The Beat Edition 2 by IIJNM Bangalore

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After Pulwama | P8

MARCH 2019

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AT INDIAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FOUNDATIONS An IIJNM PUBLICATION THE BEAT 1

Letter from the Editor The Sangh Parivar has always been uneasy with core planks of India’s Constitution that enshrine its secular and federal character. Even with Mr. Modi’s brute majority in Parliament in 2014, they lacked a consensus within their coalition to alter the basic structure of India’s governance. So, they have sought to tackle the problem piecemeal. Our cover story looks at the most blatant attempts by the BJP government in its 5 years in office to shape the institutions of state to its will. The Supreme Court has seen an unprecedented show of dissent by its senior-most judges, the Reserve Bank of India has seen two governors exit in the space of two years, the Election Commission has had its decisions questioned as never before and the Central Bureau of Intelligence has had its credibility shredded. In every case, the government’s meddling has been the proximate cause. The government has in the meanwhile lost no time in turning our most respected universities into test beds of patriotism and pseudo-science, discredited our most respected sources of statistical data, turned our media into an inquisition and created an atmosphere of fear and intolerance independent India has never known.

The suicide attack on a paramilitary convoy in Pulwama that killed 40 Indian policemen only added to the hysteria. India’s calibrated response won it a measure of international support but is unlikely to deter the militants who were responsible or their patrons in the Pakistani Army and intelligence services. Does India understand the implacable nature of its adversaries, does it have the rudiments of a strategy to change their behaviour, our special report asks. The campaign for protecting cows has upended the livestock and leather industries, caused untold suffering to communities dependent on them for food and livelihoods and left millions of cattle starving, our reporters discover.

The Devadasi system, the centuries-old practice of sexual bondage and caste oppression perpetrated in the name of God, continues to flourish decades after it was banned. We bring you the voices of its victims. These are just some of the stories we report this month. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did writing them.

Yajush Gupta

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CONTENTS Cover Story Arbitrary Rule Modi in a hurry Special Report

Comment

After Pulwama No easy answers Indus Treaty

Why UP Matters Winning combination? Environment

Focus

Drying Up Depleting groundwater Forest Woes Evicting the guardians

Eonomy

Business

Agriculture

Society

Health

Sport

Cattle Battle Perils of protecting cows Online Grocers Fresh to home Free the Farmer Open markets Temple Traditions Women as offerings Treacherous Taboo Monthly reminder

Afghan Cricket Unsung heroes Arts & Culture

27-30

Uri Velvet Buzzsaw KGF Tagore and Rolland THE BEAT

CO VE R S TO RY

A Growing Tyranny Narendra Modi’s first term has witnessed a steady erosion in the institutions of governance, writes Akanksha Kashyap

“T

oday, democracy is at stake, secularism is in danger, the economy has collapsed, independent institutions are being destroyed and centre-state relations are deteriorating,”Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu recently warned at a political rally in Vishakapatnam. Ever since the Emergency of 1975, the Sangh parivar has accused the Congress Party of political overreach, governing through remote control and eroding the institutional framework of our democracy. But as their protégé Narendra Modi’s first term ends and

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a general election approaches, BJP’s record in office doesn’t look very different. And it’s not just the cow-vigilantism, Muslim baiting, shrill nationalism or the pervasive air of intolerance that worries observers. Alarm bells rang in January 2018 when the four senior-most judges of the SupremeCourt called an unprecedented press conference to accuse the then Chief Justice of India (CJI), Dipak Mishra, of being biased in assigning cases to them. On matters the Modi government deemed sensitive, Mishra would allegedly exclude his senior colleagues and conduct proceedings along with a junior

judge. Says Abdul Razack, a political analyst , “At the press conference, the current CJI Ranjan Gogoi made a statement that the cases were being assigned in a manner to favour someone. The statement in itself clearly speaks volumes of what exactly was going on in the apex court.” In fact, the government’s efforts to influence judicial appointments was apparent in its foot dragging over the appointment of Justice KM Joseph to the apex court. In 2016, a bench of the Uttarakhand High Court presided over by him had struck down President’s rule

Credit: News18.com

in the state to Mr Modi’s great embarrassment. Even though the collegium kept suggesting his name, the government took its time to accept him. And even when the government accepted his elevation to Supreme Court, there were questions whether the work of the court was being remotely managed. The Supreme court though is not the only institution that faces such a crisis under today’s government. “There is dictatorship imposed on all the institutions of the country, sparing not even a single one,” says Saoumya Bakshi, Trinamool Congressyouth president in Kolkata.The autonomy of the Election Commission (EC) too has been in question. In 2017, the government had proposed the idea of electoral bonds. They were proposed as a means to ease poll funding by enabling citizens to contribute to the party of their choice anonymously. The bonds were supposed to have a short life span and be open to subscription for just a short while before

the elections. While the government was still in the process of debating how exactly such a bond could be created, the EC denounced the idea as ‘retrograde’.

Electoral bonds are a retrogade step as they compromise transparency of political funding

According to a PTI report, in a written deposition to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Law and Personnel, the EC had said, “The amendment in section 29C of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 making it no longer necessary to report details of donations received through electoral bonds is a retrograde step as transparency of political funding would be compromised as a result of the change.” A year later a new Chief Election Commissioner, AK Jyoti, took charge and promptly reversed the commission’s previous position, saying electoral bonds were just what the country needed. As Mr. Jyoti told The Indian Express,“What I am saying is that now there will be digital and banking trail of donations. That is one step towards the right direction. I have not said that it will solve all problems.” He didn’t explain how a digital banking trail could be reconciled with anonymity or indeed how anonymous donations contributed to electoral transparency. THE BEAT

Ranjan Gogoi (third from left), the current chief justice, had told the press conference that cases were being assigned in a manner to favour someone | Credit: The Wire

Another shocker came when the dates of Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly Elections were suddenlychanged. There was some speculation that the Centre was planning to announce a few projects in the states and the EC quietly agreed to the dates the Centre wanted. Even after numerous questions were raised, the EC could not explain its actions. There was also a delay in announcing the election dates for Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh,Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. Though the EC pointed out that the timings were changed for the convenience of all the parties, the opposition clearly saw it to be linked to Modi’s rally in Ajmer. “It seems as if the BJP is trying to put a Hitlerstyle dictatorship regime,” says Bakshi of Trinamool. “Only difference there was that Hitler was open about it, but BJP keeps defending its act.” Defending the EC’s actions, Rahul Sinha, BJP national secretary says, “The Election Commission always has been doing its duty. They can change the dates whenever they wish and feel the need to, that is not even an issue.” But the institution the government seems to have had the most difficulty with is the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The resignation of governor Raghuram Rajan in the

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third year of his tenure, came as a shock to financial markets worldwide. Although Rajan said he wanted to return to academia, it was public knowledge that the governor was too independent minded for a government bent on micromanaging the economy. By then the government had a wellearned reputation of taking monetary decisions without consulting the RBI. Demonetisation was one such a move. The decision, which invalidated all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes and thus 86% 0f the currency in circulation overnight was an avoidable disaster. It was a reckless political decisionhatched and carried out by a tiny cabal surrounding the prime minister’s office and RBI was left to deal with the massive economic disruption that followed. In his September 2016 resignation letter Dr.Rajan wrote, “While all of what we laid out on that first day is done, two subsequent developments are yet to be completed. Inflation is in the target zone, but the monetary policy committee that will set policy has yet to be formed. Moreover, the bank clean-up initiated under the Asset Quality Review, having already brought more credibility to bank balance sheets, is still ongoing. International developments also pose some risks in the short term.

While I was open to seeing these developments through, on due reflection, and after consultation with the government, I want to share with you that I will be returning to academia.” In an interview to Business Standard, Rajan clearly hinted he resigned because he wasn’t not offered an extension, as would be routine especially for an economist of international standing. Dr.Rajan’s reference to the bank’s asset quality was the nub of the problem. The government had initially backed the RBI’s tough stance on cleaning up the banks. But after the demonetisation fiasco, when nationwide credit shortages crippled the rural economy, medium and small-enterprises (MSME) and the wholesale trade, the government panicked and started pressuring the RBI to go easy on the banks and to allow them to lend freely to the MSME sector. Thus, the air around Dr.Rajan’s resignation had barely cleared when his successor, Dr.Urjit Patel put in his papers too. In a public lecture, RBI deputy governor, Gopal Acharaya warned, “Governments that do not respect central bank independence will sooner or later incur the wrath of financial markets, ignite economic fire, and come to rue the day they undermined an important regulatory institution.” His remarks infuri-

ated the finance ministry. The government blamed the country’s central bank for having created the bad-loan problem through its “lax supervision” and even for failing to detect the Nirav Modi-Punjab National Bank swindle. More alarming, for the first time the government hinted that it might invoke Section 7 of the RBI Act to overrule decisions by the RBI board. “Section 7 was threatened to be invoked probably only to take over RBI and get hold of the RBI’s Rs.9 lakh crore emergency funds for a massive bout of public spending in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election,” says analyst Razack. With the resignation of two highly-trained, professional economists from the head of India’s central bank in quick succession, the stage was set for a recently retired bureaucrat from the finance ministry,Shaktikanta Das to be drafted in. Unsurprising, his first act as governor was to ease interest rates. Recent events involving the Central Bureau of Investigation have been no less worrisome. In what journalist BakhaDutt called an ‘Indian version of President Trump’s sacking of his FBI chief’, the CBI chief and his deputy were sent on leavefollowing an acrimonious fight between them. Alok Verma had been appointed CBI director in 2017 and had objected when the government appointed Rakesh Asthana as his deputy, on the ground that he was corrupt. But Asthana has been known to be Mr. Modi’s favourite even before Verma was appointment.According to

a Scroll report,Mr. Verma, in his petition to the Supreme Court challenging the government’s order, said: “Not all influence that is exerted by the political government would be found explicitly or in writing. More often than not, it is tacit, and requires considerable courage to withstand.” This statement was perhaps a clear indication on how the government was misusing its powers. Even now,the appointment of Nageshwar Rao, another Modi favourite, as interim director, has put the focus on CBI.“The government is using the CBI as an extension of the Prime Minister’s office which is definitely a threat to the country. CBI is something which the country trusts and believes in, but it is unfortunate that today whoever speaks against Modi gets arrested,” says Bakshi. “It is quite absurd to see that every person who is not in favour of the government has his/her office or home raided; whether it be Mayawati, DK Shivkumar, or Akhilesh Yadav. Akhilesh’s house was raided for a case that happened seven years ago. Was the government sleeping for these years?It is quite clear that they are using the CBI as a tool to curb the opposition,’’ points out Razack. “The government has never interfered in the operation of independent institutions. All these people who have resigned never provided any clear

reasons which might point to meddling. It is only the opposition that believes there is a crisis. On the contrary, steps to strengthen these bodies are being taken continually,” replies the BJP’s Sinha.

he Modi government’s insidious attack on the institutions of our country in fact runs deeper. They have sought to take over the country top educational institutions and the bodies that fund and regulate them, to rewrite the school curricula to elevate mythological and obscurantist ideas to ‘scientific’ status and have used their student organisations to hound and drive out independent scholars. In their zeal to burnish the image of the government, they have fabricated economic and employment data and destroyed the credibility of the country’s premier statistical organisation. As Razack sums it up, “The autonomy of our institutions is being jeopardised. They are in need of immediate protection. If something concrete is not done right now, the pillars that we have spent so many years building up might just crumble. And, with it the whole edifice will come down.” BJP president Amit Shah recently referred to illegal Bangladeshi migrants as “termites” eating into India’s vitals. He could more accurately have been describing his own government.

Photo: economictimes

“The bank cleanup initiated under the Asset Quality Review has already brought credibility to their balance sheets.” - Raghuram Rajan

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SPECIAL REPORT

Fighting to the End Pakistan’s scorched-earth policy leaves India with little wiggle room, writes Sounak Das

n February 14, a suicide bomber drove an explosive-laden vehicle into a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir, killing 40 and injuring many more. It was the deadliest terrorist attack upon security personnel in Kashmir since 1989. Pakistan-based terrorist outfit, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), publicly took responsibility for the attack. The attack underscored the fact that India remains in the crosshairs of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and will continue to haunt India’s intelligence agencies for some time to come. Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to avenge ‘each drop of tear shed’ and intellectuals and common people alike engaged in a national discussion about what could be done to prevent another attack. There was unprecedented anger and the country stood united as the victims hailed from almost every state of

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Credit: India Today

the Indian Union. ‘’Pakistan’s deep state is a constant worry for India,” says Nihar R Nayak, research fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in Delhi. “The civilian government of Pakistan is but a puppet in the hands of the army. Peace is not an option for the Pakistani army, which stymies any attempts at holding out the olive branch. This is the sad truth.’’ The Kargil operation is the most telling instance of how the peace process initiated by the then prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif was sabotaged by the Pakistani military. What happened at Pulwama had a specific purpose. It was meant to provoke. Jaish-e-Muhammed was the outfit chosen to carry out the outrage because it has become the army’s chosen instrument to lure members of the Pakistani Taliban away from spreading

terror within Pakistan and satisfy their blood lust elsewhere. The group revived the vehicleborne suicide attack after a span of almost 20 years. The suicide bomber, Adil Ahmad Dar (20), was a Kashmiri local who went to Pakistan in the spring of 2018 and received training there. Dar made a pre-attack video that announced the attack. The attack by a Kashmiri also exposes the government’s hollow claims on containing violent actors in J&K. Some experts such as Nitin Pai, director, The Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, say Dar’s case proves yet again that the government has failed to reduce jihadi terrorism in the state. ‘Years of neglect has compelled many Kashmiri youths from diverse backgrounds to take up arms against the state,” says Pai. “There has been scarcely any political engagement with stakeholders. The political establishment should

understand that eliminating terrorists is not the same as eliminating terrorism.” “The Modi government introduced ‘Operation All Out’ in January 2017 in an ostensible bid to end terrorism in the Valley lock, stock, and barrel,” he continues. “But records show that it has done quite the opposite and increased home-grown insurgency. Politicians tried to take away the state’s special status which gave rise to hatred and fear. Kashmiris perceive it as threat to their identity. All these large-scale demonstrations and stone pelting are a direct outcome of anger sweeping the state. Modi and his party’s rants of a ‘Hindu India’ might also be easily used as a platform by the Pakistani deep state to form narratives to draw Muslims more towards insurgency,’’ Pai fears. But the Pulwama outrage also presented the Bharatiya Janata Party with a valuable electoral opportunity, one that it’s leadership couldn’t afford to miss. A couple of weeks after the attack, 12 Mirage 2000 Indian fighter jets crossed into Pakistani territory and bombed an alleged Jaish-e-Mohammad terror training camp at Balakot, deep in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The airstrike was meant to send a strong message. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale referred to the action as a ‘nonmilitary pre-emptive strike’. The phrase was a deliberate attempt by India to convey to the international community that this was neither retaliatory nor directed against the Pakistani state but an act of ‘pre-emptive’ counter-terrorism. This was a major shift from the

previous stance adopted by the former NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. During the Kargil war, Vajpayee had forbidden the IAF from crossing the LoC, in order to avoid international recrimination. But this time too, India’s intention was to destroy terrorist targets but not harm Pakistan’s military personnel and infrastructure. It also made sure that civilian casualties were avoided. But following a retaliatory air intrusion by Pakistan, their fighter jets engaged in a dog fight along the LoC in which an Indian pilot’s MiG 21 Bison and a Pakistani F-16 were shot down. The Indian pilot was captured but before matters could escalate, Pakistan released him and offered to help India investigate the involvement of its nationals or use of its territory by JeM. Despite its extreme provocation, Pulwama can be seen as just another milestone in the ‘civilisational’ war the Pakistan Army has embarked upon against India. It is useful to understand why Pakistan has kept waging ‘asymmetrical’ wars against India. India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads ever since partition and after the humiliation of 1971, when it lost half its country, the Pakistan army uses an array of proxy warriors to fight an undeclared war against India under the twin shelters of ‘plausible deniability’ and the threat of nuclear retaliation. As Christine Fair, a political scientist at Georgetown University and one of the most astute scholars of the region’s geopolitics argues, Pakistan is obsessed with changing the map of the sub-continent.

With the world’s third largest Muslim population, India presents an affront to the two-nation theory The creation of Pakistan was based upon the ‘two-nation theory’ which argued for and won separate homelands for the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. But with the world’s third largest Muslim population, India’s very existence presents an affront to the greatest champions of the two-nation theory, the Pakistan Army. Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, is a particularly hard pill to swallow. The Indian Independence Act allowed the Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh, to choose the dominion he would belong to. He opted for independent rule. Pakistan sent in an army of irregulars to capture Kashmir by force and violated a stand-still agreement signed with Singh. Unable to withstand the superior force deployed against him, the maha-

Symbolism not being enough, the two South Asian neighbours have fought four wars | Photo: India Today

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This is the first time a suicide bomber has attacked a CRPF convoy using an explosive-laden vehicle in J&K | Credit: India Today

raja requested India to help him. India agreed on the condition that he sign an instrument of accession to join India. Singh acquiesced and India deployed its soldiers to secure the bulk of Kashmir that Pakistan hadn’t occupied. Since this humiliation, and particularly after the creation of Bangladesh from its eastern flank, Pakistan has tried valiantly to wrestle all of Kashmir from India. It has waged wars, sponsored terrorist attacks on India’s major cities, supplied separatists in Kashmir with arms and ammunition, and tried every trick in the book to force concessions from India. Pakistan has learnt from five decades’ experience that it’s military can begin wars with India but lacks the resources to win them. It has nurtured and deployed terrorists to inflict a continuous cost in civilian and military lives while brandishing the threat of its nuclear weapons to deter an Indian conventional response. It has also lobbied the United States to intervene and pressure India to de-escalate when the

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latter showed signs of retaliation.

n sum, it no longer matters to Pakistan whether it can defeat India or not. But it’s a matter of life and death for Pakistan to show the world that India cannot ignore or defeat it and it will make every effort, no matter what the consequence, to thwart India’s rise. Pulwama is but a stop on that road to perdition. This brings us to the question of what, in the circumstances, can India do to make Pakistan appreciate the futility of its project? There are basically three ways by which India can compel Pakistan to act on the terror groups operating from its soil. ‘’First is the way of mediation,” says Nayak from IDSA. “An outsider, such as the US, China, or the United Nations intervenes and asks Pakistan to do what is needed. The problem with this approach is that China will never go against its ‘all-weather’ friend, Pakistan. China has invested huge money in the China Paki-

stan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and will, therefore, never jeopardise its business interests. The US under Trump is least bothered. Most importantly, the Simla Agreement signed by Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972 prohibits the two neighbours from going for mediation.” “Second, India can use military force which will invite the same from Pakistan,” he continues. “War – we are talking of conventional war and not nuclear -will cost India heavily. India cannot afford to spend its economic strength that it has accumulated over decades on a war right now. A full-scale war will push India back by 30-40 years. We should be glad that the air strikes and the (released pilot) Abhinandan incident did not escalate to something worse.” “The third option is to bring Pakistan to the conference room. But all such efforts have proven inefficacious until now. I think, the best way out is to strengthen the country’s intelligence services,’’ Nayak concludes.

India’s Empty Threat

he 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT) is the major reason why India and Pakistan haven’t gone to war over water. They have fought over Kashmir, the creation of Bangladesh and more recently, over cross-border terrorism. But after the Pulwama attack this February, their water-sharing agreement could become a new battleground. On February 21st, Nitin Gadkari, the union water resources minister tweeted, “Our Govt. has decided to stop our share of water which used to flow in Pakistan. We will divert water from Eastern rivers and supply it to our people in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab”. In 2016, after an army camp in north Kashmir was attacked by Jaish-eMohammad militants, prime minister Narendra Modi had threatened to withdraw from the treaty declaring that, “blood and water cannot flow together”. Months later, once tempers cooled the two nations resumed their joint monitoring of the IWT. What’s different this time is that Pakistan’s government announced it has no problem if India decides to divert the eastern rivers flowing to Pakistan as it does not violate the treaty. Under the IWT, the Indus and its

Credit: The Straits Times

India can use all the water in the Indus basin it’s entitled to without troubling Pakistan, says Malvika Ramesh

fivetributaries that flow from India into Pakistan are divided into eastern and western rivers. India has unrestricted use over the eastern rivers, the Sutlej, Ravi and Beas while Pakistan has unrestricted use over the western rivers, the Chenab, Jhelum and Indus. But because the volume of water in the western rivers is almost thrice that of the eastern rivers, the treaty allows India also unrestricted use of the western rivers forpower generation, domestic, industrial butfor limited agricultural use. Talking about Pakistan, Charles L. Glaser, a scholar of international relations theory, in his book Rational theory of International Politics says, the country is “fundamentally dissatisfied with the status quo, desiring additional territory even when it is not required for security”. As Christine Fair of Georgetown University points out, while the Pakistan army is ideologically wedded to the two-nation theory and considers its mission incomplete till it has seized all of Muslim-dominated Jammu and Kashmir, its key doctrinal publication, The Green Book does not concern itself with the river-sharing issue at all. But one of the

red lines the Pakistan army has said India can cross only at the risk of nuclear retaliation is a threat to its water supplies. Gadkari’s comments, designed to placate an increasingly frustrated Indian public, has little practical value and in no way threatens the terms of the IWT. If India wants to ‘divert’ the eastern rivers, it would require major geo-engineering to route and store the remaining 6-7% of the water that it is currently not using. The problem here is that without this infrastructure, any precipitate action will only lead to massive flooding in Jammu and Kashmir.

he other issue that India is likely to face if it diverts waters is retaliation from China, a key ally of Pakistan. India and China share the waters of the Brahmaputra river that rises in Tibet. Were India to threaten the security of Pakistan by diverting water, China could do the same with the waters of the Brahmaputra river and cause havoc in India’s north-eastern states which depend on that water. Since there are no treaties signed between India and China over the Brahmaputra river, China has a freer hand on the Brahmaputra than India has on the Indus.

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CO M M E N T

Belly of the Beast Uttar Pradesh is the crucible that will decide the fate of BJP, says Yajush Gupta

The Congress is likely to weaken SP-BSP prospects by contesting in seventy-three seats deny prime minister Narendra Modi a second term in office. Once the SP-BSP alliance had been cemented, BSP leader Mayawati explained the rational for keeping other parties out of the fold saying, “Our prior experience with Congress has not been very good. Our votes get transferred to other parties but not the Congress. Looking at our past experience, when it

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Credit: The Print

he Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party (SP-BSP) alliance isn’t just a pact between two bitter rivals, but two subaltern groups at the base of the Indian social pyramid, the other backward classes (OBCs) and the dalits. The SP has traditionally been the party of the yadavs who constitute a large chunk of the OBC population in Uttar Pradesh (UP) while the BSP is the voice of the jatavs, the dominant group within the Dalit community. The success of their alliance lies in their ability to ‘transfer’ votes to each other. Muslims constitute almost 20% of UP’s population and their support will prove crucial to the alliance. There is great insecurity among Muslims in the wake of the numerous attacks on their community by Hindu cow vigilantes and, given their meagre representation in state, they would likely vote en masse for whoever can unseat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But the Congress has thrown a spanner in the works. The party had shown great maturity after the Karnataka assembly polls when, despite winning the most seats, it offered its support to the much smaller Janata Dal (Secular) to form the government and keep the BJP out of power. A similar state-wise strategy, to support whoever had the best prospects of defeating the BJP, is the opposition only realistic hope to

comes to SP and BSP, our votes get consolidated successfully. And that’s why, we have decided to tie-up with SP.” This happened in the 1993 Assembly election in UP, when Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram joined hands to stop the BJP at the peak of the Ayodhya movement. Almost 25 years later, their success was repeated during the by-elections in Phulpur and Gorakhpur in March 2018, when the BSP’s support allowed the SP to trounce the BJP in the strongholds of its chief minister and deputy chief minister. This suggests not just chemistry between their leadership but a deep understanding amongst their voters.

he SP-BSP alliance offered a token two seats to the Congress in its heirlooms Rae Bareilly and Amethi, but the party would have none of it. By deciding to contest almost all seats in the state, the Congress is likely to chip away at the base of the alliance and worse, split the anti-BJP vote in a three-corned fight. A large section of the state’s Muslims may not be as comfortable with the BSP as they would with the Congress. The alliance could face some resistance owing to years of rivalry between them. The understanding between the BSP and SP has been forged at the level of the top leadership. Their cadres have worked against each other for more than two decades. Also, the 2018 by-poll victories came with a wafer-thin margins, with lower voter turnouts because polls don’t generate the fervor and engagement that a general election does. The BSP has a far more committed and loyal cadre than the SP. The divisions within the SP (a reflection of Mr. Mulayam Singh’s decline in recent years) suggests that all is not well within the party. Ms. Mayawati will be able to transfer the BSP’s votes to the SP’s candidates. But in seats where BSP candidates contest, it will not be easy for SP president Akhilesh Yadav to return the favour.

ENVIRONMENT

Poisoning Our Wells Groundwater depletion is the gravest challenge facing urban and rural India alike, says Sindhuja Michael

bout 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water and 96.5% of that water is salty and held in oceans. The remaining freshwater is stored in lakes, ponds, and rivers, ice caps and aquifers. The water cycle of evaporation and condensation helps to maintain the planet’s water balances, to retainhumidity in atmosphere and moisture in the soil to support vegetation and to provide water for human use. After surface water, groundwater is our most reliable watersource. Rainfall is the main natural source of groundwater recharge. But this process breaks down in cities where land is covered by roads and buildings. Hence the rainwater gets washed away into drains and doesn’t percolate into the ground to get stored in aquifers.This was reflected in the Chennai floods of 2017. Chennai sees heavy rains every 10 years orso but what explains the citywide flooding in 2017? The answer is the encroachment of the city’s wetlands by unplanned construction. As our surface sources of water have been almost completely exhausted (80% of it used in agriculture) or con-

“The world can’t survive without water. And morality can’t exist without rains”

-Thirukural

taminated by industrial and household waste, we have become dangerously reliant on our limited groundwater resources. “Groundwater shapes the social and economic health of many urban areas of India,” writes Ankit Patel in his 2009 report Groundwater Situation in Urban India. “In India, 56% of metropolitan cities are dependent on groundwater either fully or partially. Groundwater quality can easily deteriorate byingress of industrial effluents, urban wastewater, overuse of pesticides by cultivators, either directly from casual disposal or indirectly as seepage from treatment lagoons or infiltration from surface watercourses or canals.”

atel gives the example of Bharuch city in Gujarat which depends 90% on surface water since the local groundwater is overexploited and saline. In the surrounding districts, dependency is around 50%as they lie within the Narmada and Mahi river basins which still have water available. Ludhiana in Punjab completely relies on groundwater sources.The groundwater is already contaminated by severe pollution from industries.Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh depends for its entire supply on groundwater, despite lying within the Ganges basin. Out of Bangalore’s 105 lakes, barely four can be classified to be in good health while 25 lakes are

highly contaminated, says a report by Prof. TV Ramachandran of the Centre for Environmental Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The city is fast depleting its ground water reserves too. “Coimbatore had bountiful groundwater supply but that seems to be running out,” says Nagarajan K, a farmer from Sullur, Coimbatore. Before constructing his house, he dug a bore well for drinking water.“In the beginning we used to access groundwater within 20 feet, but now we have to dig up to 600 feet for water.”These aresigns that indicate that even cities with abundant natural water resources like Coimbatore, with the Noyyal and Siruvain rivers, areat risk of drying up and the city might end up with a water crisis in near future. As Patel concludes, “In the regions where groundwater over-development has already occurred, cities are competing with irrigators for water. A limit on growth of both irrigation and urban development can be imposed in the vulnerable areas identified in the study. In addition, many of these locations are surrounded by high industrial polluting units which degrade the quality of groundwater apart from existing contamination. Proper treatment of urban wastewater for re-use in irrigation, industries and recharging of urban aquifers, is one of the options to manage such competing uses.” THE BEAT

E NVI RON M E N T

Missing the Forest for the Trees Traditional forest dwellers are the best protection against encroachment and deforestation. Yet they are being hounded out, says Yajush Gupta

t is an oven-hot noon at Nagarhole National Park, as Chinnappa patiently collects firewood for supper. He is tall, dressed in a dhoti, kurta and a colored turban and belongs to the Kattunayikka tribe of the DB Kuppe range at Nagarhole. “I have heard about this. I have lived here for decades. Leaving here is unimaginable,” he says when asked about the eviction notice to ‘illegal’ occupants of forests issued by the Supreme Court. The recent order by the apex court, which has provisionally been stayed, has threatened the livelihoods of forest-dwelling communities across the country. The apex court agreed to review its verdict, which would have displaced more than a million tribal and non-tribal people from their homes in the forests. On February 13, the court had ordered 21 states to evict nearly 11 lakh families of the tribal population and other forestdwellers who couldn’t provide documentary proof to support their claim to forest land. These states included Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal among others. The apex court passed the verdict while hearing petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. This directly affected millions of adivasi and traditional forest-dweller families, now labelled as “encroachers”. The petitioners had demanded that state

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governments evict those forest dwellers whose claims over traditional forestlands under the landmark law had been rejected. In order to be eligible for rights under the Act, the person has to be a traditional resident of the forests. PJ Dilip Kumar, former director general of forests and special secretary in the union ministry of environment and forests, believes that the issue has multiple layers and defies easy solution. “The problem isn’t just restricted to the non-availability of documents, but it’s the larger issue of the land ownership and title. There are lakhs of adivasis who have encroached in what is known as the “orange area”. These lands, mainly in parts of MP and Chhattisgarh are disputed and claimed by both the revenue and forest departments,” he says. The Supreme Court on August 24, 2007, ordered Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh governments to respond to a petition to clarify the status of at least 1.2 million hectares of orange land. According to an article in Down to Earth magazine, in 1958 control of over 9 million hectares of forestland was handed over to the forest department by a blanket notification but the revenue department did not update the records. In 1965, 4.5 million hectares were brought under the special category protected forests under section 34A of the Indian Forest Act. The other 5.6 million hectares were handed over to the revenue department because they did not fit the category of “forests”. On December 12, 1996, the Supreme Court in a landmark judgment stated: “The word ‘forest’ must be un

derstood according to its dictionary meaning,” suggesting that every (large) area with a group of trees is a forest. This description covers all recognized forests, whether designated as reserved or protected. However, under the threat of looming food shortages in the 1960s, the revenue department had issued pattas (deeds) to many forest dwellers for shifting cultivation. To make matters even further complicated, the Central Empowered Committee constituted by the Supreme Court determined that all lands with trees are “forests’ and must be managed by the forest department. “Across states, large areas have been declared state forests without any survey. Areas under multiple jurisdiction where ownership rights are in complete government-made mess are now being scooped into the forest department’s jurisdiction,” Mr. Kumar adds.While state governments have time and again reiterated their commitment to protecting the rights of the traditional forest dwellers, there has been an alarming rise in the number of claims by the

Credits: downtoearth.org

settlers. According to the government statistics, as many as 2,75,446 claims have been filed in Karnataka alone by people belonging to scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. Knowing that it would be hard for tribal to produce documentary evidence to support for their claims, rule 13 of the Act lays out numerous other proofs for conferring rights, including confirmation of residence by the eldest in the settlement and the condition of structures like houses and huts. “The primary duty of the Court, while interpreting the provisions of the Act, is to adopt a constructive approach. One should not overlook or ignore the hard fact that the claim petitions are filed by persons who would hardly possess any convincing and cogent evidence to the satisfaction of the authorities,” the Gujarat High Court had pointed out in a 2013 judgement. But these exceptions, according to activists, have also given enough opportunity for bogus and illegal claimants to stake claim on forest land and scuttle the claims of genuine and traditional settlers. The Forest Rights Act in itself has

several loopholes which come in the way of approving the rights of traditional forest dwellers. A 2014 report of the high-level Virginius Xaxa Committee, set up to study the socio-economic, health and educational status of tribal communities in India, noted that gram sabhas were rejecting claims of forest-dwellers without assigning reasons. “The rejections are not being communicated to the claimants, and their right to appeal is not being explained to them nor its exercise facilitated.” the report pointed out. Such criticisms of the Act’s implementation weren’t addressed in the Supreme Court’s February 13 verdict.

tate governments must now take the cue and ensure that due process is followed in deciding or rejecting the claims. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, is progressive in the sense that it is the first to legally mandate compensation and restitution for people affected by projects. However, it fails to address the need for minimizing

of acquisition of land and resources. This is not surprising, since the objective of the Act, which seeks to address concerns of those whose livelihoods are affected, simultaneously aims at facilitating land acquisition for ever increasing industrialization and urbanization. Interestingly, on the same day that union government filed a review petition against the Supreme Court’s February 13th verdict in support of the tribal population, it also issued a circular clarifying that obtaining consent of the gram sabha under the Act was no longer necessary to set up commercial projects on forest land. What is needed most to strengthen the Forest Rights Act is an institutional system to support the process of implementation, including strengthening of the gram sabhas, restructuring the functioning of the local level committees and improving the functioning of the monitoring committees. As Mr. Kumar concludes, “It’s a complicated issue and needs a wellplanned and a thoughtful resolution rather than a pan-India order.” THE BEAT

B USI NE S S

Ideological Fodder India’s cow protection movement is irrational, wasteful and extremely cruel to the animals it pretends to safeguard, write Sayantan Sarkar

s if India’s farmers didn’t have enough to worry about, they now face a new menace in the fields, a wandering army of stray cattle that threatens their crops. Ramkrishna Seth, a farmer from Birbhum, West Bengal says farmers have started fencing their fields with barbed wireand tyres. “I have a barb wire fence for my 5 bigha land. Stray cows and buffaloes are one of the main reasons for my crop loss. Farmers around these areas lose close to 2-3 acres of crops due to bovine invasions in fields,” says Seth. With more than 16 million cattle, West Bengal has one of the largest bovine populations in the country. In Karnataka too, with a cattle population of more than 9.5 million, farmers face a crisis of stray bovines. Says J. Manjunath, a farmer from Devegere, Karnataka who owns 2 acres of land, “My corn fields are regularly under threat from the strays. I have lost yields in the past and that is the reason, I have decided to install a barbed wire fence around my crops.” According to the last stray cattle census by the Animal Husbandry Department in 2012, India has about 5.2 million stray bovines. Their numbers are likely to have doubled with the advent of ‘cow vigilantism’ and strict enforcement of laws prohibiting cow slaughter in recent years. Hindu extremists have targeted cow traders in the name of religion. Moreover, amendments to laws and regulations such as Prevention of Cruelty on Animals Act 1960 and laws that prohibit the selling of cows, buffaloes and camels for slaughter has impacted the rural economy and the meat export and leather industries. But the real victims are dairy farmers and minority communities like Muslims and Dalits whose livelihoods and nutritional standards are threatened. Says Jyotsana Jha, a business analyst in Bengaluru, “Cost of keeping a cow which is unproductive would be around Rs. 7,500 per month. For a farmer, who

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Narendra Modi had earlier said that people who slaughter cows and animals were destroying the rivers of milk.

is under agrarian distress, it is quite difficult for him to keep taking care of these cows and buffaloes and that is the sole reason why these animals are abandoned.” She added, “The introduction of newer technologies and equipment in agriculture has limited the use of animals in fields. Therefore, farmers no longer need to use cows and bovine animals to plough the fields. There are also

drops in milk prices which is coupled with restrictions in trade of these animals that has made dairy farming unviable in the country.” The world’s largest milk producer, India has a dairy industry growing at over 15% a year. Farmers cannot afford to keep unproductive cows and buffaloes but traditional avenues for disposing animals past their prime have been closed. Traders and slaughter houses are

wary of selling and trading of meat or leather. Indian leather industries which employs around 2.5 million people has taken a major hit due to the current situation. In June 2017, a state directive in Uttar Pradesh labelled cow slaughter and illegal transport of dairy animals punishable under the National Security Act and Gangsters Act, effectively criminalizing traders. Economists also believes that cow protection laws affect

becomes unproductive even for ploughing in fields. In the prime minister’s own backyard in Gujarat, cow slaughter is a non-bailable offense punishable with life imprisonment, which effectively equates killing a cow with murder. These things have left a heavy trail on the leather export front. 2017 saw the lowest leather exports since 2011. Irregularities in the leather industries as well as the fact that the government has even banned the slaughter of aged

for many farmers and they are forced to abandon their cattle on the roads,” says the farmer who did not wish to be named. “When a cow becomes unproductive, a farmer has to account for its feeding and welfare. This eats into his profits, which makes livelihoods extremely difficult.” But as Seth, the farmer from West Bengal, points out, even productive cows are left to graze on others’ fields. These cows feed on crops that are sprayed with pesticides and fertilizers, which not only affects their health but also contaminates the milk produced by these animals. “Children are often affected when they drink milk from cows which have gorged on those crops sprayed with chemicals,” he says.

Photo: Pictureboss

households which keeps cows and buffaloes for producing milk for a source of income and for their own consumption. If a farmer cannot sell an unproductive bovine, the cost of milk would go up exponentially as the farmer has to compensate for the cost of taking care of unproductive bovines. In the 2014 election campaign, Narendra Modi had said that people who slaughter cows and animals were destroying the rivers of milk. As the bovine population ages, it mostly

and unproductive bovines, have affected revenues generated by the export of meat. India is the world’s largest beef exporter, almost all of it buffalo meat, but even that has been in impacted by the pervasive culture of fear. Says a farmer from West Bengal’s Hooghly district, “Cows have a life span of around 20-22 years or more and can be milked till the age of 12. After that, it is a liability for farmers such as that. Ban on slaughter houses create a dilemma

here are about 5,000 cow shelters in the country according to a survey by Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations. This a miniscule very small number considering the cattle population in India. Uttar Pradesh alone has more than 19.5 million cattle followed by Madhya Pradesh which has 19 million. Maharashtra and Rajasthan follow with 15 million and 13.3 million cattle respectively. The gaushalas in Uttar Pradesh are in a pathetic state and every day cows and buffaloes are herded into these ‘shelters’, where they are left without proper care. An article in the Business Standard noted that a government-run shelter by the name of Kanha Upvan, saw anincrease of 4,000 cows within a period of just seven months. Earlier it used to house around 5,000 cows. Government has announced an interim budget of Rs.750 crores for the protection of bovines. Interestingly, the fate of stray cows and buffaloes have not improved because of this. Plastic bags and other harmful things are often found in the stomachs of stray bovines, which leads to a painful death. Hindustan Times reported in 2017 that around 500 cows starved to death in a government gaushala in Rajasthan. The newspaper also reported that between January 2018 to July 2018, 8,000 cows died due to injuries and diseases in Rajasthan’s Hingonia Gaushala. A similar situation is observed in Madhya Pradesh as well, where 58 cows died in just 28 days in a cow shelter. A government committed to preventing these animals from being slaughtered does little to ensure their welfare, safety and wellbeing. THE BEAT

B USI N E S S

A Kirana at Your Door Urban Indians are spoilt for choice over the variety of products available for home delivery, says Renuka Thakare

he online grocery-delivery business in India is booming. Companies that focus on supplying consumer staples to your door are expanding in India’s metros and looking to push into smaller cities too. Amazon Pantry, Big Basket and Grofers are India’s three largest e-grocers today. But where these companies supply a range grocery, home and personal care products, start-ups like Morning Cart and Daily Ninja have taken grocery delivery to the next level. Instead of just delivering staple groceries to the household, they supply perishables like fresh milk, eggs and breakfast foods to customers’ doorsteps. The Bengaluru based start-up Morning Cart which revolutionised milk delivery in two large pilot projects in Electronic City and in Hebbal, expanded to deliver tender coconuts, fresh flowers for puja, as well as a range of breakfast supplies including idli/dosa batter, cereals and even cooked breakfast before 7 in the morning! Morning Cart hasn’t just eased the household’s morning school-and-office rush but, by leveraging technology, has streamlined the traditional delivery system and made the lives of milk and newspaper vendors a lot easier. By intro-

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ducing e-wallets, they have solved one the thorniest problems issues in home delivery: payment. Morning Cart began working on the idea in 2016, when they created a platform on which customers could place and change orders and make payments while the distributor could monitor the delivery schedule in real time. The process involved creating three applications for customers, milk vendors and delivery dealers to operate their work. It gave the company a 360-degree view customers, vendors and delivery boys. “When we started, we wanted to have a product reaching every house every day, we wanted the highest interaction with each of our subscribers, says Anuj Bishnoi, co-founder of Morning Cart. “That is why we chose milk. Milk and newspapers reach every house every day. Keeping milk as the core product, we built a relationship with customers and a reputation for reliability.” For customers it is a great offering because there’s no minimum order, no delivery charges and the customer has a fixed delivery slot before 7 am. Customers can order until 10 pm for delivery the next morning. The next step

was expanding the range of products to cater to other ‘morning needs’, be it puja supplies, coconut water or breakfast foods. “It is very easy and convenient to use the app, it saves my time, I don’t have to wake up early in the morning to buy milk. The process is hassle-free and I just have to choose everything I need next morning before 10 pm and pay the

Keeping milk as the core product, we built a relationship with customers and a reputation for reliability total amount online”, says Soumya Kandukuri, a Bannerghatta resident. “Milk is the ‘hookup’ product, you know the customer will stay with you because of this daily necessity. Unless you really mess up with the delivery or something, you have a full guarantee that the customer will stick with you,” says Bishnoi. “The frequency of orders from the e-grocery segment was twice or thrice a month because customers had to pay a convenience charge of around Rs.100 every time to get the order delivered. So our pitch to customers was that if they buy milk from us, they will get other items delivered without any charge. This kind of revolutionized the e-grocery segment when people started realising that delivery charges have to go and once we

According to the February’18 Crisil report, online grocery is expected to be the fastest growing sector in online retail | Credit: 123RF.com

focus on convenience, then the market will explode,” He added. Big Basket acquired Morning Cart in November 2018 and brought it under its brand BB Daily. Morning Cart has seen huge growth in these few months with Big Basket. Bishnoi says that in order to grow Morning Cart in an increasing crowded and competitive marketplace they had to partner with one of the grocery majors.

fter many discussions over goals and valuation, and they decided that the market leader Big Basket was the right company to tie up with. Their main aim was to reach households every day and connect with people and make Morning Cart the most commonly used app in the entire household. They currently serve 80,000 orders daily are aiming to service 10 million households by 2020. Morning Cart has categorized their offers in such a way that they are making

money even in milk delivery. Overall they are making a margin of around 15% on their total investment. Why are companies like Big Basket and Grofers investing in start-ups? According to Morning Cart, they want to enter the subscription business and offer customers novel propositions on a daily basis. Their goal is to make Big Basket a part of the customer’s daily life and become the go to point for every need, be it daily, weekly or monthly. Besides milk, tender coconut is Morning Cart’s star product. Every day they deliver more than 10,000 tender coconuts, not just in the southern parts of India, but wherever Big Basket has distribution centres. Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad are the tier1 cities in which they have launched BB Daily.Companies like Daily Ninja, Supr Daily, Milkbasket and Doodhwala are the main competitors in the micro-delivery startup sector. Daily Ninja and Supr Daily have a strong customer base in Benga-

luru and Pune. BB daily has launched its app in 10 different cities. The opportunity in the online grocery business is huge considering that online penetration is tiny and limited to just a handful of cities today. According to The Economic Times, the food and grocery market in India is worth $300-350 billion a year of which the online segment accounts for barely 0.1%. The article points out that barely 2 million Indians shop for groceries online while a single major bricks-and-mortar chain witnessed a million footfalls last year. Given that India has the world’s largest cohort of young people, a group of increasingly tech-savvy consumers who value convenience and time, the online grocery business is likely grow steadily. No wonder the world’s top ecommerce firms, whether Amazon, Alibaba (invested in Big Basket) or Google (invested in Dunzo) are building a presence here. THE BEAT

AG RI CULT U R E

Set Free the Farmer The only solution to India’s agrarian crisis is to allow the farmer the freedom to grow what he wants and sell it to who he wants, says Raveena Bhati

azing at his trees and wondering what his ripening lemons will fetch in the market, Siddarah is a worried man. Will the proceeds help him repay the loan he took for his daughter’s operation? With the sale of both his lemon and pomegranate crops, he is hopeful of making a profit of Rs.20,000 on his investment of Rs.40,000. Small farmers like Siddarah gladly accept even the smallest returns they make. Of course they would like to negotiate a better price but the market is oversold, they have waited six months to get some money in their pockets and there always a creditor knocking on their door. So they accept whatever they get. Siddarah cultivates 6 acres in Kenginal village in the Vijyapura district of Karnataka, an area famous for exporting premium quality lemons all over the world. But there’s also a world of difference between what the local farmer gets and what the exporter earns. In fact while Indi taluk in the same district exports its lemon globally, very few farmers there are even aware of it. They sell to middlemen who on-sell it to exporters for a huge mark up over the purchase or farm-gate price. The creation of an alternative market, one not controlled by middlemen or the Agriculture Produce Market Committee-run mandi, is absolutely if the small farmers is to make a decent living selling directly to end users or consumers. The capacity to store plays a critical role in a farmer’ ability to get a fair price for his produce. Small land holders either depend on middlemen for transportation, storage and selling of their produce or on the, which under the law is required to provide transparency in price discovery to farmers. A farmer from the Srikanhalli village, that lies 5 km from Kenginal, who owns 32 acres of land has built a cold storage of his own, which he uses to store his onion crop. “The prices of onions in the market arelower than what I was expecting. I decided to wait for a better price,” he says. But poorer farm-

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ers like Siddarah are solely dependent on middlemen to take their product either to the APMC or private markets. There can be little transparency in prices when middlemen deal with multiple small farmers, all of whom are under immense pressure to sell. He can quote a much lower rate than even that prevailing in the mandi in the full knowledge that it’s a buyer’s market at harvest, a small farmer cannot afford the cost of transportation and definitely cannot afford to leave his produce to rot. Vijendra Singh, a farmer from Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh says that in order to get a higher price some farmers hold their produce for a little longer. It rarely works. “Often prices remain low and farmers are forced to sell their product at the existing price. The dalal in such circumstances provides a farmer

What the government doesn’t understand is the farmer is not not looking for a handout with the price lower than for what it sold in mandis to get maximum amount at a cheap rate, hence looting the market and farmer both.” The problem of a securing the farmer a fair price lies at the heart of

India’s current agrarian crisis.The solution lies in finding an alternative market. Says Heena MS, a horticulture scientist at the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) in Indi Taluka, Vijyapura district, “The processing industry which can be an alternative for a farmer to sell their farm produce is missing. The lemon market is vast but there are no processing industries present in the taluk or district. Middlemen take advantage of this lack to exploit the small farmers and deny them a profit.” As Dr. Srinivas Ravindra , executive director at the Centre for Sustainable Development in Bangalore explains, “Whenever there is a distress in the supply, huge fluctuations are triggered where the distributor starts playing the role of a dictator in the market. For example, millets were initially sold for Rs.130 but when the fluctuations hit the market the distributors doubled the price.” After studying the problems of farmers over the past two years, the KVK has identified the problem of storage and lack of alternative markets for small farmers as the main impediment to realising a fair price. But they have also suggested changing the product mix to tap entirely new markets. For example, organic farming allows farmers to reach some of the most quality and health-conscious consumers, people willing to pay premium prices for chemical-free food. Another alternative in intercropping that allows the farmer to diversify his produce and markets. In both cases, corporate chains which directly sell to the consumer can give farmers the best deal. They provide him an advance payment, high-quality planting material as well instructions on best practice to get the best yields, and guaranteed buyback when the produce is harvested with an assured price that assures him a healthy profit. Says Anil Mohare, who after working in a company returned to his village to start a farming business, “I am expecting total earnings of Rs.20lakh at the end of this year from the sale of cashewnuts

and grapes along with lemon. I deal directly with the exporters in Vijyapura who give me prices which middlemen will never offer.â&#x20AC;? By comparison, his neighbour in Kenginal village Siddrah, who owns just one acre less than Anil, would be happy to make a profit of just Rs.20,000. The National Agricultural Market or eNAM which came into existence in 2016, is a pan India electronic trading portal which networks the existing APMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities. eNAM aims to eradicate the fraudulent practices of middlemen to improve returns to farmers by bringing together all the APMC mandis, traders, exporters, and farmers on the single platform. It targets the abolition of middlemen and provides transparency among farmers

and consumers directly.

DI Natural, a Bangalore-based electronic exchange for organic products is a corporate twin to eNAM, where the farmers can display their products and asking price and a consumer on the platform can bid for quantities directly from the farmer. The alternative markets and technological solutions offered by the likes of E-NAM and ADI Natural could make a world of difference to Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agrarian economy but their pace of adoption is slow as most farmers in the more remote parts of the country are still unaware of them. Organizations such as KVK are providing farmers opportunities to come together and learn about these new approaches. KVK in Indi taluk for example is training 130 farmers, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

still early days. In the interim budget presented to Parliament on February 2, the Modi government made a conscious effort to address the problems of small farmers by offering cash assistance to them. Under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi or PM-KISAN, it promised Rs.6,000 a year to all families who own less than five acres of land, with the first instalment of Rs.2,000 to be paid in March,just before the Lok-Sabha election.What the government fails to seriously comprehend here is that farmers are not only asking for benevolent handouts. They want an opportunity to do business fairly, access to credit, to storage facilities, to better transport infrastructure but most of all, to markets that will give them a fair price for their produce.

Small farmers are under immedsf a pressure to sell at rates even lower than in mandis

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SO CI E T Y

Slaves of Gods and Men

Photographs: Getty Images

Pubescent girls are still forced into sexual relationships in the name of serving God, says Anuradha Sriram

evadasis, the slaves of gods are well known for their sacrifice to the Temple Goddess in the rural districts of Karnataka. They are devout caretakers of the Goddess who have given their lives to the service of the deities. They can be beautiful dancers or singers but from theirearliest years they are subjected to sexual exploitation. According to the government of Karnataka, the state is still home to 9,733 devadasis despite the practice having been abolished by law in 1988. A typical devadasi belongs to a low caste and, in the name of serving the God, she is forced into sexual relationships with men. The story of the devadasi is tragic. She loses herfreedom and control over her body and her life so completely she starts to believe that she was born to this fate. Their livesare miserable, any child is born of their relationshipsdoesn’t even get the father’s name and many die destitute and uncared for, often riven with AIDS or

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other sexually transmitted diseases. The youngdevadasis are robbed of a childhood, education and are never exposed to the outside world in their entire lives. Once past their prime or if they get pregnant, their partners desert them. When they turn 45-50, they unlikely to have anyone to care for them and suffer from malnutrition.It is when the devadasi mothers face difficulty in supporting their children and struggle to make a basic living, that they turn to prostitution. Padmavathi is a mid-aged woman from the Harapanahalli Taluk in Davangere district in central Karnataka. She was barely six years old when her parents devoted her to Uchangi Durga, a very famous temple in the district. She wasn’t given even a basic education and all she did her entire childhood was serve the Goddess. She knew very little about the devadasi system, until when she started menstruating. She was then forced to

get sexually involved with men and allow complete strangers to control her life.“I was forced to submit my body even when was I menstruating. I was in my teens and the man was in his early 30s,” recalls Padma. “I was draped in a purple silk saree with a braid of jasmine aroundmy head. I didn’t know what fate had planned for me. I was finally sent to a dark room to be a mid-aged man’s pleasure for my first-night ceremony,” narrates Padma. “There has been no one in the society who has come back to help us. Media always comes and asks about our lifestyle, our way of living, our story but nobody did take any attempts to protect us or our community from getting exploited,” says Padma. Padmavathi is now in her late 50s and has a son named Mallikarjun, who is 27 years old. He is considered an illegitimate child. Like Mallikarjun there are several such children who are born

Credit:Getty Images

My caste didn’t stop upper caste men from having a physical relationship with me the sex trade.

to devadasis and are shunned by the society. They are not accepted as they do not know who their biological father is. Devdasis are usually taken from the lower castes and a lack of education makes them believe that their sole purpose in life is to dedicate themselves to the goddesses. There are a number of social beliefs in Indian society that perpetuates the devadasi system. Patriarchy, religion and caste combine to create a system for the landed gentry, the temple’s chief patrons, to abuse young women in the name of God. Yellamma is fair and good looking which proved to be an advantage for her in the course of her life as a devadasi. She choked while she narrated all that has befallen her over the past decade and how she still unwillingly is tied to

mother of two, a toddler and a six-year-old daughter, Yellamma suffers from AIDS and blames her recent partner for the disease. Unlike other devadasis, she volunteered into this business because of her parents’ extreme poverty. Also, since she belongs to the scheduled tribes, it became easy for her to serve as a sexual worker in the name of devoting herself to the goddess. “My madiga caste didn’t stop upper caste men from having a physical relationship with me,” she says. “Nobody has ever considered marrying me because of my profession. Being the only child of illiterate poor parents, circumstances forced me to get into this. Poverty is bad. I pray to god no

one gets trapped in it. I wish I could have a better life for myself,” Yellamma sobs. The men she lived with didn’t even look after the basic needs of her family. When Yellamma discovered she was pregnant, she had to visit the hospital all by herself and even sold her muttu, a devadasis symbol tied to her neck, to buy medicines. Once, the devadasi system was an occupation centred around taking care of the temple and performing rituals, but also learning classical musical and dance traditions like Bharatanatyam and Odissi. The women had social status, as dance and music were an essential part of temple worship. Today it is little more than tawdry ruse to trap young women. .in a life of sexual slavery.

From the left: Yellamma and Padmavati; holding their Muttu-a sign of their servitude THE BEAT

H E ALT H

An Area of Darkness Ignorance about menstrual hygiene is responsible for some of the most serious health problems facing Indian women, says Anuradha Sriram

School girls learn to shun the social taboos concerning menstrual hygiene

arti shyly and happily accepted the packet of sanitary napkins handed to her. She has just turned 14 but as her parents couldn’t afford to buy her sanitary napkins, until now she had been using a piece of cotton cloth to stay dry.“I will use sanitary napkins for the first time in my life,”says Aarti smiling after receiving a pack of napkins from an NGO. Aarti is from Bareilly, a small town in Uttar Pradesh and from. Poor family. She attended an awareness camp named ‘The Green Period’ arranged by the motherdaughter duo, Anahita and Agrima who had come down from Mumbai to talk to women in rural India regarding menstrual hygiene. Menstruation is a monthly cyclestretching over three decades of a woman’s life and is poorly understood as it’s often a taboo in traditional societies. Women generally are not exposed to the science of how their body develops and changes during puberty. The lack of awareness, knowledge and hygiene during those days of the month can cause

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| Credit: Sukhibhava.org

life threatening diseases. Unhygienic practices during menstruation, such as using unsterilizedcloth,can increase vulnerability to urinary tract and reproductive tract infections. Poor menstrual hygiene is also associated with the growing incidence of cervical cancer, a disease that kills 72,000 women in India every year. “The problem of menstrual hygiene in India is that it is considered dirty because of the lack of awareness,” saysTanasha Bannerjee, team leader of menstrual-hygiene management at Dasra, a Mumbai-based non-governmental organization (NGO). “The woman is restricted from going to the kitchen for her daily course of work. Seen as a ‘dirty’ occurrence, a menstruating girl is either isolated or forced to drop out of school. There are a number of steps being taken both at rural and urban levels to make young girls and women aware of menstrual hygiene.” “Women in India are growing up unaware of the real reasons for men-

struation and the taboo surrounding menstruation remains a part of their growing up and continues with their daughters,”says Bannerjee. ‘Menses’ is not dirty or polluting. It is a very natural occurrence in a girl’s body and hygiene is of utmost importance as it plays a vital role in keeping a woman’s well-being. Sadly, 70% of women in India regard menses as dirty and ‘polluting’. Women restrict themselves and their daughters from going into the kitchen, temples or participating in any rituals during periods. India is still trapped in myths about menstruation. Knowledge of menstruation before the onset of menarche, or the first menstrual bleeding, is a must. In a survey conducted by Sachi Saheli, an NGO in New Delhi that works towards spreading menstrual hygiene, 56% of the girls were found not having knowledge of the menstrual cycle. Often, girls who are unable to afford sanitary napkins tend to drop out of school after they attain puberty only because they cannot handle the heavy

bleeding. In a 2014 report, Dasra estimated that 23 million girls dropped out of school because of lack of proper menstrual management facilities in the school. A total of 66% women were unaware of menstrual hygiene. Just 2-3% of women in rural India are estimated to use sanitary napkins and this leads to women adopting unhygienic practices during menses. Since menstrual hygiene has become of great health concern, many NGOs are now trying to make women and teenagers in rural and urban areas aware of the menstrual hygiene. One such NGO is Sukhibhava based in Bengaluru, which aims to educate a million girls about various issues concerning menstrual health and hygiene. Sukhibhava’s Period fellowship trains around 40 women to educate others across India. The project currently focuses on Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune and few districts of Karnataka. Says Dilip Pattubala, co-founder of Sukhibhava, “Unlike other NGOs, Sukhibhava is concerned with changing stigmas and misunderstanding around menstruation. It helps spread awareness and increase accessibility to hygiene products at subsidized rates.”Sukhibhava, trains its volunteers for three weeks and then deploys them to various regions. Food, travel and lodging expenses are taken care by the NGO and stipend of Rs.25,000 per month paid to the volunteers. The importance of menstrual hygiene has gained recognition through numerous workshops and campaigns. One brilliant initiative to reach women in rural India, inspired by Akshay Kumar’s movie Padman about an entrepreneur who created affordable sanitary pads, is the mother-daughter duo who founded Project Green Period. Agrima Makharia, an 11th grade student of Oberoi International School Mumbai, focuses on improving the health and hygiene of girls from small villages in Sonbhadra district in Uttar Pradesh by teaching them about the menstrual cycle and the use of sanitary napkins to stay healthy and hygienic. The several social taboos related to menses instigated Agrima to address this superstition and in turn develop a platform where the girls can start using sanitary napkins instead of cotton cloth. The project concentrates on tackling the issues of high cost, lack of availability of cheaper sanitary napkins and educating women. Says Agrima, “I want to create a solution which is long lasting and

permanent, which can be viable in the long run than doing something that is temporary.” For women in rural districts, use of sanitary napkins is considered a luxury. This is because of the lack of availability of napkins, awareness and high costs.Agrima’s mother Anahitasays that when she interviewed a few women in Magardha, which is about 200km from Varanasi, they weren’t reluctant to use pads but the shops they could buy pads from were 5 km away.

reen Period aims to distribute biodegradable pads to women and teenagers of rural Uttar Pradesh and extend a hand towards healthier living. Agrima and her mother initially raised funds for the project by putting up stalls and selling homemade lemonade, sev puri and popcorn packs in the school campus during school fests, parents-teacher’s meetings etc. raising around Rs.25,000 per stall. They have now created a trust called Parivartan Global to raise funds for this project. Agrima gets the sanitary pads manufactured bya social entrepreneur, Mahesh Khandelwal who is based out

of Mathura and had received a National Unity Award in 1993 from the former Indian President Mr. R. Venkatraman, for his social service.A pack contains 10 XL sized pads which costs Rs 20. These affordable pads were distributed in many such government schools in Sonbhadra district. Chitransh Saxena, is an IT professional from Bareilly and founder of the Pad Bank. He has created a ‘pad bank’ in the town where he sells sanitary napkins for a minimal cost. The Pad Bank mostly targets slums, schools and households to organize awareness programs on menstrual hygiene and at the end of the program the Pad Bank team gives a passbook to women and girls who cannot afford a sanitary pad.“Every month the team visits the enrolled member’s house and give 8 sanitary pads for free,” says Chitransh. These are among many such initiatives being launched to address one of the most serious health concerns facing Indian women. It’s time everyone understands the importance of menstrual hygiene and that periods are part of a natural and healthy regenerative cycle and not something to be ashamed of.

Distribution of the sanitary napkins in the menstrual hygiene camps to the underpriviledged girls | Photo: sukhibhava.org

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SPO RT S

Lions of the Pamir Afghan cricket reflects a spirit that is unafraid to take on the biggest players in the game and win, writes Anurag Mann

the ACC Twenty20 Cup,jointly with Oman in 2007. They qualified for their first-ever Cricket World Cup in 2015 co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand. In the Asia Cup 2018,Afghanistan showed how far they had come in ODI cricket where they defeated Sri Lanka for the first time and held India to a tie. To date they have played 111 ODI matches and are currently ranked 10th in the ICC’s ODI rankings. Afghanistan played their first T-20 match against Ireland in February 2010 and have participated in four T-20 World Cups since then. In the World Cup 2016, Afghanistan surprised everyone by beating West Indies in a league match. The victory was a special one because that was the first time Afghanistan had beaten a test-playing nation. They are currently ranked eighth in T-20 rankings, ahead of both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. A key element in Afghanistan’s success has been their spin bowling, with Rashid Khan, Mohammad Nabi and the newcomer Mujeeb Ur Rahman all playing vital roles. Rashid Khan is the current World No 1 T-20 bowler and holds a few

records that every young bowler aspires to at the international level. He is the fastest and youngest bowler to take 100 wickets in ODIs. He achieved the feat in his 44th ODI breaking the record of Australia’s Mitchell Starc, who got his 100th dismissal in the 52nd match. He also holds the history of the fastest bowler to take 50 wickets in T 20 games.

hough Rashid has been impressive since his debut against Zimbabwe in October 2015, the exposure that he got from playing T-20 leagues across the world brought a lot of success to his country. He got his first Indian Premier League contract in 2017 when he was picked up by Sunrisers Hyderabad. He impressed everyone with 17 wickets in 14 matches with a strike rate of 19.05 and economy of 6.62 per over. That confidence boosted his career as he started performing exceptionally for his country as well. Later, he got offers from other T-20 leagues like the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash League and the Pakistan Super League. He has improved his batting skills as well and is scoring important runs for his teams in the death overs. He is the star who has given Afghanistan special recognition in World. In the World Cup 2019 qualifiers, Afghanistan stunned everyone with their excellent performances. They were only second best to three-time world champions West Indies. With the incredible promise they have shown, Afghanistan could well be the next big Asian challenger in world cricket. Credit: Cricket Australia

arch 18, 2019 will go down as a red-letter day in the history of South Asian cricket, when Afghanistan won their first test match against Ireland. Afghanistan, who became the 12th test-cricket playing member of International Cricket Council (ICC) in 2017, were playing just their second test match ever.The victory is all the more remarkable considering the grit and determination of a team whose country has been torn apart by decades of civil war. Cricket came to Afghanistan in the 19th century. However, the first step to bring Afghan Cricket to the world stage was in taken in 1995 with the formation of Afghanistan Cricket Board.The next big moment came in 2001 when they got ICCaffiliation and then became a member of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) in 2003. Pakistan played a vital role in developing Afghan cricket by inviting them to play in their domestic tournaments. They finished sixth in the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) Trophy in Kuala Lumpur, were runners up in the Middle East Cup in 2006 and won their first tournament,

Afghanistan’s success owes to their spin bowling with Rashid Khan, Mohammad Nabi and Mujeeb Ur Rahman playing key roles

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REVIEW

Uri:A Mid-life Crisis

ar films have always presented a problem. They could serve as reenactments of historic battles as in The Longest Day or The Thin Red Line, attempts to reconstruct complex situations in the light of subsequent events. But more often, they serve no purpose than thinly-disguised justifications for blood-letting and violence andreinforce simple‘us versus them’ narratives, morality plays where the good guys win. Aditya Dhar’s Uri-The Surgical Strike is neither. In fact, it is not even strictly a war film. It is less The Hurt Locker and more The Avengers.The protagonist of the film is Major Vihaan Shergill, a man who can do no wrong. Played by Vicky Kaushal,Shergill is brought out of a staff job to leada covert operation (and incidentally, also avenge the death of his brother in law). Among other things, Shergill is a dutiful son, a loyal friend and a more importantly, ‘an officer in the Indian Army’. In short, he’s not someone to be messed with, just a walking cliché. In the final scenes of the film, where Shergill is beating a man to pulp, he roars, “You snuck into my house and killed my brothers. I’ll

Credit: IMDb

By trivializing war, Uri insults our armed forces and our collective intelligence, says Ajay Ramanathan

sneak into your house and kill yours.” Where Uri works is in its action sequences. The film is helped by some slick camerawork that make the combat sequences a treat to watch. At its heart, Uri is your average Salman Khan film that plays on the good versus bad formula. Good being India and bad equals Pakistan. In one noteworthy scene, Major Shergill says, “They want Kashmir, we want their heads.” Another scene portrays a Pakistani bureaucrat as a flatulent clown. For a movie that claims to be inspired by real-life events, this is a serious problem. Films cannot be looked at in isolation. After all, they are made in a particular social climate. As the description goes, Uri is a dramatized portrayal of the Indian army’s retaliation to the 2016 Uri attacks on an Indian army base in Kashmir. To put the film in context, we have to go back a couple of years to the prime minister’s sudden decision to delegitimize 86% of the country’s currency and cause untold misery and massive economic dislocation. Any criticism of the government thereafter became an act of treason. Appropriately, “soldiers are dying on the border” became the

standard response to Mr. Modi’s effete critics. And believe it or not, this equivalence of blind loyalty to the government and patriotism has been gobbled up by the Indian public along with the 9’o clock noise, sorry news. ‘Go to Pakistan’ was the corollary.

ri was produced for this freshlyminted desh bhakt. However, to suggest that the film demonizes Pakistan would be incorrect. The film makes it clear that the targets of the surgical strike were terrorists and not the ordinary citizens of Pakistan. However, these spells of rationality are few and far between. What makes this movie’s treatment of a serious issue so galling is that we have seen films like Raazi just last year that dealt with an earlier impending war with Pakistan but with a little thought and a lot more imagination. Uri is not even like Border,which tried to understand the army and portray its compulsions with far more nuance and understanding.Rather, Uri is founded on a simple formula that jingoism sells. With the defence minister’s public endorsement, is it any wonder that it’s a runaway box office hit? THE BEAT

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When Life Mimics Art

t is not easy to feel amazed and terrified at the same time, but Velvet Buzzsaw will do that to you. Art is dangerous, the movie tells you, and might hunt you down and murder you. The eccentric movie, that popped up on Netflix this January, is an art-horror film with a hint of satire and dark comedy. It features megastars like Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo and Toni Colette. The story tells how art-gallery owners, high-profile art advisers and critics control the market and play with artists and art pieces for money and fame. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Morf Vendewalt, an intimidating and ambitious art critic who is one of the most respected figures in the art world. The imperious industry is hit by a storm when a dead artist’s paintings are found by Josephina, an undervalued employee at an eminent gallery. Painted by an unknown artist, Dease, his work portrays pain, violence and madness. Some are unfinished but nonetheless sellfor huge sums andhelp catapult Josephina to the heightsof the art world. The artwork in Velvet Buzzsaw is not restricted to paintings; there are artsy robots and metal spheres thatsell for $4 million, which director Dan Gilroy

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Credit: Netflix

Velvet Buzzsaw is a morality tale presented in an art-horror movie genre, says Jignasa Sinha

uses to mock the state of the contemporary art world. But the satire is soon over-shadowed by old-school horror, which comes in the form of the “otherworldly” influences of the dead artist. Art becomes the antagonist of the film, the blood and characters in the paintings sparing no one. The paintings and visuals are powerful metaphors of the evil that is waiting to be unleashed. The paintings turn out to contain a mysterious serial killer, an unknown force or spirit that starts targeting all these narcissistic, greedy people. These are the ones who collect, trade inand profit from Dease’s art. The camera captures the ‘anatomy’ of the paintings and suggest that blood serum and tissue were used to create the shades of red and black on the canvas. Murderous artwork maybe new but the film follows the well-worn trail of movies where mysterious creatures kill multiple people to seek revenge. The supernatural element attributed to the artwork is a not entirely new either, evoking suggestions of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey and its moral viewpoint. Velvet Buzzsawclearly takes a lot of inspiration from the 1965 cult movie Color

Me Blood Red which similarly is about an artist who garnered success by using human blood in his paintings. The movie ends after a series of inexplicable murders that teach the elite industry a lesson in humility. The gallery owners sell all the art at nominal prices to escape death but unfortunately cannot escape its clutches. Art, the movie suggests, is sadistic and the movie ends with the art being sold on the sidewalk with the inevitable consequence of reaching more people and destroying their lives.

elvet Buzzsaw unveils the reality of the art world, how art has been reduced to a commodity and the failure of creativity, genuine art and emotions to trump money. It revolves around influential and elite people in the industry who have the power to crush budding artists and art galleries alike. The director plays with multiple genres and is able to deliver a great story with a powerful message, but in the second half of the movie, the integrity of some of its genres is lost and a generic and predictable cinematic plotline takes the front seat.

REVIEW

Underdog to Top Dog

Credit: IMDb

With KGF, Kannada cinema discovers that big-budget films can make money, provided they stick to formula says Ajay Biradar

ne of the most keenly awaited Kannada movies in recent times, Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) has finally hitIndianscreens. Narrated byjournalist Anand to his colleague Deepa, the story revolves around six characters Rocky, Reena, Garuda, Andrews, Shetty and Inayath. The movie portrays the protagonist Rocky’s hunger for power and traces his journeyfrom rags to riches. It’s a heady brew of politics, crime, business -- and plenty of action. Plot wise, KGF is your average gangster-action film. There are a few romantic scenes that adda bizarre, apparently comic touch to the film. For instance, in one scene, the female lead is partying on the streets when she meets the protagonist. “I love you,” he says the minute he makes eye contact with her. ‘How dare you?’ she replies. ’How fair are you?’ our hero wisecracks. He then beats up the 30 goons hired by her father to ward offsuch Romeos. Where the film works, however, are in its action sequences. With heavy calibre triumphing martial arts, the action scenes are helped by some heavy lifting on part of the cinematographer Bhuvan Gowda. In an interview with TheIndian

Express, Gowdasaid the movie was shot entirely with a shoulder-held camera. He alluded to the fact that he had even been injured during the shoot. This ordeal has paid off however, with the camerawork looking as slick as ever. The mix of ‘day and night sequences’ have been executed well. Where the film suffers however, is the plot. Many a Kannada film hero has been infected by an inability to offer nothing more than gun-wielding machismo. What began with much promise fizzles into mediocrity in the time it one takes to grab a bucket of popcorn. What this means is that KGF will be a smash hit at the box office.

he total budget of the movie was Rs.80 crores, and hasalready managed to earn Rs.200 crores worldwide. It stands at number four on the list of highest grossing films in south India, having earned Rs.100 crores in Karnataka alone. It is also the first Kannada movie to be released in Pakistan. It has not only broken records in Sandalwood but also challenged Shah Rukh Khan’s Zero, Ranveer Singh’s Simmba and Vicky Kaushal’s Uri: The Surgical Strike. It has

also been released in other south Indian regional languages like Telegu, Malayalam, and Tamil besides in Hindi. It is the first Kannada movie to be featured in Amazon Prime, its digital rights having been sold to Amazon for Rs.18 crores. The satellite rights have been bought by Colours Kannada. The movie is written and directed by Prashanth Neel, who made his debut 2014’sUgramm. That film was one of the highest grossing filmsof 2014 for which he has won South Indian International Movie Awards(SIMMA) best debutant director in 2015.He won online filmindustry tracker Filmibeat’s best director award for KGF in 2018. As popular Kannada films go, KGF is not a bad movie. The action sequences and song and dance routines will keep you entertained for its running time of nearly three hours. The film ends at a point that suggests a sequel is in the making, so it looks like the KGF franchise will be with us for the foreseeable future. However, for an industry that not too long ago released aquality film like Ondhu Mottea Kathe, the success of KGF is a pointer to the direction that the Kannada film industryis headeds. THE BEAT

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Dreambook for Our Times Tagore and Rolland tried to imagine a world at peace with itself, writes Sounak Das

lbert Einstein is usually considered Rabindranath Tagore’s primary interlocutor in Europe. The Nobel laureates discussed such philosophical questions as free will, the concept of ever-lasting truth and beauty, and Eastern and Western music. Their relationship was at once iconic and awe-inspiring. Yet, their correspondence offers little insight, which might be a hard pill to swallow for many adorers of the two geniuses. However, when one reads Tagore’s correspondence with the French writer, Romain Rolland, who also received the Nobel Prize for Literature, one encounters a deep engagement between two of the last century’s great intellectuals as they seek to make sense of a troubled world. Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence (1919-1940) compiles for English readers the letters and telegrams exchanged by these two cultural icons. It is not only a correspondence between two men but a dialogue between two different nations, twodifferent cultures, two very different histories. Chinmoy Guha, one of India’s greatest French scholars, has edited and annotated this correspondence and brings to light some unknown and unusual aspects of the two great minds. There is a certain connection that can be discerned by the reader which Tagore and Rolland shared for almost 20 years. This relationship reflected their constant efforts at sowing the seeds of peace both philosophically and spiritually, and therefore, had deep meaning. Although the French master never

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visited India, hefelt part of its ethos. He adopted theIndian spiritual way of life, learnt from the Bengali polymath and

from works of men like Swami Vivekananda and found comfort and inspiration in India’s spiritual teachings. The two men felt that if Europe and India grew together, hand in hand, one taking and giving equally to the other, a ‘new man’ would evolve from their collaboration. The French humanist believed that Europe was in decline and Asia would eventually reclaim its seat at the high table in the assembly of the world. The emphatic idealism which the Frenchman and the Indian shared might seem to us somewhat over the top today. History has harshly taught us this. Still, a careful perusal of the correspon-

dence reveals that Rolland was more realistic and grounded of the two. A very interesting part of the book deals with their disagreements. Tagore visited Italy in 1926 and there met Benito Mussolini. Tagore’s speeches gave the mistaken impression that he supported the fascist regime. The Italian dictator quickly took advantage of the situation and created a favourable image for himself and his party in the eyes of the world. The unfortunate incident inspired many misunderstandings between Tagore and Rolland. Tagore was respectfully reprimanded by Rolland for this. Those who are interested in knowing the ins and outs of the affair will find Guha explaining it with letters and documents to support. The book also explores how Rolland always regretted that he could never visit Santiniketan and couldn’t directly communicate with Tagore. Tagore wrote his letters in English. Rolland was helped by his sister, Madeleine Rolland, to whom the book is dedicated, in reading them as she painstakingly translated the letters. The relationship of the two with Mahatma Gandhi was also a problematic area: Rolland was reverential to Gandhi, whereas Tagore had a troubled relationship with him.

great deal of effort has gone into producing this compendium. Guha’s scholarship is evident in the explanatory and interpretative endnotes. The introduction is both factual and inspiring and there are several appendices in which he provides a collection of letters written by people around the two greats. This makes the work one of its kind.

Namma Champions!!!

engaluru FC beat FC Goa 1-0 to win their maiden Indian Super League title. This makes them the first former I-League champions to have won the ISL. Rahul Bheke scored in the 116th minute with a well-placed header after a set-piece routine to win the title for his team. Both sides were playing the ISL final for a second time with FC Goa having lost to Chennaiyin FC in 2015 and Bengaluru FC to the same side last year. They also won the Federation Cup 2014-15.

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Tejinder Parmar