore, no one out there with any sense is buying the government’s line anymore.

Anna has undoubtedly roused the people from some sort of a deep slumber. It cannot be an accident that since he has started fasting, there has not been even one murder or rape in India’s rape capital, Delhi. A collective catharsis is taking place; people are again connecting with the Law of Karma, shaken from a Kumbhkaran-like sleep by Anna’s chants of ‘Vande Matram,’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai.’ Non-Hindus too have been similarly inspired by his Gandhian-type secularism, his motivational call ‘Inquilab Zindabad,’ and his powerful evocation of the sacrifices of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev. This is inclusive secularism at its pristine best.

The protests are growing, the crowds are swelling, the writing is on the wall. Yet, it is quite possible that those who have mastered the art of tricking and disempowering people by gaming the electoral process and converting it into a cynical game of numbers by dividing people along every conceivable and possible dimension, are not reading it right even now, and may once again succeed in suppressing this uprising, this Second War of Independence, as Anna calls it, with some justification. It is possible that some of them may again enjoy wine like they did after Baba Ramdev was bundled out of Delhi by the police.

If that happens, politicians would do well to remember that the non-violent fuse that Anna, Baba Ramdev, Kejriwal, Bedi, others and 'We The People' have lit is burning rapidly, and getting shorter. The bomb of corruption that politicians have fashioned is now simply too big to be wished away. It has to be burst. Politicians will do well to heed to Anna's fatherly warning that carries the energy of a true Gandhian and India's youth; it is not to be trifled with, and they should to do it before it blows in their face and unleashes destructive energies that may be very difficult to control. They owe at least this to India.
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SA'FAI' BEGINS, PURGE NEEDED

The whitewash, sa’fai’, of the damning Faigate revelations that have sinister implications for India, both internally and in its responses to Pakistan, has begun. And, as expected, the usual suspects are at it.

Prannoy Roy and Barkha Dutt’s NDTV, chastened by "guilt-tweets" of Ms. Dutt before and after the Radia tapes rash hit and claimed her, continuing histrionics notwithstanding, has chosen to remain silent lest it is unable to pull its smelly foot out of its mouth subsequently. Their burden has been taken on by two old friends of the channel, the publicly exposed Vir Sanghvi and the yet to be Shekhar Gupta.

Vir Sanghvi, now reduced to writing on the net, the very medium he derided at the peak of his wholly "paid" arrogance, has written another Radia piece “ dressed up” to look as a pat in the back for India, but meant to exonerate his many corrupt liberal friends who have been found to be anti-national as well. If you read the whole piece, you will find that Sanghvi has been unsparing in exposing the well-known game plan of Pakistan – which, let us be clear, means the ISI, which in turn means Pakistan’s Army Chief – for Kashmir which, as he brings out, India has been been warning the world about.

Yet, Mr. Sanghvi wants us to believe that the real issue about Faigate is that Ghulam Nabi Fai's organisation, the Kashmir American Council, was “created by the Pakistani state to con Americans!” You don’t expect men of Vir Sanghvi’s integrity to tell us why the ISI wanted to con the Americans over Kashmir. Because if he does that then he knows he cannot conjure the lame and disgraceful defence that he offers, in just a couple of lines, for Indian liberals and peaceniks, among them Justice Sachar, author of the infamous Sachar Commision report, who were regulars at Fai’s Kashmir conferences that were micro-managed by the sinister ISI. They, he claims, were unaware of Fai’s sources of funding and whitewashes their culpability by saying: “it is sad and unfortunate that they were duped into lending legitimacy to an ISI-sponsored initiative.”

The Editor of Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, has, for once, beaten Vir Sanghvi and conjured an even more absurd defence of the indefensible, but one that some of those caught will try to employ to escape the accusation of committing plain treason.

Gupta rubbishes Sanghvi's line that those who enjoyed Fai’s hospitality were unaware that he was a Pak/ISI agent. This is what he says of Fai: “But all of it, the injured air of Kashmiri victimhood, and Americanised English would not fool you about who he exactly was, and what precisely he was after. He was a Pakistani lobbyist for “their” Kashmir cause, leading a very cleverly constructed over ground support base for the malevolent movement that was picking strength in the early nineties. You would have to be utterly nuts, delusional or smoking some awful prohibited substance to not figure this out. Would you have known he was funded by the ISI? Again, you had to be from another planet to believe anything else.”

As every donkey and his son knows, Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is driven wholly by the military and its outstanding covert operations outfit, the ISI, that has been fermenting trouble in the Valley and other parts of India for a long, long time. That is the reason why Gupta has abandoned the unaware line. But, he also knows that sleeping with the ISI is an unforgivable act of treason, soaked in blood. So, he bails out the likes of Justice Sachar and many others yet to be exposed by inventing a high moral ground where none can be: “A more honest — and morally totally convincing — answer would have been the straight one. That as an intellectual or, in case of some, as a civil society activist, you were fully within your rights to go and speak at any forum, even if it was funded or organised by the Pakistanis and that just the fact of accepting a free ticket and a tiny per diem would not have compromised your integrity.”

As I understand this bizarre argument, it is perfectly fine for well-known Indians who are representing India to lend respectability and credence to, and bolster the ant-India position of the ISI on Kashmir across the world, knowing fully well that it is one over which three wars have been fought and over which a proxy war is still on. So, by the same logic, Indians should also be at liberty to go to Kashmir and physically fight ISI’s war against India, or do the same in other parts of India by carrying out a terror attacks and killing innocent people.

A war is fought more in the minds than on the battlefield. How can any sane man argue that while Indian foot soldiers of the ISI (a wing of Pakistan's military) are guilty and should be hanged, those who are knowingly furthering its hostile-to-India cause and its war across the globe are not only innocent but have a right to do so?

But Gupta has the the nerve to say that it is entirely irrelevant as to “who accepted Fai’s free tickets and hospitality, knowingly or unknowingly.” Perhaps Gupta no longer needs such petty perks. But, the same gentleman, knowing what he does about the military’s vice-like grip over Pakistan's India policy, was among the first to articulate, and repeatedly, after 26/11 that India should actually strengthen Pakistan and give to it concessions over Kashmir and other issues to “enhance the power and credibility” of Pakistan’s government, one that even prints fake Indian currency in its mints. Then I had imagined that he was writing the nonsense he was because someone in the corridors of power that he lives in had asked him to. Now the picture is getting frightening.

For India, what Faigate means to the Americans is, at one level, peripheral. It is undoubtedly a cog in the big picture, but for us the immediate and extremely worrying concern is that it is the tip of a very large ISI iceberg that is attacking India at all levels in pursuance of the Pakistan military’s single-point objective of bleeding India to death through a thousand cuts.

What the likes of Shekhar Gupta and Vir Sanghvi will not speak of are the scary logical deductions that must come first to the minds of all analysts as a result of Fai exposure as an ISI agent. The simple fact is the Fai was used by the ISI to defeat India internationally in so far as its position on Kashmir is concerned. And it spent millions of dollars over the counter and -- there can be little doubt -- many more below it, to get Indians to help it win this small but integral part of its existential war against India. The real war is being fought and will be fought on ground in India, including Kashmir. Does it take rocket science to understand that ISI must have been spending a thousand times more here, at every possible level, starting from sleeper cells to the media, academia, think tanks, babudom, and India’s political leadership, right up to and including 10 Janpath?

Rahul Gandhi’s assessment, shared with an American, – no electoral politics there – that Hindu terror posed a bigger threat to India than Pak-sponsored terror, is irrefutable proof that – notwithstanding his limited intelligence and grasp – even the future Prime Minister of India (as some believe) is being deliberately misguided by his trusted advisers. This cannot be a coincidence. The ISI has penetrated even his innermost circle.

While one can accept that the daily front paging of Hindu terror is essentially driven by the compulsions of vote-bank politics, it cannot be an accident that the whole mainstream mind-space has become irrationally pro-Pakistan during the last few years.

Sonia Gandhi has appointed the lawyer who defended ISI’s front organisation SIMI, the mother of the Indian Mujahideen who have carried out many terror attacks, as India’s Law Minister. She has also filled the NAC with hate-filled activists of very dubious antecedents and got a former bureaucrat who has given SIMI a de facto clean chit to draft the pernicious Communal Violence Bill that emasculates Hindus and puts the reins of determining culpability of individuals and all state organs, including the military, in the hands of unelected representatives from minority communities, in so far as Hindu-Muslim tensions (let's cut pretences) are concerned.

Seen in isolation, as indeed, liberals and ISI agents want us to, the many steps being taken by Sonia’s government and NAC seem innocuous, even harmless. But when viewed holistically, one cannot miss the fact that there is a method behind it all. Liberals and peaceniks and Hindu-haters are all pushing the “Break-India” agenda of the ISI.

The labyrinth of terror of which Fai was a part runs deep in India and many of these guys who have virtually been dictating India’s policies along all dimensions with regard to Pakistan and, by extension, Indian Muslims, who the ISI has been trying to turn into its assets, are central players in it, many willing, aware. That is why the hushed silence. That is why these fraudulent defences.

“ISI has more freedom of opinion than us.” This tweet unknowingly sums up the picture that India’s traitors have helped paint. They are many, they are powerful, they are dangerous, they have vested interests. And they have already begun the Big Cover Up. They may have much at stake, but India has much more. So, they have to be taken on by the state, by each one of us. The sa’fai’ under way must be exposed, and pressure put on the government to uncover and remove all termites who have gnawed deep into India, right to the doors of Sonia Gandhi who seems to have got caught in a trap of her own making.

The purge has to be ruthless and untouched by any political or personal considerations. This is the real lesson of Faigate.
'

SUNETRA HARASSED, PRANNOY, MEDIA SHAMED

Sunetra Chaudhury’s stunning revelation about the sexual harassment she was subjected to by a senior politician has raised issues much more disturbing than the trauma she went through and had the courage to speak about in the public domain.

Ms. Chaudhury, if one can believe what her senior colleague at NDTV, Barkha Dutt of Radia fame, tweeted some days back, is one of the brightest journalists working with the media house. Is it not, then, to begin with, odd, that her story, her cry, was not carried by her own channel, 24/7?

What happened to all the pontification in innumerable ‘We The People’ shows and other programs about women’s emancipation, equal rights, stringent laws to protect women against sexual harassment in the work place etc.? Why the stoned silence when harsh reality has hit home?

Did NDTV refuse to carry her story because, if rumours are to be believed, Prannoy Roy himself has a glad eye? Or is it because he holds the view that it is a part of the job of female journalists that he employs to get horizontal to “rise” vertically in political circles, right up to RCR, as we have seen happen? Or is it because the politician involved is a Congressman, not someone from the opposition, and that too, as it appears from the language employed by him, someone whose sole claim to stardom is his friendship with Rajiv Gandhi, and now Sonia Gandhi?

Remember how a few years back, Tehelka had entrapped military officers and politicians with prostitutes and money in a manifestly politically motivated and paid sting operation? If that was a big story, was not Sunetra’s story even bigger? A politician shamelessly seeking sexual favours from an NDTV employee in the presence of a third person?

Manifestly, the politician was ‘cock’sure that Prannoy Roy would take no cognisance and would bury the matter, even if his employee mustered enough courage to complain to him. And that the famed Barkha Dutt would also not have any courage to fly into her famous rage to come to the rescue of her colleague, and, in the process, spill the many rotten beans that have for decades remained canned.

The Indian media maintains an Omerta about the “private” lives of politicians. As Barkha Dutt said once, it is nobody’s business to know who sleeps with whom. No one can argue aganist that view. But is sleeping for pleasure or love same as sleeping for business or career advancement/getting an inside scoop? Does it not, then, become a straightforward case of corruption, of giving and receiving a plain bribe? Can the sexual harassment that Chaudhury was subjected to construed by any sane person as the private matter of a politician? The guy was aggressively and arrogantly seeking sexual favours to give her the story she wanted, and it is not news for NDTV, or even rival channels?

Is the rot deeper than we know? Is the nexus between politicians and journalists far more perverse than we believe?

When the ND Tiwari sex scandal came to light last year, thanks not to the mainstream media which would have known about him for decades, Madhu Kishwar openly said on Face The Nation that Delhi's political landscape was one giant brothel.

Sunetra’s story and the manner in which it has been hushed up by NDTV, forcing her to write her tale of woe in DNA, perhaps the only leading newspaper that was willing to carry it, tell us that Kishwar was not only right but that the rot is far deeper, and that some politicians brazenly treat female journalists as no more than easy meat. In fact, Sunetra herself has made a mention -- not without reason -- about the text messages being received by an unnamed NDTV colleague from a cabinet minister seeking her sexual services. That the colleague has chosen to remain silent, possibly like others at NDTV, gives a very disturbing picture about the code of professional and journalistic ethics that Prannoy Roy has instituted at the channels that he owns.

The picture in other media-cum-business houses is probably no better, given that no other female journalist has ever mustered the courage to complain in the manner the Sunetra Chaudhury has.

Yes, no one has any business to know who is sleeping with whom. But, the first-hand peek that Sunetra has given to the public in near real-time leaves little room for doubt that this self-imposed silence of the media is more to protect the reputations of its fraternity that has been and is using sex a potent investigative/information/power/pelf tool, than to keep their private lives private. NDTV, of course, stands exposed and shamed as it has never been. But, like Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prannoy Roy has once again neither spoken nor taken any action. And he is not a puppet on a string. May be along some dimensions he is.

The litany of exposures about media’s dark deeds gets longer with every passing day. The fig leaf is beginning to fall.
'

ANNA, RAMDEV: DIVIDED THEY FELL

Flattery can fool the best of them. What to talk of a naïve Yog Guru and a simple villager surfing into the murky, merciless world of Indian politics on the wave of popular support and truth. In retrospect, it is evident that a great deal of thought -- and equal or more misinformation -- went into the strategy adopted by the Congress party to defeat an anti-corruption movement that had energised Indians across all classes and castes.

Baba Ramdev, before he made a triumphant entry into Delhi airport, had done nine months and one lakh kilometers across India to enlighten people about the abyss of corruption that the country had fallen into and muster their support for his fight against it. That heady feeling clearly got the better of commonsense. And led him to make a few elementary blunders that quickly deflated him and his campaign, and enabled the Congress to turn the table he was standing on.

The first mistake Ramdev made was about the timing. Anna Hazare had launched a similar movement at Jantar Mantar in April and had achieved a fair degree of success. The Congress, after attacking him viciously, had capitulated, rattled by the popular support his fast had generated. Negotiations were going on between his team and the government for a preparing a joint Lok Pal Bill to tackle political and bureaucratic corruption. In the beginning of June, the impression generated, deliberately it is now evident, was that Anna’s civil society would have its way. The energy and support for Anna had not waned; he had not yet failed. Therefore, for Baba Ramdev to start his own show then was a clear sign that he was, to an extent, motivated more by the desire to take the limelight and credit away from Anna Hazare than by commonsense. Even if he had planned his satyagraha earlier, he should have postponed it.

Ramdev may have been right in his belief that Anna enjoyed little popular support beyond a small section of the TV-friendly urban middle class, and that he was the one with the weight of masses and money behind him. But, he failed to realise that his hunger to be seen as the real leader of the anti-corruption movement was just the weakness that the Congress party was waiting to exploit in order to slice the movement in two and kill its momentum.

When Pranab Mukherjee and three other ministers landed up at Delhi airport to receive him, – an honour not given even to the US President – Ramdev should have smelled a rat. They even held it to his nose: keep Anna Hazare away from your stage. But he smelled the scent of victory instead, a ridiculously easy victory that made him foolishly feel that he was a real Maharaja and Anna a tiny speck of no consequence getting attention it did not deserve.

That is precisely what Mukherjee and Co. had calculated. Their best hope of victory lay in ensuring that these two sections of “civil society” that had got together for the possibly the first time ever were separated and made to turn hostile to each other again. United, they would have been impossible to defeat; divided, they could be taken apart easily. Baba fell straight into the simple trap. As did the members of Anna's team.

Emboldened by the grand reception and imagining that Delhi was already his, Baba Ramdev added fuel to the fire lit at the airport. He got Sadhvi Rithambara on his stage. This was like showing a red rag to a herd of bulls. There is no doubt that the Sadhvi is now engaged solely in social work. But during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, she had delivered many strident speeches bordering on hate. No one was looking at the present; for Congress and media, only the past mattered. That sealed it for Ramdev. With the media turning openly hostile, Anna’s team had a similar and stupid reflex reaction, blinded to the larger game plan of the Congress, just as the baba was. The split in the movement was complete. The downhill journey had begun.

Mocking the merits of some demands made by Baba Ramdev, just to run him down, was also part of that game plan. His views on homosexuality, for example, are identical to those held by religious leaders of all religions, but no one mentioned that. Similarly, his views about giving death penalty (changed to life sentence) to those guilty of corruption are little different from those of the ‘civilised’ who demand death for rapists in TV studios and newspaper columns. He made some terrific suggestions too, like having world class educational institutions in India, couched in simple words that everyone understands. But, no surprise, you didn’t get to hear about them much, if at all.

Notwithstanding the negative blitz, the fact of the matter is that the government, by its own admission, agreed to almost all his demands, a fact that even he acknowledged on TV.

That is where Ramdev made his biggest mistake. It did not occur to him that with the Anna camp having deserted him and embedded media having turned hostile, Sonia Gandhi would not hesitate to use brutal force to evict him from Ramlila ground. Having got even more than he expected and that too so easily, he probably got carried away. Instead of calling off the satyagraha at that point of time, he dug in. And dug his grave in the process. The police, in a midnight swoop, arrested him and attacked 60,000 peaceful satyagrahis, women and children among them, forcing them to flee.

Packed off to his Ashram in Hardwar, Ramdev called of his fast unto death after nine days, beaten blue by a cleverer and far more devious Congress that not only refused to negotiate with him any further but went back on the agreement it had reached with him in Delhi.

Isolated and weakened, Anna Hazare has now met the same fate. After many solemn assurances that a joint draft of the Lok Pal Bill will be presented in Parliament during the monsoon session, the government has shown him the middle finger. Two drafts will now go to the cabinet; one prepared by the government, the other by Anna’s team. No prizes for guessing which one will go through, if at all.

As of now, the anti-corruption movement stands divided, defeated. The Congress has again hit the fail-safe nerve that has thus far seen it through many difficulties: the RSS card to discredit and dissipate any opposition to it. Both Ramdev and Anna are accused of being RSS agents and worse. The “non-communal” members of civil society have been left stranded in their ivory towers without popular support of even “secular” urban Indians.

The war on corruption has successfully been turned into a war between communal Hindus and the rest represented by the Congress. You are now being asked to make a simple choice: do you prefer RSS/”Hindu communalism” or corruption that is endemic to all parties?

No one is telling you that with Sonia’s Congress openly wooing only Muslims and Christians, with the NAC unleashing a draconian anti-Hindu Communal Bill etc. the only Indians who will oppose it for poor governance and its unprecedented plunder of India are Hindus, exceptions apart. The communal bogey is, thus, ready for the Congress to exploit. Slandering and splitting those who raise their voice against its misdeeds and failures has been and will remain its prime weapon.

No matter how hard the BJP tries, no matter which face it projects as leader, the communities being courted by the Congress are not going to desert it en masse for the BJP. Since Sonia's Congress is leaving little doubt in anyone's mind that its pro-minority stance is fundamentally anti-Hindu, the way to counter it politically is not by being even more pro-minority but by actively protecting the interests of the majority and consolidating it without feeling guilty and without being anti-minority, the last bit being vital.

Unless the “unite minorities, divide Hindus” strategy of the Congress is defeated decisively, what happened at Ramlila grounds and to the Anna camp will happen again and again. This is the first real defeat that Baba Ramdev, the Yog Guru from a small village in Haryana has faced. In the whole drama, he has undoubtedly lost a lot of his luster. Regaining it will take a lot of doing. The swell of anger against the Congress for its brutality can be used to take the anti-corruption struggle to great heights. The slighting of Anna Hazare will also help reinforce the belief that Sonia Gandhi will go to any length to protect corrupt leaders.

But for a new momentum to be built up, Ramdev and Anna will have to come together. The civil society members surrounding Anna will also have stop playing into the hands of the Congress by showing their allergy to anything that is dubbed by it as Hindu/RSS, both being synonymous for Congress. Ramdev will also need to completely shed personal political ambitions that will, invariably, cloud his judgment again.

It has to be a totally united effort for a common objective; all have to be welcomed from every religion, political party and section of society. At stake is the very future of India being mortgaged by an arrogant political class that has got used to blatant abuse of power, limitless corruption and worse. Anna and Ramdev and others must not allow themselves to be divided again.
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Related: Anna Hazare, listen to the rage
'

INDIA AND THE SERPENT

India, an idea, is the plasticine of a few
who mould it as per leader’s mind
and shout from every pulpit: it’s true.
Freedom indeed it is for them, and the led blind;
blasphemy if you call their myth,
or uncover their ugly truth.

Petty leaders battle for power,
no mercy to each other shown,
ever slicing India, tinier pieces to own;
but fearful of neighbours' guts and gun,
and wrapped in the vote-god toe to head,
dead doves they are -- how own loss they dread.

Sedition is new heaven of freedom,
‘hate' its hate-filled line, minority
dog tag a badge of honour, majority
a dirty slur; ‘The Red Saree’ troublesome
locked away, ‘Broken Republic’ given wing;
Self is the new India, Singh its dummy king.

Asurs alone churn the ocean -- the serpent
coils devs long beaten and quite bent --
bringing up with wine much venin given vent.
No hiss to alert fools he waits, silent,
for their fall; if he is not soon cut in two,
he will get India, the nectar pot, anew.
.

ANNA HAZARE, LISTEN TO THE RAGE

Anna Hazare. Who had heard of this soldier before the Great Jantar Mantar Tantar rattled an arrogant government that thought it had everything under firm control, right from the media to the BJP?

I have not read the Jan Lokpal Bill that started the churn, the first stirring of a long delayed revolution. Nor do I intend to waste my time going through it. Many analysts on both sides of the divide have written copiously about it, and will continue to do so. Like millions of other Indians I do not want to get lost in a debate that misses, or deliberately deflects from, the real point.

Our collective rage is against a democracy that is being destroyed, a government – I use the term for state as well as central governments -- that has abdicated its responsibility to govern, and politicians who have become plunderers of their own nation.

Till Anna Hazare began his fast to death against the mischievous efforts of the political class as a whole to keep itself and the babus whose guidance and collaboration makes plunder possible, literally beyond the reach of law, the enormous energy of this seething rage was getting dissipated due to lack of point or leader of focus. The present government in Delhi was, not surprisingly, smug and disdainfully dismissive of all talk of reigning in unbridled corruption that has now reached levels that cannot be sustained without a serious blowout that might even lead to the demise of the First republic.

Anna Hazare gave the explosive charge of public anger the shape it needed. The resultant Munroe effect blasted a hole through the impenetrable armour of a devious government that, till the explosive shocked and burned it, was ridiculing and mocking the diminutive Gandhian and those supporting him. This hole in the hull is not symbolic, nor can anyone plug it with a rag and drive the tank back into battle. The Lok Pal Bill represents only the first exchange of fire between the people and a government that claims to represent them but has effectively ceased to. For 43 years, people may have kept quiet. No longer. No matter how hard politicians and babus may try now, an appropriate law will be put in place sooner or later, with or without them. But that will be only the beginning, not the end.

Expectedly, government forces are hitting back with all the heavy weapons at their disposal. Their target, no surprise, is the Teflon-protected complete outsider Anna Hazare. This non-English speaking, soft-spoken leader has, to the amazement of all, connected not only to the masses but also to young, educated urban Indians who, till he appeared on the scene, were being channeled to draw bubble gum ‘inspiration’ from cricketers, Bollywood stars and Rahul Gandhi. There was no real leader who had it in him to draw their attention back to where it should have been and galvanise them into action in the manner that Anna has done.

What has disturbed government troops the most is the fact that behind the members of civil society who are drafting the Lok Pal Bill are leaders and people they had all but rendered invisible and irrelevant. Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravishankar and the like bring with them numbers that can drastically change the equations of elections that have been solved by politicians who have figured out that democracy is not about getting the people’s mandate, but about getting to power without it. With Anna Hazare praising Narendra Modi, arguably the only incorruptible political leader who is also a doer and deliverer without peer, and the latter too putting his weight behind the voice of the people, the balance of power has shifted quite substantially in favour of the people. When leaders of other religions too join Anna, as they should, it will become a no-contest.

Suddenly, the “idea of India” that uproots India from India, that does not recognise a timeless India as anything more a creation of the British, that disparages and mocks at everything Hindu, is in danger of being thrown into the only place it should always have been: the dustbin. The cocooned English-speaking elite and the secular brigade which is infested with parasites, thought -- just like the politicians did -- that they had it all covered with the help of a few missionaries, mullahs and media. Patriotic scenes reminiscent of the freedom struggle, starting from Bharat Mata on Anna Hazare’s stage, to the enthusiastic singing of Vande Matram, the national song they thought they had all but buried, has given them a rude reality check and woken them to a vast India beyond and very different from the soulless caricature they have reduced it to under the guise of ‘secularism.’

Anna Hazare is under attack not only from sarkari soldiers but also from deserters who did not get their free deserts from the government. The pressure being generated on him and other leaders like him to conform to their idea of India, one that has been built solely around the political objective of keeping Congress in power, is immense. They manifestly want to reduce him to a nominal head, a Manmohan Singh if you like, so that the corroded and hollowed edifice that they have all helped build and sustain remains intact. It is not going to be easy for him and those truly interested in rebuilding India to take the pressure.

No matter what people might say, I believe that a soldier who took a Pakistani bullet in 1965, will not run away from this battle, the greatest one that he has fought in his life. He will take all the bullets that are being fired at him now, achieve victory and pass the command to someone worthy of it.

But what Anna may not be able to take is the pressure from fifth columnists in his camp. They have no followers, no following, no rage. They need him and other leaders in the movement who have energised the masses, not the other way round. He must not let them set the agenda, the shape and the pace of the movement.They will only kill it. They are agents of status quo, not change.

Anna Hazare must listen to the rage of the people and remember the faith they have reposed in him. If he does and continues to give shape to it, he will remembered as the icon of the change that India desperately needed; if he doesn’t, he will be replaced and forgotten.
'

ADVANI GIVES CLEAN CHITS, BJP PAYS HEAVY PRICE

During the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, to the surprise of many, he took Sonia Gandhi's slave-appointee, Dr. Manmohan Singh, on in a direct Presidential-type fight. In doing so, he took her, his and BJP’s principal adversary, out of the fight and put her on a pedestal with a de facto clean chit. With Sonia so anointed saint and the scrupulously clean Singh declared Enemy No.1, a BJP victory that seemed near certain before the Nuclear Deal fiasco in Parliament in 2008 became a humiliating defeat.

Despite that crushing rout, LK Advani refused to quit -- theatrics apart – and make way for new blood to reinvigorate a demoralised party. It is possible that the coterie that had grown around him, that had little or no mass following and that drew strength primarily from proximity to him, persuaded him to stay on so that it could complete what it had begun.

This group, as I understand as a complete outsider, is largely responsible for what Arun Shourie calls ‘homogenisation’ of the BJP -- the metamorphosing of it into a networked value clone of the Congress party -- and contributed significantly to its defeat. Under Advani, it continues to call the shots and is driving the BJP into a canyon, getting out from which will need a leader of exceptional skills and ability.

In 2011, Sonia Gandhi’s UPA 2 government stands exposed as one executing possibly the greatest plunder in India’s history in so short a span of time. It’s raining scams like never before, involving amounts that only a year back were not even conceivable. Manmohan Singh remains the nominal Prime Minister whom no member of the cabinet listens to or gives a damn about. The real power, as the whole wide world knows, remains in the hands of Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul who is not PM yet only because he is convinced that he is not good enough for the job, and afraid that once he gets into the hot seat, the cool, dark shade that Singh provides for him to revel in will no longer be available, and the scorching heat will burn him before his time.

The failures of the Sonia government are so colossal and unpardonable that had there been a credible opposition in place, Congress leaders would not have been strutting around as brazenly as they are. Nor would have Sonia and Rahul been allowed to remain un-singed on pedestals beyond accountability and responsibility for what minions serving at their pleasure are doing. Tragically for India, that is the sorry state that this nation finds itself in today primarily because the Advani-led coterie that runs the BJP has failed to do what it should have as a responsible and responsive opposition.

In the middle of the din created by Raja’s arrest for the 2G scam, new scams, CBI inquiries and what now is evidently going to a ‘fixed’ JPC into the 2G scam, LK Advani has again shot the BJP in the foot and, on a silver platter, given a clean chit to Sonia Gandhi that even her most ardent supporters would not have dreamt of. In the process he also has, in one stroke, trashed the assiduous efforts of a section of his own party, manifestly not a part of the coterie, that had come up with a detailed report on black money stashed by Indians abroad.

Note the chronology. The report of the black money task force was released on February 01. On February 15, Sonia Gandhi wrote to Advani expressing her “personal distress” at the allegations – which she denied -- that she and Rajiv had bank accounts abroad. Within three days, Advani shot out a reply saying “I am happy you have categorically denied” them and adding, “I deeply regret the distress caused to you.”

Had these allegations been entirely unfounded or had never been made earlier, Advani’s express clean chit and apology would have been understandable. But, not only have they been made regularly for a long time, beginning with an article in a Swiss journal way back in 1991, they have been made publicly even on national television by many Indians from time to time. But for almost two decades, Sonia kept mum; neither did she deny these allegations nor did she say they caused her distress.

What prompted her to respond to the report of the task force with such alacrity? What drove Advani to do what he did almost the moment he got her letter? Would Advani not have known that the Congress party would milk such an unqualified clean chit to death, absolving, as it does, its Supreme leader of not just past wrongdoings but also making her appear spotlessly clean in the middle of all the muck that she has allowed to flow for the last six years? Would it not have struck him that her denial was in the present tense, that she, in effect, was also claiming that she was not receiving any pelf, and that he was certifying to the Indian public that she was indeed speaking the truth?

If Advani did not understand the ramifications of what he was writing, then he should gracefully drive himself into oblivion, and those responsible for drafting it publicly driven out of the BJP. If he did read and comprehend what he was signing, then the matter is even more serious.

Then the needle of suspicion points to the possibility that he and his coterie stand seriously compromised personally and that Sonia holds the key. This also helps explain their consistent reluctance to blame Sonia for anything and their limiting their attacks to her dummy PM who has displayed despicable lack of spine in standing up to her, and who has let her thugs plunder this country fearlessly. Since he will not be Congress' PM candidate in the next elections, hitting him makes no sense because it does only one thing: it enhances the images of Sonia and Rahul and conceals their monumental failures that should have seen them on the street by now.

The BJP has already paid a heavy price for these follies that can best be attributed to compulsion/complicity, and its credibility is at a new low. The longer this lot holds the reins of power in the BJP, the more grievous damage it will inflict on the party, indeed the whole country.

I have no idea who the leaders of the coterie that needs to be dismantled pronto are. But, if one pay attention to the names that NDTV, virtually the Congress party’s own channel, speaks favourably of as BJP’s PM candidates, then only two names emerge: Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, with the former being its first choice by many a mile. As per The Pioneer, owned and edited by BJP MP Chandan Mitra, even Ambika Soni spoke of them in response to questions on Advani's apology. Coincidentally, they are also among the most homogenised of the next lot of leaders.

The BJP may have some hard choices to make.
'

MEDIA, AUCTIONS AND AAM ADMI

Who was on auction yesterday and is even today? Yes, everyone knows that cricket players are being bid for and bought by owners of various IPL teams. Exciting? Sure, to some. Glamorous? You bet. Do the proceedings spread over two days merit being screened live? Arguably yes, on sports channels. On national news channels? Are you crazy?

You and I may not be crazy, but some owners of India’s 'free' media think we are. That’s why they have decided that a nation of 1.2 billion people grappling with innumerable problems, wants to see nothing but the entire proceedings, live on, yes, news channels and regional channels too.

Is there any such precedent anywhere else in the world other than in a failed banana republic, even there? I cannot imagine. Why, then, is India being subjected to this blitz by media barons?

On Jan 07, Rajdeep Sardesai, part-owner and part-editor-in-chief of CNN IBN, tweeted: “while aam admi worries about price of onions, franchisees will worry about the price of players. yeh hai india.” Touching sentiments. The same gentleman had, however, a minute earlier tweeted: "tomorrow morning, IPL 4 auction. dont miss our coverage 10 am onwards with harsha bhogle and sanjay manjrekar, should be fun.” Many on Twitter spotted the emotional disconnect, the hypocrisy, and there was a barrage of tweets highlighting the same. On Jan 08, he replied to one: “@alok10823 everyone loves a good auction, esp when cricketers are on sale, including the aam admi.” If Sardesai is to be believed, he is loving it today too.

The aam admi, as you can easily infer, has become some kind of a joke. Earlier only politicians used to claim to speak on his behalf even as they lining their pockets with money meant for him. Now the media is doing the same. Politicians have to speak of and for him because they need his vote once in a few years. Media needs no votes but cannot do without him too primarily because it has unilaterally appropriated the right to question politicians and everyone else, on his behalf. For both he is the real sovereign. However, the media is completely unaccountable to him and, therefore, has no interest in him save the revenue he generates by watching himself being made the invisible star every evening in someone else’s voice and of someone else’s agenda.

Rajdeep Sardesai the businessman understands what a terrific tool this media-created aam admi is. Even a chameleon can’t do what he can be made to. That is why Sardesai can in one breath make him look worried about onion prices and in the next project him as someone who loves watching, for two full days, ‘news’ showing cricketers being sold. The real aam admi may forget his onions, media owners never forget theirs.

The question that is begging to be asked, but never will be on any TV channel, is: why are news channels run this tamasha, suspending everything else in time and space?

News channels are not entertainment channels for running shows that people love; nor are they sports channels, otherwise they would telecast revenue-jackpot 20:20 matches live. Then why? The entire IPL auction drams, as I understand, is nothing more than one big non-stop advertisement whose sole objective is to increase consumer awareness of the IPL brand so as to maximise spectator and viewer participation in the upcoming tournament. Since it is not a live cricket match, playing it live on the one authorised sports channel that will telecast the tournament, will not get its promoters and owners the number of eyeballs they want to attract. Viewers across India can, however, be carpet-bombed and mind-numbed into making IPL a bumper success if news and regional channels carry it live.

A two-day running advertisement for India’s most successful sports brand is a mouth-wateringly lucrative business proposition. An independent news editor concerned about core values and principles of journalism will, as per my understanding, not be a party such blatant prostitution of a news channel. An owner, possibly lubricated even more by additional ‘personal’ payments/inducements under the table, will, on the other hand, hasten to summon the non-existent aam aadmi, like Sardesai has done, to justify the decision, to hell with ethics, to hell with the real aam aadmi.

Now this is not an isolated aberration. This is one more recent example that I must briefly dwell upon to highlight the fact that media has become slave to pecuniary interests of owners in a tearing hurry to become billionaires, whatever it takes. Yes, Radia tapes also tell us much about the deep rot and the quid pro quos, but this is not the time to discuss them.

Post Radia, there’s been much debate about the alarming manner in which lobbyists have infiltrated and corrupted the media and the government. Sardesai, one of ‘Radias’ still not singed due to lack of 'clinching' evidence of quid pro quo, cleverly used his position as editor-in-chief to host a program on the channel he owns, to lobby for legalizing lobbying. An alert netizen caught him in the act. Sardesai -- difficult to swallow -- actually went to the extent of creating false Twitter accounts to deceive viewers – and policy makers too -- into believing that public opinion was in favour of lobbying. When caught, he and Sagarika Ghose, his wife, tried to get away by fibbing that the comments were genuine but were wrongly attributed to Twitter. To their bad luck and surprise, alert netizens dug deeper and discovered that lie too. The faking was wilful. Full details, available on dalalmedia posterous will shock you. CNN IBN was finally forced to tender an apology. And the furore subsided. It should not have.

The cleverly-worded apology was not a call of conscience; it was given out of sheer compulsion, to plug further damage. Sardesai had simply no choice, the documentary evidence, like in the Adarsh society case, was clear and damning; there was no escape route available. It was TINA that got Sardesai to cut his losses and pour ganga jal over the crime he had deliberately committed with all his faculties in fine fettle.

The question that was not asked loudly enough then was: what was Sardesai’s motivation to go to the extent of faking public opinion in favour of lobbying? That there had to be a strong personal stake in, firstly, asking such a question at such an inopportune moment and, secondly, taking the risk of falsifying tweets, was clear as day light. But, no one else, including in the media, probed any further. No one asked him why he instructed his staff to create false tweets; his staff was also not asked what exactly they were told by him. Who knows what else would have spilled out after the questioning had started? There is little doubt in my mind that an honest follow up would have opened the eyes of the whole country to the fact that the then President of the Editor’s Guild is a corrupt man who can go to any extent to push his personal business interests on the platform of his channel. The journalist in him, there is little doubt, has been all but killed by the businessman he has chosen to become.

You can close your eyes and bet that this was not the first such case. Before Radia, no one suspected the integrity of these guys and no one bothered to check. Now every little twitch is viewed with suspicion, and that is why Sardesai was caught. He will be much more careful in future, but remains otherwise unfazed. That is why on being questioned about telecasting the IPL auction live he has summarily informed us that 'his' aam aadmi, who is no one other than him, wants it. You and I can take a walk, and can keep walking.

Know and never forget that rich Radia media owners are in the game only for the bucks. And they won’t let you, even India, stop them. That's why they are not at all concerned that they and the journalists they employ have been exposed as a class and that trust has been lost. It does not trouble them that the quid pro quo is now visible even to the blind, that though the evidence may or may not stand scrutiny in a court of law, in the court of public opinion it is more than enough.

So the next time you switch on a news channel and hear an anchor passionately asking a question on behalf of the aam admi, be very wary. Always try to imagine what might have gone on behind the scenes, and what the unspoken agenda is, personal, political, pecuniary. Someone, something is being 'auctioned' behind the scenes all the time. Radia may have not have been the TINA that India had hoped it would be. But if you and I are alert, and the few men and women of unimpeachable integrity in the bordello can muster enough courage, it is only a question of time before the sticky garbage is shoveled out.
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BY SUBJECTS, OF AND FOR DYNASTIES

Two things stand out in the front page of The Times of India of October 20, 2010. One is the boast of Robert Vadra that he can "definitely win an election from anywhere" and the second is that his "exclusive" interview has been given top billing by the newspaper.

Businessman Vadra's cockiness does not come as a surprise, nor does the fact that one of India's leading newspapers has chosen to put him on the pedestal it has. Both obscenities tell a tale of a steepening decline that, if not reversed, will inevitably lead to the demise of India's democracy.

The shocking Commonwealth Games loot and the sordid drama in Karnataka have, yet again, brought to fore the reality that politics is now almost wholly about business. And business in India, as we all know, is about keeping the money in the family. The ownership virus has, therefore, spread deep into politics, with dynasties, big and small, sprouting everywhere.

The Nehru-Gandhi family, supposedly steeped in modern, liberal values, started the slide that has now become an avalanche of sorts across India. If Laloo Yadav is promoting his son and Bal Thackeray his grandson, it has nothing to do with Biharis, Marathi manoos, Indians or India. It is only about protecting and enhancing family wealth 'for generations to come,' as Amitabh Bachchan's says in the Binani Cement ad. The cadre-based BJP, late to the dynastic party, is making amends. Only the communists remain unaffected by the dynastic disease, but in their case rigour mortis has already set in.

There is no better recent example of this rot than Jagan Reddy who, thanks to the active help of his Chief Minister father YSR Reddy, has become easily the fastest growing businessman ever in India, with his Income Tax jumping from Rs 2.92 lakhs in financial year 2008-09 to an unbelievable Rs 84 crores for the first six months of the current financial year. Note that this is the 'white' component of his income. Considering the fact that bribes are mostly paid in cash, one can safely conclude that in the six years that YSR was CM, the father-son duo successfully plundered Andhra Pradesh like no one ever has. Yet, no questions have been asked, no sting operation done, no inquiries ordered. In fact the sole inquiry that had to be ordered against one of YSR Reddy's principal 'financiers', Ramalinga Raju, only because he could not cook the books of Satyam any longer, has, not surprisingly, run aground and is not likely to unearth anything against YSR or any other politician.

With politics proving to be such a risk-free, even though criminal, route to astronomical riches in super quick time, how can India remain the democracy that its founding fathers wanted it to be? It has to become an oligarchy. Of plunderers.

What we are witnessing now is the shaking out of ordinary Indians from the top rungs of power and wealth. It began slowly with Indira Gandhi, but, with the economy expanding rapidly and the corruption and plunder becoming badges of honour to brandish and brag about without even the tinge of fear of getting caught and put behind bars, it has gathered a momentum that no one would have imagined a few years ago. This sorry development could not have taken place without the active involvement and support of the liberal media that have embraced colonially-seeded social norms, repelled the egalitarian values that they were meant to imbibe, and joined the plunder party that, as watchdogs, they are supposed to bust. That is why a Vadra figures where he does, in the manner that has. That is why colossal corruption is winked at in the manner that it is and buried where it should never be.

The new rajas, big and small, are taking control of India, not as benevolent rulers in the mould of the Ram that Mahatma Gandhi wanted them to, but as daring, no-limits, no-conscience robbers. Elections have become tools to enhance the hold and power of dynasties. The naive poor are being bought with TVs, cycles, goats etc that you and I pay for. Thanks to the arithmetic of elections, the Muslim community has been reduced to a nautch girl, as it were, to be lured into their beds at election time, again with your money and mine.

Whore-ism is the new synonym of secularism, plunder of politics. What we call democracy is now increasingly of and for dynasties. In the new order, the 'by' people can only be subjects, not sovereigns.
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Related reading:
1. Elections 2009: Dynasties empowered, not youth
2. Women's Bill: Empowering gharanas not women
3. The more Rahul's Congress changes, the more it's the same

CWG DEJA VU: LET THE INQUIRIES BEGIN!

"Let the Games begin." With these words of President Pratibha Patil, the Delhi Commonwealth Games, surrounded by the thick fog of corruption, began. Three hours and a spectacular Opening Ceremony later, the heavy clouds of doubt about its success had vanished and even the most die hard pessimists had become ecstatic believers.

When the near-flawless Games concluded two weeks later, the fireworks that lit up Delhi's sky symbolised the jubilation in Indian hearts that had been more than doubled by the unexpected record haul of medals by unsung India's sportsmen who had been almost forgotten before the Games began. Indian chests puffed with pride as the whole world applauded India for delivering 'world class' games.

"Let the inquires begin", said Dr Manmohan Singh immediately after, keeping his promise that those guilty of corruption -- nay loot -- would not be spared. There was much joy then too, and the media went hammer, tongs and gongs after Suresh Kalmadi, Chairman of the Organising Committee, the only guy against whom an inquiry has been ordered, report to be submitted in three months. In the din of the cheering that has followed, few have seen through the elaborate smokescreen that is being created to protect everyone else, particularly Urban Development Minister Jaipal Reddy, Sports Minister MS Gill and, above all, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

Let's get a few facts straight. The overall budget of the Games, most of it for developing the infrastructure of Delhi, was around Rs 70,000 crores. Of this, Suresh Kalmadi was allotted a mere 1,600 crores, as his job was to simply run the Games after all stadiums and the Games Village, built under the watch of others, were handed over to him. Other spent nearly 50 times what he did, almost 98% of the total expenditure was incurred by them. But, inexplicably, no one is now talking about the massive cost overruns and loot there.

Kalmadi is manifestly guilty of corruption; no one has forgotten the stories about expensive toilet papers etc and the dubious contracts that were awarded by his team. For his many apparent acts of commission, he must be punished swiftly. There is little doubt that he will be too, but only politically. He is a political light weight who can be dispensed with, if not forever, at least till we forget, and that will be pretty soon. I don't believe any charge that can send him to prison will be allowed to stick. If Kalmadi sings, many will be singed. So, like it happens all the time, nothing will happen to nail him legally.

Kalmadi has become the fall guy, the dirty shirt that is being used to show how white the shirts of others are. Yesterday he was snubbed by the PM, a personally honest man, and today Sonia Gandhi has done the same. He is out of all photo frames, as if his mere presence will make others guilty of corruption too. The guy with the smallest budgetary outlay and, therefore, the least 'take' is being torn apart so that the big fish, without the knowledge and blessings of whom the Great Delhi Loot would not have been possible, can not only be sheltered and saved but also made to emerge smelling good.

The whitewashing of Sheila Dikshit has begun in right earnest with NDTV running a full interview with her and Barkha Dutt praising her for tucking in her saree to get Kalmadi's dirty Games Village cleaned up, even though Tejinder Khanna, Delhi's Lt Governor says she doesn't deserve the credit, all conveniently forgetting that it was the unprecedented rains that miraculously stopped just in time and saved the day for India. It is evident that Shiela Dikshit cannot be allowed to go under for corruption. Political power in India's capital and seven Lok Sabha seats are at stake, at the very least. When you add the ripple-effect and the fact that her indictment will translate into that of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi too, you know that the media is going to work overtime to make sure that India will get to see only to that part of her saree that is spotlessly white.

Gill and Reddy have already been forgotten. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the man who slept over CWG files for years when he was Sports Minister, thereby facilitating the last minute ballooning of the budget and the attendant loot, has been rewarded for his efforts with a dubious Rajya Sabha seat even though he lost in the Lok Sabha elections. Rahul Gandhi, who refused to follow in the footsteps of his father and take charge of the Games, and who cleverly kept totally away from it, is basking in the praise being showered on him for imperiously allowing everyone to rob this nation; no blame can stick to him because he did nothing.

The inquiries have barely begun. But, already there is a feeling of Déjà Vu. You can feel it in your bones that not one 'Dilli ka Thug' is going to caught and punished. At best a petty official or two will be booked for deviating from procedure. Kalmadi will at worst fade into opulent anonymity. The books will remain cooked, ignoble intentions and criminal acts concealed. Our complicit media will soon say 'cut' and move on to something else that will distract India's attention and cover Congress' 'cuts'. And India will soon bid for an even bigger gold mine: Olympics.
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