Open magazine TruePDF 25 march 2019

The hybrid sTarIn a world of ageing Khans who’ve had a particularly terrible 2018, the whispers about Ranveer Singh being the new Khan on the block are becoming louder Cover by Saurabh

The hybrid sTar

In a world of ageing Khans who’ve had

a particularly terrible 2018, the whispers

about Ranveer Singh being the new

Khan on the block are becoming louder

Cover by

Saurabh Singh

36

The gender card

The outrage at the Pollachi sex abuse

racket gives Opposition politicians a

foothold in the battle to win the trust

of women, a constituency methodically

cultivated by MGR and Jayalalithaa

By V Shoba

40

The rediscovery oF india

Recent archaeological studies shed some light on 1,500 years after the collapse of the Harappan civilisation

a hero oF oUr Time

The rise of Ranveer Singh is the triumph

of the outsider The new sensation

of Hindi cinema on the thrills and

travails of his journey

gUTs & baLLs

The Dhoni question

By Aditya Iyer

LosT & FoUnd hisTories

The travels of a deity

By Ranjit Hoskote

12

30

righT on Time

Nationalism is back as a persuasive

theme in this general election

By PR Ramesh and Siddharth Singh

Apollo Hospitals and Times Now present India's first reality based medical emergency series Inspired by true events at the Apollo Emergency, showing real challenges faced by the doctors and their medical teams who are running against time, fighting odds to save lives from the brink of trauma and death It's a gripping series with a collage of emotions that make you feel life is worth fighting for.

Saturday 9:30 A.M | Sunday 1:30 P.M Tune into

lessons from pulwama

Pakistan keeps meddling in India despite being overbur-dened with internal conflicts between Punjabis and Sin-dhis, ‘natives’ and Muhajjirs, Sunnis and Shias and Ahma-dis, Pakhtuns and the rest, the civilian government and military, and so on (‘Seven Minutes That Changed India’, March 18th, 2019) It has always turned a blind eye

to terror factories on its soil for that sole purpose Imran Khan’s promise of ‘Naya Paki-stan’ is hollow since it has led

to no improvement on this front The Pulwama attack only reveals that Pakistan is uninterested in mending its ways Therefore, India’s focus should be on strengthening the intelligence machinery and improving defence

editor@openmedianetwork.in

preparedness rather than convincing an intransigent world about Pakistan

MY ShariffPrime Minister Modi’s firm and path-breaking response

to the Pulwama attack is commendable We should have updated our strategic thinking long ago But better late than never Besides, our response has not only consolidated Modi’s position but has also put the Congress and the rest of the opposition

on the back foot If it wishes

to not worsen its position, the opposition would be well advised to refrain from its

‘bleeding-heart’ criticism

However, the BJP should also stay away from overplaying its hand and exploiting the Government’s response to

Pulwama for the Lok Sabha elections Our forces are not for politicking

Jaideep Mittra

urban mess

Bibek Debroy’s column was

a timely reminder about the urban explosion this country

is witnessing outside the metros that hog not only the media’s attention but also the policymakers (‘Out of Town’, March 18th, 2019) India’s

‘smaller’ towns are a ticking bomb

B Kappagantula

coalition or crowd?

The opposition remains a divided house outside TV stu-dios (‘The Illusion of Unity’, March 18th, 2019) With noth-ing more than an anti-Modi polemic to unite them, it does not look likely the BJP needs

to worry much in the run-up

to the General Election next month

Radhika Ray

bottom-up innovation

Given that big capitalism

only leads us to crashes à la

2008 and excessive satisation, it’s time we gave small capitalism a chance to prove itself (‘The Illusion of Unity’, March 18th, 2019)

centrali-Varni Dhaka

C letter of the week

C Christine Fair’s essay hit the nail on America’s tacit condoning of Pakistan’s role in terrorism in India (‘Pakistani Hubris and American Cupidity’, March 18th, 2019) As she rightly pointed out, the American press is still stuck in its false equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim And by giving in to jingo-ism post-Pulwama, we are only confirming the image that the Pakistan Army has constructed for itself of an India unwelcoming to anyone except Hindus Fair is correct in saying that we are only helping the Pakistani forces and making things difficult for those civilians

on both sides of the border who dream of their tries differently Anyone who believes a ‘strong and befitting’ response to Pakistan after a terror attack is going to be enough to deter them is forgetting the long history on our borders and our several futile attempts

coun-at convincing the interncoun-ational community, especially the US, to censure our neighbour in stronger terms than mere statements and formal condemnation

Unless Pakistan’s global backers realise how mistaken their geopolitical thinking remains with respect to that country, Indian military responses will not lead to any long-term, substantive change in the situation

Rupa Das

Editor S Prasannarajan

managing Editor Pr ramesh

ExEcutivE Editor ullekh nP

Editor-at-largE Siddharth Singh

dEPuty EditorS madhavankutty Pillai

(mumbai Bureau chief) ,

rahul Pandita, amita Shah,

v Shoba (Bangalore), nandini nair

crEativE dirEctor rohit chawla

art dirEctor Jyoti K Singh

SEnior EditorS lhendup gyatso Bhutia

(mumbai), moinak mitra

aSSociatE EditorS vijay K Soni (Web),

Sonali acharjee, aditya iyer,

Shahina KK

aSSiStant Editor vipul vivek

chiEf of graPhicS Saurabh Singh

SEnior dESignErS anup Banerjee,

veer Pal Singh

Photo Editor raul irani

dEPuty Photo Editor ashish Sharma

aSSociatE PuBliShEr

Pankaj Jayaswal

national hEad-EvEntS and initiativES

arpita Sachin ahuja

gEnEral managErS (advErtiSing)

rashmi lata Swarup,

Siddhartha Basu chatterjee (West),

uma Srinivasan (South)

national hEad-diStriBution and SalES

ajay gupta

rEgional hEadS-circulation

d charles (South), melvin george

(West), Basab ghosh (East)

hEad-Production maneesh tyagi

SEnior managEr (PrE-PrESS)

cfo anil Bisht

chiEf ExEcutivE & PuBliShEr

neeraja chawla

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Editor: S Prasannarajan Printed and

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www.openthemagazine.com 7

25 march 2019

A crAzy trip thAt began

early in the morning with a car

journey from Delhi to Kurukshetra

in haryana culminated late at night

in Santiniketan, the rural bliss that

rabindranath tagore had sought for

his centre of alternative learning

Alas, there is not too much of the

‘alternative’ that is in evidence at

Visva-Bharati these days there is of course

the overpowering presence of Gurudev

and the tasteful campus he created

But apart from the glass mandir, the

china Bhavan, the bark shawls and the

conscious cultivation of the fine arts,

Visva-Bharati has become yet another

central university—certainly better

maintained and better funded than

other universities in West Bengal, but

by no means a centre of the alternative

education tagore had envisaged

i had travelled to Santiniketan

to deliver a lecture on trends in

contemporary indian politics that

the Ministry of human resource

Development in Delhi had sponsored

the present Vice-chancellor Bidyut

chakrabarty had been a doctoral

student at the London School of

Economics during the time i was at

the SOAS he quietly told me that it

would be advisable to make my lecture

bilingual—a mixture of English and

Bengali “the students will grasp it

better,” he told me

in the afternoon before the

lecture, i requested him to organise

an interaction with students and he

graciously set up a meeting with

the faculty and students of the

history department

the students were mainly drawn

from Birbhum and the neighbouring

Bardhaman districts Some even

spent more than two hours each

commuting they had almost all

studied in Bengali-medium schools

and a significant number of them were first-generation literates Nearly all of them professed an interest in history and had no complaints about the curriculum their anxieties centred on two concerns

First, most students and teachers felt that the semester system imposed too heavy a burden on the students and prevented them from really coming to grips with any of the papers they felt that the system encouraged superficial-ity and made studies almost entirely examination-oriented it also meant that students lacked the necessary space to get involved in other, extra-curricular activities on the campus

they were consequently denied the opportunity to make the most of student life outside the classroom

tagore would have been horrified

the second problem they faced was even more serious it centred on linguistic incomprehension Visva-Bharati permitted undergraduate students to write their examinations

in either Bengali or English that seemed fair however, it so happened that an overwhelming majority of the prescribed books were in English that posed a serious problem because the levels of English comprehension of most students were inadequate

history is not a technical subject and good history writing is often dependant on the historian’s prose

Unfortunately, the subtleties and

nuances of English were often lost on the students A second-year under-graduate explained to me she had to read one article thrice to get a sense of it Another lamented that in the paper on Ancient rome, he was unable to fully digest Gibbon’s classic work on the decline of the roman Empire All the students expressed their gratitude to the teachers for helping out, but obviously there was a limit to how much help they could provide given the pressures of the semester system What i found particularly distressing is that this problem of language, which is central to the quality of education, is largely left unattended ideally, the university should be organising special classes—

at least in the first two years of the undergraduate degree—to elevate the levels of English comprehension i would even recommend that the first year of the degree course should focus principally on improving language skills, using the most appropriate pedagogic methods there is little point demanding that the standards

of English at the school level should be improved, since that would instantly become a political issue in any case, there are just not enough trained English teachers to cater to such a requirement the alternative is for the university to accomplish what, ideally, should have been done at the school level

the problems the students encountered at Visva-Bharati aren’t unique Similar problems are faced all over india they affect the quality of the graduates the country is churning out they are also inextricably linked

to the skill deficit the government is set on tackling But can the problem

of skills be tackled separately from the larger issue of higher education? n

Swapan Dasgupta

open diary

o penings

It starts with a thump, a big electronic drumbeat

that gets louder and quicker as the track progresses the

music goes on, one ear-shattering beat after another,

build-ing into a frenetic crescendo and then the relief as the first

words drop it is a speech picked up from a political rally and

played over the track

“i want to tell you something,” the line goes “those who find

Pakistan dear they should go to Pakistan it won’t last for long it

won’t last for long.” the music plays this way, beat after electronic

beat, interlaced with a communally-incendiary speech

there are hundreds of such tracks, made by young DJs in

small indian towns, combining electronic music with political

speeches these tracks will be released online, shared over

phones and played during political rallies and religious

festi-vals Very often these rallies will pass by mosques and Muslim

localities and occasionally, they lead to violence

Various cities have attempted to ban this sort of music

from being played during festivals Last year, for instance, the

Vadodara police installed their own music systems in certain

communally-sensitive parts to play police-approved

devotion-al music during Ganpati Visarjan

“we aren’t mixing these songs because we want to,” says

Jainendra Kumar “there is a demand for it People want to listen

to it.” Kumar, who goes by the

moni-ker DJ JK Jhansi, is one of several DJs

in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh he is in his

20s and is a part of a group of around

four DJs who create these tracks

“when you live in small towns and

cities, you have to understand, it is not

as if you get a lot of different types of

work (for DJs) You make tracks that

people will want to hear.”

Kumar is hazy in his explanation

of who exactly places the order for

these tracks his only explanation is

that DJs like him are asked by various

local groups to create tracks

“all i do is find the speeches and

film dialogues and play it over a

track,” he says “i have no control

over where it is played.”

Music traditionally has rarely

featured in discussions around politics in india this is perhaps understandable Mainstream music in india is really film music, operating within the straitjacket of commercial considerations.But as elections near and the country goes through its usual politically polarised moment, musicians are beginning to get involved Music by young DJs like DJ JK Jhansi that feed into the communal frenzy lies at one end of the spectrum at the other end are those taking place at concerts and tours well-known musicians from the classical music world such as tM Krishna, Bollywood personalities like Vishal Dadlani, sonu Nigam and abhijeet to a host of young indie musicians are all picking sides.One such indie band, the Delhi-based six member group ska Vengers, sing about a vast number of things, from the Naxalite movement to alleged human rights abuses in Manipur During the 2014 General Election, they tweaked the popular ska tune,

A Message to You, Rudy by the British band the specials by

bringing out their own version, Modi, A Message to You.

“songs are often capable of saying things in ways that the spoken word can’t,” says rahul ram in his mid-50s now, ram

is a member of indian Ocean, the band widely recognised as pioneers of fusion rock in india Five years ago, around the last General Election, ram became part of another, arguably far more unique band he teamed up with a lyricist and writer (Va-

run Grover) and a stand-up comedian (sanjay rajoura) to form aisi taisi De-mocracy in this act, the trio use music and humour to hold forth on a range

of political issues there are songs on

tV news coverage of the recent Pakistan skirmish, demonetisation and ‘Babri’ dolls

india-according to ram, the three can get away with all this because they play the role of the shakespearean fool “the fool says things that nobody else dare(s),” he says, “but that

is difficult to take offence to.”Over the last two years, although the group is active online, the trio have performed few shows But they will now be embarking on an all-india ‘aazaadi tour’ have they scheduled this to coincide with the

Face the Music

NOTEBOOK

There are hundreds

of tracks made by young DJs in small towns that combine electronic music with political messaging

These songs will

be released online, shared over phones and played at rallies

25 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 9

General Election? “[it] has more to do with the schedule of our

members than the schedule of the Election Commission,” says

ram “the fact that it’s time for the General Election is a bonus.”

the inflection point in this trend of politically assertive

musicians was the 2014 elections that was when several

musi-cians began to speak their minds openly a few even stood for

elections among them, the rotund Bollywood musician, Bappi

Lahiri, did not let his inexperience as a politician and the

jewel-lery around his neck weigh him down he would break into a

song every few minutes in his rallies either from his then recent

hit Ooh la la from The Dirty Picture or his older hit number, I am

a Disco Dancer Lahiri contested from the small west Bengal city

of serampore on a BJP ticket when asked about his reason to

contest an election, he told the Indian Express, “My songs have

kept me alive and kicking in Bollywood for so many years i

can do anything with my songs and this time i want the lotus

[BJP’s poll symbol] to bloom with my music.” the lotus did

bloom but elsewhere, and Lahiri lost that election

Musicians were also employed for symbolic purposes For

the 2014 elections, the senior classical vocalist Chhannulal

Mishra proposed Narendra Modi’s name for the Varanasi seat

although in later interviews, he claimed he’d have been willing

to propose sonia Gandhi’s name too had he been requested

During this period, Dhammaraxit randive, was still a young

man who had recently moved to Mumbai from his hometown

of satara the son of a lok shahir (people’s poet), a type of lyrical

storytelling performance in Maharashtra, randive was already

interested in activism on caste and gender discrimination then

in the next few years, after the assassination of the ists Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar, people he had interacted with as a college student, randive realised he wanted

rational-to use culture as a form of activism

in 2015, randive established the troupe Yalgaar tik Manch, a 15-member-group which performs across the country, to combat right-wing fundamentalism, and caste and gender discrimination

sanskru-a msanskru-ajority of the group sanskru-are Dsanskru-alits but there sanskru-are sanskru-also seversanskru-al Muslim and upper-caste members they perform wherever they can, often on their own expenses, in large and small cities, and even on train journeys between venues there is a need, ranadive says, for groups such as theirs with a more left- oriented ideology to reclaim cultural spaces

they are trying to give lok-shahiri a contemporary spin to

address more people, using elements foreign to the form such as

qawwali and guitars “You can’t preserve lok-shahiri by keeping

it in a museum,” he says “You have to do things to it so you take your message to a larger audience.” they have been threatened sometimes although it has never escalated into physical violence.During cultural workshops that they hold, police personnel regularly show up in plain clothes as volunteers “Every time a new person joins [our group], the police will make it a point to talk to them and jot down their phone number,” he says But even that they have gotten used to, ranadive says “it is a small price to pay for responding to what’s going on in the country currently.” n

By Lhendup g Bhutia

Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch, a 15-member music and theatre group, performs songs on caste discrimination and politics

Every airline death is tragic but the recent ethiopian airlines

crash has quickly turned from a local accident to something with

far-reaching global ramifications

this is the second time in five months that a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet has

crashed after the indonesian lion air crash last year there are certain

simi-larities between the two Both involved jets less than four months old; both

occurred within minutes of take-off in generally clear weather conditions

the entire aviation industry is now spooked

Boeing’s stock prices have plummeted Several countries soon grounded

the jets, from europe to China india followed later (SpiceJet has apparently

13 of these aircraft, Jet airways has five but they were grounded earlier for

non-payment of dues.) Boeing has now said it would recall all 371 of the fleet

the 737 Max 8 was Boeing’s answer to airbus’ a320 neo it was an

upgrade of its previous iteration, and was supposed to be more fuel efficient,

less expensive to maintain, and could fly further and cram in more

passen-gers than its previous iterations according to the science writer Jeff Wise in

Slate, Boeing swapped out the engines of the previous iteration of the 737 for

new models ‘in order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing

engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing this, in turn, affected the way the plane handled Most alarmingly, it left the plane with a tendency to pitch up to prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high,’

he writes according to a preliminary report, Wise claims, it was this system that apparently led to the lion air crash

in the long run, Boeing may come out of this saster the company is too big to global aviation to fail More than 5,000 of the new Max planes (most

di-of them Max 8s) have already been ordered it is not

as though airline companies have other options airbus has its own schedules to meet to be able to take up such a large order

But Boeing’s public image is in a shambles People have an irrational fear of dying in an aircraft crash the odds of dying in such a scenario—as several statistics show—are minimal last year for instance, there were 500 estimated deaths in passenger airline crashes (this includes the lion air crash) that is still around one fatal crash for every three million flights even in the case of this particular jet, only two aircraft among 350 of them flying an average of 3.5 trips every day since 2017, led to a crash the percentage is still minuscule.aircraft are boringly safe there’s a much higher probability from dying in a road or train accident But that’s not how people calculate risk We will worry if the aircraft we are travelling on could crash, yet think little of driving a car without airbags.Many americans are believed to have switched from flying to driving, for instance, in the months after the 9/11 strikes airline passenger-miles report-edly fell between 12 per cent and 20 per cent while road use surged according to the German academic Gerd Gigerenzer, who specialises in risk study, this caused an additional road death toll of 1,595 deaths

in the US a year after 9/11 ‘People jump from the

frying pan into the fire,’ he told The Guardian ‘We

have an evolutionary tendency to fear situations in which many people die at one time this is likely

a holdover from when we lived in small groups, where the death of a small part of the group could

place the lives of everyone else in jeopardy.’

it will be an uphill task for Boeing to regain trust it will need to overcome the psychological hurdle of passengers even if the Max 8 jets are cleared, if people begin to fear the aircraft and book flights according to the model of the plane, Boeing will have a massive problem to overcome n

By Lhendup g Bhutia

Crash Course

With two back-to-back crashes, Boeing

has a disaster on its hands

PORTRAIT Boeing 737 max 8

sAuRAbh sIngh

25 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 11

AngLE

OppOrtunity Versus OutcOme

AddreSSinG feMale students

in a college in Chennai, rahul

Gan-dhi said that he thought, “in general,

women are smarter than men”, and

drew immediate applause But there is

simply no evidence for such a claim, one

way or another it can also get

contra-dictory from the point of view of what

political feminism has been trying to do,

which is again to show that there is no

difference, exemplified by a movement

against neurosexism, or the

discrimina-tion of women on the basis of brains Just

a couple of weeks ago, the journal Nature

published an article titled,

‘neurosex-ism: the myth that men and women

have different brains’ with the intro

reading: ‘the hunt for male and female

distinctions inside the skull is a lesson

in bad research practice’ it is difficult for

both to be true: that women are smarter

than men and the brains don’t differ

it is however another area of

Gan-dhi’s speech that has more practical

implications: the announcement that if

his party came to power women would

have 33 per cent reservation not just in

Parliament, but also in government jobs

for women at least at the state level,

politicians of other hues have also paid

lip service to such a policy two years ago,

the then BJP Madhya Pradesh Chief

Min-ister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced

33 per cent reservation in all government

departments Before the last UP elections,

Samajwadi Party leader dimple yadav

promised it numerous other states have

similar provisions at different levels the

leap from the idea of 33 per cent

reserva-tion in representareserva-tion, to reservareserva-tion

in jobs has been almost seamless in this election it has reached the national mainstream it is inevitable that the BJP and other parties will follow suit

the complications of such a tion are many india is a country full of marginalised discriminated groups, all either being recipients of reservation or demanding it there is an upper limit

reserva-on reservatireserva-ons laid down by a Supreme Court judgment any further reservation must be a permutation and combination

of all these groups, now add 33 per cent to

it One of the reasons why women’s vation in Parliament has not succeeded is because OBC parties like rashtriya Janata dal and Samajwadi Party are asking for sub-reservations for caste groups within that percentage While these parties are

reser-no paragons of gender equality, there is really no good argument on why their demand is unjust Why shouldn’t, for example, Scheduled Caste women, have a fixed quota within that 33 per cent?

the main question when it comes to reservations is whether there should be equality of opportunity (reservations in educational institutions) versus equality

of outcomes (reservations in jobs) india has in fact done very well with the former

in this election, Mamata Banerjee also demonstrated how to bring equality of opportunity by giving more than 33 per cent nominations for women to contest for the lok Sabha elections that brings in substantial change instead of ossifying a system which is built on largesse, symbol-ism and electoral profit n

Why 33 per cent reservation for women in

government jobs is a problematic idea

By madhavankutty piLLai

AdvERTIsIng

ad makers now increasingly tap larger social discussions, willing even to wade into polarising topics,

to create commercials that become talking points Popular recent examples are Gillette’s take on

‘toxic masculinity’ and nike’s US campaign around Colin Kaeper-nick, the american-football player who kneeled during their national anthem to protest police brutality and racism in india, Surf excel’s latest ad—a young hindu girl helps her Muslim friend reach a mosque during holi without him getting stained—has earned a lot of op-probrium from some quarters the

ad preaches religious harmony with the tacit suggestion that such har-mony is—or rather several Muslims are—under threat But it fails in not pushing the envelope enough, care-fully using children, not adults and,

at the end, instead of the boy being dropped at the mosque, implying he needn’t play holi if he didn’t wish to, the girl tells him he will have to once

he is done praying n

IdEAs

Afriend with friends in the right

places had piloted us into the shrine well

before daybreak, before the massed crowds

of devotees waiting outside its great gateway

had been granted entry Just before the sun rose, the heavy

wooden doors, studded with metal spikes, swung open, and

the faithful surged into the courtyard in their hundreds

with uncanny smoothness, this onrush of devotees in a

state of exaltation subsided into disciplined rows there

was, however, a grander marvel in store within moments,

the air filled with a flourish of music, the wafting fragrance

of incense and the ringing of bells the doors of the inner

sanctum opened and we were permitted a glimpse of the

deity who presided over the shrine this was the mangala

darshan or ‘auspicious glimpse’, the first of eight darshans

that the deity grants his followers every day, from dawn to

nightfall, in the temple-town of nathdwara, near Udaipur

in southern rajasthan nineteen winters ago, this was my

first audience with shrinathji.

nathdwara is the centre of the Vaishnava tradition of

spirituality and ecstatic devotion known as the Pushti Marg,

‘the way of Grace’, which is focused on the worship of

shrinathji, Krishna visualised as a seven-year-old child to

describe shrinathji as an icon is misleading, for the devout

treat him as a svarupa, a living manifestation of the divine in

nathdwara, the god is the king his shrine is described, not as a

mandir or temple, but as a haveli or palace the town’s calendar

turns on the axis of his daily, monthly and seasonal activities

each darshan is a renewal of the senses it draws the pilgrim into

an enchantment kaleidoscopically composed of song and the

sounds of bell, drum and shehnai, the scintillation of light and

reflection, clouds of incense, the colours of the deity’s robes, the

priests’ vestments and the delicate pichhvais or painted

back-cloths hung behind the deity every darshan is defined by its

own special set of rituals, with the deity presented in different

costumes and accompanied by varying paraphernalia

As we followed shrinathji’s progress from one darshan to

the next, we realised how silken turmeric could be and yet

how pungent; how camphor can prickle the skin and stir the

throat to melody the burning orange of one pichhvai resonated

with fires in winter, while the lotuses floating on the crinkled

blue surface of another plunged us into a mythic Yamuna the tinkling of bells sparked off the honey-silvered flavour of

prasad on the palate to trace the circumference of the haveli is

to celebrate synaesthesia, a heightened state of experience in which a stimulus applied to one sense is registered as a feeling

by another

the Pushti Marg, whose followers are known as the

Vallabha sampradaya—after their founder, the philosopher

Vallabhacharya (1479-1531 Ce)—rejects self-mortifying austerity it teaches that spiritual transcendence can be achieved in the midst of the householder’s worldly life it regards every earthly pleasure, if refined, as a reflection of

shrinathji’s resplendence As the artist and scholar Amit Ambalal—the friend who invited me to my first mangala

darshan—writes in his authoritative study, Krishna as Shrinathji

(1995), ‘Painting is only one of the many facets of the Vallabha

cult as practised in the haveli of shrinathji Poetry, music,

cook-ery, flowers and floral arrangements, costumes and jewellery are integral to this mode of worship.’

EACh dAY in nathdwara summoned forth a new

surprise the doors of a balcony would be flung open,

and a burst of music would herald another darshan we

came upon the deity’s presence at every street corner, as

we savoured the murals glowing on the walls of an abandoned pleasure pavilion, or waited while traditional

pichhvai painters unwrapped their heirloom folios in the

neighbourhood known as Chitrakaaron ki Gali, ‘the lane of

the painters’ in nathdwara, the highest form of worship

is chitra-seva, the dedication of the devotee to shrinathji’s

painted image

that image is distinctive shrinathji is represented with

his left arm upraised, lifting Mount Govardhan to protect the villagers of Vrindavan from the anger of the sky-god indra his right arm rests on his waist his skin is rendered in the deep nocturnal blue reserved for Vishnu, suggestive of his cosmic nature his extraordinary dagger-shaped eyes look upon his

worshippers in an attitude of pushti or grace Meanwhile,

the icon in worship—which the laity cannot approach—is reported by scholars to be reddish-black in colour, similar to

Lost & Found Histories

The Travels of a Deity

How a Krishna sect in Rajasthan bridges multiple divides

By Ranjit Hoskote

25 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 13

the rocks near the summit of the Govardhan hill in Mathura,

where it was discovered by Vallabhacharya and his disciples

in 1493 Ce

Long worshipped by villagers as a naga or serpent

guardian, the icon was consecrated and installed in a temple

at the site in the early 16th century, even as northern india slid

into a time of turbulence within the space of three decades, the

embattled Lodi dynasty was overthrown by Babur, whose son

humayun was in turn driven into exile by sher shah sur, the

founder of the suri dynasty whose last representative, hemu,

was defeated by humayun’s son Akbar during this period, the

the icon of shrinathji that was moved several times to remote

places of safety the chaos ended with Akbar’s coronation in

1556 Under his aegis, Ambalal writes, the Vallabha sampradaya

received the patronage that allowed it to ‘grow and establish

itself as a popular sect during the reigns of Akbar’s successors,

Jehangir and shah Jehan, and under Vitthalnathji

[Vallabhacharya’s son] and the Goswamis [spiritual leaders]

who followed him, the seva devised for honouring the deity

became more subtle, complex and lavish’

Vitthalnathji, whose artistic preoccupations rivalled his

scholarly commitments, imparted to the Pushti Marg its

dazzling aesthetic character he organised the rasa mandalis or

companies dedicated to the sacred choreographic theatre of

the rasa, shrinathji’s divine revels Combining rasa with raga

(music and poetry), bhoga (feast) and shrungara (ornament),

Vitthalnathji’s seva cast its enchantment over a wide variety of

followers the teacher maintained strong connections at court

the Baso-baavan Vaishnav ni Varta, the ‘stories of the 252 disciples’, an exemplary text of the Vallabha sampradaya, records that Akbar was captivated by Vitthalnathji’s wit and wisdom the Bhaavasindhu ki Varta records how Akbar,

visiting a Pushti Marg shrine in Gokula on the occasion of Janmashtami, had a visionary experience during the festivities

Mughal patronage of the sampradaya continued through the reigns of Jehangir and shah Jehan, as their firmans,

granting lands and titles, attest (those whose ideological

fixations prevent them from acknowledging such imperial proclamations should consult the national Archives of india, the archives of the Vrindavan shodh sansthan, and the

sampradaya’s extensive varta sahitya or teaching

compilations) Jehangir’s wife, the rajput princess Jodh Bai, was known

as Jagat-Gosaini, ‘one to whom the world is imbued with the spirit of

Vitthalnathji’ their son

shah Jehan invested the

head of the sampradaya

with the title of ‘tilakayat’ (‘the anointed one’), which nathdwara’s chief Goswami has borne ever since this harmonious relationship was ended by Aurangzeb, who violently reversed the inclusive policies of his predecessors

in 1669, he destroyed the Vishvanatha temple in Varanasi and the Keshava deva temple in Mathura

in 1670, the 15-year-old damodarji, the tilakayat of the time,

set out on a dangerous journey westward to rajasthan, in

disguise, with shrinathji concealed in his bullock cart two

years later, deity and custodian began a new life under the protection of Mewar’s sisodia rulers, in sinhad, a village that grew into nathdwara it was a long journey from Mathura, but a longer one yet from the Andhra country where Vallabhacharya’s telugu Brahmin parents had originated

the circulations of the Vallabha sampradaya remind us, yet

again, of the fatuity of dividing india into the north and south beloved of mindless caricature the cultural realities of the subcontinent have always been far more complex, and shaped

by multiple migrations n

Nathdwara is

the centre of the VaishnaVa tradition of spirituality and ecstatic deVotion known as the pushti Marg,

‘the way of grace’, which is focused on the worship of

ShriNathji,

krishna Visualised as a seVen-year-old

alamy

he election announcement has rescued narendra modi from a quandary he need no longer cast envious looks at the throng of admirers who copy the studiedly casual clothes and greying hair that china’s Xi Jinping—Doordarshan’s famous ‘eleven Jinping’—has made as much his emblem as Jawaharlal nehru’s red rose or Jomo Kenyatta’s fly whisk the severe punishment meted out to an uttar Pradesh doctor who dared to wash a sweeper’s feet confirms the Prime minister won’t allow any copycat to steal his thunder.

Yet, the contrast must secretly rankle When Xi started going grey, at least seven of the most loyal of the

25 members of the Politburo promptly did so too So did faithful luminaries like Zhou Xiaochuan, former governor of the People’s Bank of china, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, and liu he, a vice-premier no, they were

not like Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon whose hair was ‘gray but not with years / nor grew it white / in a single

night / as men’s have grown from sudden fears’ that dire fate was reserved for Zhou Yongkang, a former chief of domestic security, whose jet-black hair turned into a shock of white while he was in detention for anti-party crimes Black hair being the vogue then,

it was whispered that the hapless Zhou’s punishment included denial of the dye he had always used the ‘magnificent Seven’ went grey for exactly the same reason that congressmen in Rajiv Gandhi’s time boasted of being computer addicts unlike the indian intelligence agent whom the Sikkimese nicknamed ‘Go-kar’ Whitehead, not because of any pimple or pustule but because of his white thatch, they knew that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery it’s the asian way

the indian equivalents of Zhou, Wang and liu must, therefore, be a sad disappointment for the Prime minister Proudly sitting on reserves of Rs 9,68,710 crore, no governor of the Reserve Bank of india has paid modi the compliment of cultivating his shaggy look Su-shma Swaraj must be excused for failing this particular test of loyalty; less legitimately, she is willy-nilly excused from taking the policy decisions that should be the external affairs minister’s responsibility But it must be said to her credit that she does try to demonstrate her allegiance by every so often sporting a waistcoat like the boss Knowing her place, she is careful to ensure the garment isn’t mono-grammed all over nor, so far as anyone knows, has it ever been put to auction the commonsensical Swaraj is aware it is most unlikely

to attract bids, leave alone astronomical ones lacking her gender excuse, Raghuram Rajan’s smooth grooming was positively insolent and should at once have aroused suspicion no wonder two pesky governors had to be sent packing in a little over two years

as for the imitative liu, india doesn’t go in for vice-premiers We did have deputy prime ministers but nearly 70 years after death, the very first incumbent has unwittingly become the posthumous prop, crutch and stick for attacking the first Prime minister later deputy prime ministers like morarji Desai or charan Singh, to say nothing of the last incumbent, lK advani, fur-ther justify modi’s canny decision not to risk a number two in any case, it would be difficult to position a deputy in what arun Shourie calls “a government and party of one-and-three-quarter people” if it’s a “one-man show” as Shatrughan Sinha says, the

Deconstructing the salt-and-pepper look of Xi

Dye Another DAy

open essay

T

By SunAnDA K DAttA-rAy

25 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 15

Prime minister must be his own deputy

it’s not Xi alone who shows up modi to disadvantage

comparison with indira Gandhi isn’t too flattering either But

no matter how flamboyant the Prime minister’s waistcoats,

he remains grizzled and gravelly compared to the stylish quick

change artist that was indira Gandhi

the morning the Shah commission opened, it found in

her a rumbustious protester in Patiala house, crumpled cotton

saree hitched above her ankles, one end tucked firmly into her

waist like a fisherwoman girded for battle, tousled hair like

salt-and-pepper jute and not a trace of make-up She wasn’t at all the

woman i had glimpsed the evening before in the Willingdon

crescent bungalow that was her political Siberia then, Gandhi

presented a rich gleam of swishing silk under an

embroidery-encrusted Kashmiri cape, exquisite make-up and, above all, a

jet-black sheen of hair that fitted closely like a cap from which

sprouted a single flame of dazzling white india’s former and

future Prime minister was setting out for Rashtrapati Bhavan

to charm Britain’s visiting prime minister, Jim callaghan

although dressed to kill, “there was that steel in her that would

match any Kremlin leader”, wrote Singapore’s lee Kuan Yew

Watching her in Patiala house it occurred to me that she had spent considerable time and effort dressing down

apples and oranges are not for comparison like must be juxtaposed with like modi probably regards only Xi as his peer, although someone who holds the three jobs of general secre-tary of the communist Party of china, president of the People’s Republic of china, and chairman of the central military com-mission, and is hailed as ‘paramount leader’ by 18.41 per cent (at the time of writing) of the world’s population, may not think

a mere prime minister his equal Xi is a princeling, one of that exalted chinese version of Delhi’s pampered brat pack, sons and daughters of influential party veterans like mao Zedong,

he sees himself as heir to the emperor Qianlong whose letter

to King George iii in 1793 asserting that his ‘dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea’ is still held up as history’s ultimate expression of conde-scending arrogance Such an august personage must look down on a politician who begs starving villagers for their votes, physically fights off those who try to foist a muslim skull cap

on his head, and suffers the jibes of aspiring females like

mama-When Xi started going grey, at least seven of the most loyal of the 25 members of the Politburo promptly did so too The ‘Magnificent Seven’ went grey for exactly the same reason that Congressmen in Rajiv Gandhi’s time boasted of being computer addicts

ta Banerjee and mayawati these problems of democracy can’t

really be wished away by PV narasimha Rao’s prescription of

solving the problems of democracy with more democracy

everybody in china wants to dress and look like the

para-mount leader not in a defiant i-am-as-good-as-you spirit but to

demonstrate loyalty no indian does every indian is his own

paramount leader the manchus may not have been

over-thrown in 1912 if the Son of heaven hadn’t made it impossible

for ordinary mortals to emulate his elaborate and expensive

lifestyle the ‘Zhongshan suits’, as the four-pocketed tunics

introduced by the sturdily democratic Sun Yat Sen were called,

were far easier to copy mao’s order after the 1949 revolution that

men and women alike should follow the leader’s sartorial style

turned everyone into a flattering loyalist Jiang Zemin, who laid

the foundations of economic liberalisation, startled the world

by departing from that mould and appearing at a party congress

in a lounge suit it signified the

end of ideology, warned

West-ern leaders that communists

weren’t so different when it

came to money, and advertised

chinese stitching in an attempt

to undercut all those

suit-while-u-wait Sindhi tailors in hong

Kong always an astute

strate-gist, the ageing Jiang put many

princelings into key positions

as a result, their gratified fathers,

uncles and even grandfathers,

senior chinese communist

Party leaders, backed him Jiang’s

oversized, black-rimmed glasses

which were all the rage in the

1990s were ousted from fashion

by hu Jintao’s gold-framed

lenses, but his lounge suits

remained

however, Xi still takes his mao

jacket out of mothballs on special

occasions like formal military

events because it sends two important political messages First,

it reassures a billion-and-a-half chinese that the country will

forever honour the People’s liberation army’s role in the

revolu-tion that established the People’s Republic of china Second, the

civilian apparel is a reminder that the military might spread its

tentacles in a string of pearls from the cocos island to

hamban-tota to the maldives to Gwadar, but it remains subject to the ccP’s

political will and discipline

otherwise, Xi is far more innovative than modi the new

look he is promoting—crisp, white, button-up shirts open at the

neck worn with a smart blazer or a short jacket, and discarding

glasses—is said to be aimed at cutting down the elitism of fellow

princelings a real man of the people would have accumulated

an extravagant wardrobe like modi But a princeling must be

seen to be a man of the masses hence several carefully casual tieless appearances after climbing the greasy pole expensive and immediately spotted gewgaws like Rolex watches and Fer-rari cars are out So are the trendy ties and well-cut suits that the former ccP secretary, Bo Xilai, sported before he was kicked out

of the party Xi is often pictured wearing a navy blue, zippered windcheater as he leads campaigns against corruption

now that he is going grey, his courtiers will no doubt claim it’s the result of having to cope with Donald trump’s trade war,

a slowing economy, and the aggressiveness of small countries around the South china Sea But deep in their hearts, the chinese are delighted because grey hair for them is the traditional sign of wisdom they were not at all surprised, therefore, when trump declared, “i have no white hair” even mao and Deng Xiaoping, the original paramount leader, embraced a silver-haired look in their later years like much else in china, tradition, like confu-

cianism, has often been at odds with fashion Gleaming black heads of hair were in vogue dur-ing the communist heyday be-cause they supposedly indicated youth and vigour it was like the rouge that england’s ailing King George Vi slapped on to keep up his subjects’ spirits, especially during the challenging years of World War ii in a strategic return

to tradition, ‘uncle Xi’—as he likes to be called—is using less colouring

modi may be three years older, but since the average age of a chinese in 2020 is expected to be a hoary 37, compared to a sprightly

29 for an indian, china’s leader must look avuncular now that

he is supremo for life, he might even feel obliged as the years roll

on to bleach those of his tresses that haven’t fallen off From the powerful Politburo Standing committee to provincial and local officials, everyone is keeping careful watch the chinese being inveterate gamblers, books may have been opened at home and

among the Huáqiáo, as an estimated 50 million overseas chinese

are called, to lay bets on the greying of Xi meanwhile, dye sales have plummeted

if only the may elections could be held in this demonstrably more deferential setting there would be no reason then for modi to ignore questions about promises to enrich every citi-zen by Rs 15 lakh, create two crore jobs a year or double farmers’

incomes the questions wouldn’t be asked n

Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books He is an open contributor

open essay

Modi may be three years older, but since the average age of a Chinese

in 2020 is expected to be a hoary 37, compared to a sprightly 29 for

an Indian, China’s leader must

look avuncular

aP

THE RISE OF RANVEER SINGH IS THE TRIUMPH OF THE OUTSIDER

THE NEW SENSATION OF HINDI CINEMA SHARES THE THRILLS

AND TRAVAILS OF HIS JOURNEY WITH DIVYA UNNY

at Indiana University, and the professor

had put them on the spot by asking

ev-eryone to present a piece Ranveer,

un-prepared, walked up to the front of the

class It was the first time in years he was

addressing a crowd With sweaty palms

but a steady breath, he rattled off the

fa-mous Amitabh Bachchan monologue

from Deewaar (1975) Nobody

under-stood a word, but the language barrier

didn’t stop a hearty applause that still

echoes in Ranveer’s mind “I sat there

stumped, and the claps continued I

remember it so vividly, almost as if it

was in slow motion,” he says That day

changed everything

Cut to a warm afternoon at a

sub-urban five-star hotel in Mumbai

14 years later Ranveer is yet to arrive but the energy in the room has already begun to shift Two ice-cold espressos have been ordered, the room has been checked for the right temperature, an outdoor space has been assigned for the interview, and the path has been cleared His spot boy informs his man-ager that he’s walking towards us

The drama, I’ve to admit, is amusing

Ranveer is famous for making epic public entries with his boom box blar-ing his hit songs, but that’s certainly not what was expected this afternoon

The 2018 Forbes India magazine that

includes him among the top 10 Indian celebrities (in the company of Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar) lies casually on the coffee table in the room, and just as I flip its pages, I see him

In black track pants, black jacket with his signature hoodie, sunglasses masking most of his face, and a slight smile, he says, “Hi ma’am, shall we

start?” He’s mellower than usual day, not keen to draw attention He still embodies his character Murad from

to-Gully Boy He takes a while to take off

his sunglasses, and make eye contact “I feel like it’s some kind of a weird security blanket,” he confesses

Ranveer as Murad, the quiet vert, the hip-hop music lover from Dharavi, who fights all odds, will be counted amongst the most exemplary and finessed characterisations in mod-ern Indian cinema There’s a Murad in every Indian home, who has hopes and aspirations that seem too audacious

intro-And Ranveer’s embodiment of that persona, had us from frame one He seethes slowly, there’s pain in his eyes, rebellion in his soul, and poetry in his words “People think I’m this Bandra brat, but I am really among those kids as well I grew up on the border of Bandra East and West, and literally shared a wall with them On one hand, for me, were the affluent beings of this cosmopolitan J

h e r o o f o u r t i m e

h e r o o f o u r t i m e

I was just a kid with a dream and it came true

I understand that I am

fortunate to

be in this position- So when somebody expresses

love or excitement-

I take it in and

I try and give back threefold that's just

how I am

ERRIKOS ANDREOU / DEU: Creative Management

suburb, but on the other was my time spent playing cricket and football with

the boys from the waadi

(neighbour-hood).” Ranveer isn’t outwardly cal, but he insists he isn’t far removed

politi-from Gully Boy’s social realities “I’d run

back from school, throw my bag and rush to play a game with them Their language, their conflicts, their fights with their own selves is something I witnessed very often I’m not saying I related to their struggles entirely, but

I wasn’t alien to them My view for 25 years was fancy skyscrapers at one end, and the slums at the other I was very aware of the duality of Mumbai, and that gave me a very interesting vantage point to the film,” he says calling himself

a ‘true-blue Mumbai boy’

Without a doubt his most

understat-ed performance, Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy

establishes a new reality year-old Ranveer, who debuted just nine years ago and was almost written-off as too brash to be in Bollywood, is the su-perstar of his generation With no hits

Thirty-three-to their name in the last year, the era of the Khans might finally be coming to

an end And their successor has both the appeal and charm of a hero, and the skill and submission of a great actor He

is not trying to imitate anyone, but is stitched from his own cloth Someone who is standing on a pedestal, and still has his feet on the ground “He’s an actor-star and since Aamir Khan I don’t think we’ve had someone who can do both, carry the might of a star and still main-tain the honesty of being a fine actor,” says director Maneesh Verma who intro-

duced him to the world with Band Baaja

Baaraat (2010) “I don’t know about

ta-glines, but what I do know is that this, what is happening to me, is beyond my wildest imagination,” Ranveer says

In less than a decade, through his roles, coupled with a flamboyant yet magnanimous personality, Ranveer

is ruling hearts and minds alike With nearly 20 films, and 28 brand endorse-ments, at an estimated net worth of almost Rs 90 crore, he has leaped over his contemporaries, including Ran-bir Kapoor “When Ranbir came in he

“Ranveer’s okay to not take the spotlight in a

scene and aims to serve the story in the end

That’s a precious quality for an actor”

zOyA AKhtAR

A scene from Gully Boy ; (below) director Zoya Akhtar and Ranveer on the film’s set

25 MARCH 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 21

was looked at as a Bandra brat and he

changed that perception by playing

some incredible roles But Ranveer has

now taken that and made it so much

larger by identifying with a section of

society who have not been considered

worthy of the gaze of Bollywood His

mellow, inward-thinking portrayal in

Gully Boy makes him that much more

identifiable with a mass who were

look-ing for a hero from amongst them,” says

senior film writer Indu Mirani

In the same note, his directors and

co-actors see him as someone who’s fearless

and doesn’t strive for perfection His

co-actor Vijay Varma, who plays his friend

the carjacker Moeen, says, “Ranveer

exudes a certain kind of self-worth and

confidence that can’t be shaken by

exter-nal factors I truly believe that being a

se-cure actor is something everyone should

strive for and it shouldn’t be glorified But

Ranveer, in his system has a thing of

giv-ing, a lot I remember during a workshop

I was having trouble with my character

and he just ran his palm on my back

Asked me to breathe It was where I

connected with him That makes the

experience so real, and so memorable.”

Zoya Akhar, who is a friend and has also

directed him in Dil Dhadakne Do (2015),

adds, “He’s fine being vulnerable He’s

very mindful and knows when to step

back You don’t see Ranveer, but Murad

the minute he’s on screen, and that’s

because he’s so invested in his part He’s

okay to not take the spotlight in a scene,

and aims to serve the story in the end,

and that’s a precious quality for an actor.”

It’s a space Ranveer has been leading

up to for years now Being the

quintes-sential ‘Hindi picture ka hero’ was his

dream Like it was and is for countless

young boys in Mumbai We were

intro-duced to him as the boisterous Bittoo

Sharma in Band Baaja Baaraat (2010)

But Ranveer’s introduction to cinema

was always the larger-than-life parts

played by Amitabh Bachchan, Anil

Kapoor, Govinda and others He was

so influenced by their magnetism and

mannerisms, that even today, he can

masterfully mimic Kapoor “Once in

between takes during Dil Dhadakne Do,

I asked Anil Sir if he understands lens magnifications, like when they say, ‘50

lekar aao, 75 lekar aao,’ on set, does he

get it?” Ranveer then scratches his chin, brings base to his voice, squints his eyes

in classic AK style and says, “Aaj tak nahi

seekha hun mein kya…aaj tak nahin seekha

(I haven’t learned it yet…)”

One can’t say if he’s just a natural,

or just so taken by his idols, that their mannerisms are like muscle memory

to him In all probability it’s a

combi-nation of both “I think I was eight or nine when my teachers used to tell me,

‘Tu bada hoke actor banega.’ I had that

gregarious, vivacious personality My report card remarks would always say:

‘He is keen to entertain the other kids

in the class.’ So the signs were all there

And god knows I wanted to,” he adds

When he was 15 his dream became very real for him “I was looking from the outside at this Hindi film industry, and I didn’t have a way in This is around the year 2000 when all your heroes were

producers, directors, actors’ sons—Hrithik Roshan, Abhishek Bachchan, Tusshar Kapoor, Vivek Oberoi I mean,

it genuinely seemed like too far-fetched

a dream I was an outsider My chances were a million to one Which is when you re-calibrate your dreams to match your reality I signed up for an advertis-ing degree in America,” he says

By chance he took an acting class in his second year of university, and the rest is history He is emotional when he recounts the most significant conversa-tion he had with his father that evening after class “I said to him, ‘I really want to finish my degree, come back to Bombay and try.’ Without a thought in his head

he said, ‘Do it I know this is what your heart wants When your heart is going to

be in it, you will be good at it.’ Randomly getting a call like that from your son who you have invested so much in, it took a lot

of fortitude from his end to accept it All

he said was, ‘I have one condition Finish what you started and then come back.’ I couldn’t accept not trying, I knew that I’ll regret it if I don’t,” says Ranveer

B y now word had spread through the hotel that Ranveer Singh is in the house Just 20 minutes ago it was just me, Ran-veer and his managers in the garden, and now there is a woman with her six-year-old son, a newly married couple, and

a few others who (we could tell) were hoping for a selfie with him Slowly the crowd was trickling in One man even randomly threw a thumbs up in his di-rection, but Ranveer was too immersed

in his story to notice “I did theatre, joined

an advertising film and basically groped

in the dark for three years before I got a

call back for the Band Baaja Baaraat

au-dition Even today Adi [Aditya Chopra, the film’s producer] says it’s the best au-dition he has seen in his entire career,”

he says Maneesh Sharma, the director

of the film, remembers how other than him, everybody thought casting Ranveer would be suicidal “People came and told

me ‘he can never be a star’ I didn’t have validation for my excitement, but film-making is primarily based on instinct and my instinct said he was the one, and

he was going to make it big.”

the quality

of being unaware is priceless It goes away the more work you do-which is

when you know that there can only be one performance in your life that will be all heart and

no craft

C o v e r S t o r y

Even today, Ranveer believes that he

can never top what he did with Bittoo

“After I got selected I was messing it all up

I was too nervous Adi called me one day

and said they were going to do a screen

test and I could treat it like the World Cup

final If I won I could take the cup home,

if not I could leave for good Thankfully,

I stayed I don’t think in my whole life I

will be able to match what I did in Band

Baaja Baaraat It’s too raw, it’s too

un-adulterated I can see now that I didn’t

know anything, and I am just doing

everything instinctively.” Sharma who

was also directing his debut film found

in Ranveer a partner who was willing to

give it his all “His emotional quotient is

really very high and he’s extremely

sen-sitive He really knows which buttons

to press in terms of his own sensitivity

to the character I remember during the

climax of the film I went to Ranveer and

I saw ‘CLIMAX’ written in big bold

let-ters on a white board He was so nervous,

and had made the scene so big in his head

that we couldn’t shoot that day I had to

ask him to relax and treat it as just part

of the story, and that’s when we nailed

it,” he says “I was so kuccha (raw)… as an

actor the quality of not knowing, and

be-ing unaware is priceless It’s invaluable It

goes away the more and more work you

do, which is when you know that there

can only be one performance in your life

that’ll be all heart and no craft Only one,”

Ranveer adds

Band Baaja Baaraat brought him

rec-ognition and acclaim It was a time when

Ranbir Kapoor was still the blue-eyed boy

of Bollywood, Salman Khan had just

landed with Dabangg (2010) and Akshay

Kumar had four films that year Still, a messy-haired, dusky boy with no godfa-ther in the industry, made his mark On

a talk show with NDTV Ranveer reveals

how he would constantly get asked how much money his father had pumped in

to make him a star It was success well earned, but he knew he had to do more

to prove himself

He soon broke out of the niche of the loud, snarky, street-smart Dilli boy he was expected to follow Many new ac-tors stick to parts that they’re comfort-able and popular for; Ranveer did the

opposite With Lootera (2013), where he

played an archaeologist-cum- painter, he expertly internalised the performance

“Lootera was way out of my realm as an

actor at that point, but Vikram [director Vikramaditya Motwane] held me down and made me see what it feels like to play

it down I remember on the fourth day

of the Lootera workshops, I wasn’t

get-ting it I tried and tried until I had a huge breakthrough and realised what it takes

to pitch oneself at that scale,” he says During the shoot of this film, he broke his back and was bedridden for two months He remembers this as a time when he discovered himself “I was yet

to understand my comfort zone as an tor, but I never wanted to submit to it I

ac-realised slowly that parts like in Simmba

come to me easily It’s the quieter parts that were more challenging because there’s nothing to say or to do It keeps

me stimulated, and I’m not stuck doing the same thing,” he says

This need to experiment came as

an epiphany After Lootera he went on

to act in Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela (2013); Finding Fanny (2014); Dil Dhada-

kne Do (2015) and Bajirao Mastani (2015)

In each film we only saw the character, and not Ranveer His multi-coloured pencil box and notepad he’d carry on set and take notes in while pacing around has become iconic He often used music

to stimulate his mind, and also fell back

on smaller things like one perfume per role His co-actor and wife Deepika Padu-kone reveals, “He’d get so consumed by the roles he plays that his walk, his way

I want to write- compose- direct I want

to explore other avenues

of filmmaking

But it takes courage and personal evolution to

do that I don't feel like I am there yet

Band Baaja Baaraat (2010)

Lootera (2013)

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013)

Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

Bajirao Mastani (2015)

Befikre (2016)

25 MARCH 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 23

of dressing, the way he speaks, how he

responds, everything changed It’s a joke

in our relationship that every six months

I’m dating a new person And at that

point, we’d just met and I really wanted

to get to know him better It was very

exciting to see him imbibe this new self

now and then, but I really needed some

consistency too,” she says

His process is not defined he says

and can never be Ram from Ram Leela

is nothing like Peshwa Bajirao Ballal

from Bajirao Mastani (2016) and Kabir

from Dil Dhadakne Do is a far cry from

Sultan Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat

(2018) These are roles that grew

be-yond the film itself and remained with

his viewers “I stick with my part of the

deal: kalakaari (acting) The endeavor is

to stick with the feeling I have worked

with actors who are all craft, no feeling

I am standing one inch away from them

in the flesh, and I know for a fact that it’s

all craft It’s got everyone fooled except

me because I am trying to connect with

this person and there is no connect I

don’t want to get there ever, and for that

I have to submit fully,” he says Sanjay

Leela Bhansali, who has directed him in

several blockbusters, said in a television

interview, “I have never seen obsession

for the world of cinema in the way I’ve

seen it with Ranveer.”

The obsession could be all

consum-ing, especially for a part like Khilji where

Ranveer felt like he was losing his mind

It took him eight years to learn how to

separate his self from his roles Khilji,

with his mad locks, kohl-rimmed eyes,

and untamed sexual appetites, was a new kind of villain in Bollywood He certainly

was the best thing about Padmaavat, but

it came at a price “I remember during Khilji, in the middle of the 40-day gruel-ing schedule, one day I woke up at 4 am suddenly in my apartment I walked past the mirror and I couldn’t recognise my-self and it scared the shit out of me The character was seeping into me I was be-coming angry and cynical I was becom-ing a person I was not I called my mother immediately and asked her to come on set I realised that you have to go back to things that truly ground you, truly bring you back to who you are,” he says

As Ranveer grew as an actor on screen, so did his personality off screen

“I spent two months with him on set

as Murad and he was so calm, so quiet

And on the last day I saw him explode

on the dance floor That’s when I realised who the real Ranveer was,” Vijay Varma says Time and again, he gave his fans high-octane drama, be it with his sense

of fashion, or his over-the-top our He was exuding life and energy that seemed abnormally high to most

demean-He could be anything, he could be thing; he was a superhero on the streets

every-of Mumbai, one moment, and another

he’d be prancing around in a ghaaghra

at his own wedding reception His acts flooded social media, he was often even trolled Be it on a TV show or the stage,

he was vocal, and unabashedly so about how his feelings for the woman he loved, and all of it made him come into his own

He wasn’t afraid to express himself and

frankly it was refreshing He was okay being the object of desire, and he was okay breaking into tears

e was the hero, but

defied the stereotyped chismo a Hindi film hero came with After years, we are seeing a leading man who is so com-fortable in his skin that he cares little about feedback, except when it comes

ma-to his films He’ll fall inma-to the arms of his fans, without a thought, and you can see that he is happy “That’s just my way

of expressing gratitude My way of ing thank you I have wanted this ever since I’ve known who I really am, and now when I’m getting it, all I want to do

say-is give back I made my own luck, but

it still didn’t have to come to me… I was just a kid with a dream and it came true

I understand that I am very fortunate to

be in this position So when somebody expresses love or excitement I take it in, and I try and give back threefold, that’s just how I’m built, it is just who I am So it’s coming from a very genuine place or gratitude,” he says

A big shift in his life is his ship with Deepika that he says has changed him for the better Their wed-ding was the most talked about affair at the end of last year While it flooded the media, the couple also managed to keep

relation-it personal “When we started dating six years ago, I was more successful than him, busier than him, making more money I’ve never come across a man

Padmaavat (2018)

H

Ranveer will soon begin shooting for ’83 where he plays the role of former Indian captain kapil dev

who is so comfortable with my success

and the attention I was getting He was

supportive and encouraging of my

ca-reer and it wasn’t superficial support

That doesn’t happen with many men

He really cared, and I don’t think our

re-lationship would have lasted if not for

how he inherently felt about my world

and how much he respected it I did not

have to make compromises to keep my

man happy and that was the best thing

about him,” says Deepika

Just as we come to the end of our

hour-long walk, Deepika appears on

Facetime She’s on a shoot, and surprised

to hear from him “I pocket dialled you

by mistake, Rani I’m in an interview

now, will call back You look really hot

by the way!” he says, spontaneously It’s

endearing He speaks about her with

affection and respect “She’s taught me

a way of being She has opened up my

eyes to a whole new dimension of hard

work I had never in my life before seen a person work that hard at something and

it made me understand what it takes to achieve something If she is the number one actress today, it is because nobody else deserves it more than her,” he says

Recently Will Smith, the original hip-hop icon, congratulated Ranveer

On an Instagram story, he said, “Yo veer, congrats man, I am loving what

Ran-you’re doing with Gully Boy for me

old-school hip hop here seeing hip hop all over the world like that I am loving it man Congrats.” Now that kind of praise naturally thrilled Ranveer He says, “I kept re-winding it and watching how

he says, ‘Yo Ranveer!’ it was too cool The

Pursuit of Happyness is among the

great-est cinematic performances of all time and when your idol says something so encouraging, what more can I ask for?”

With his aspirations, talent and ergy, Ranveer is sure that acting is just

en-one of his many hats “I want to write, compose and direct I want to explore

my creativity in various other avenues of filmmaking But it takes a lot of courage and personal evolution to do that I don’t feel like I am there yet I am getting a lot of very stimulating acting work and I want

to concentrate on that,” he says He will

soon shoot ’83 where he plays the role of

former Indian cricket captain Kapil Dev.Before he leaves he happily obliges the 25-odd people who have been wait-ing patiently for photos with him He looks in my direction and says, “You have a choice in life always You can take two paths One is seemingly easier, within your reach and more accessible Another is bold where you go down a path which seems very dangerous You don’t know what will come out of it You don’t know what this path holds But do

it, you never know You’ll never know until you do.” n

C o v e r S t o r y

"When we started dating six years ago,

I was more successful than him, busier than him, making more money I’ve never come across a man who is so comfortable with the attention I was getting"

DEEpIKA pADUKONE actor and wife

Ap

here’s a memorable

but somewhat rude

dia-logue in anurag

Kashy-ap’s guns-on-the-Ganga

epic, Gangs of Wasseypur

(2012), that articulates

India’s twin obsessions with cinema

and its heroes: ‘Sab saale sabke dimaag

mein apni apni picture chal rahi hai/Sab

saale hero banna chah rahein hain apni

pic-ture mein’ (‘everyone has a movie going

on in their minds/and they all want to

be its hero).’

Few have wanted it as badly, by his

own admission, than ranveer singh

Bhavnani, who has often called self a product of Bollywood a child of

him-a fhim-amily on the periphery of Mumbhim-ai’s grand cinematic dynasties, the 33-year-old has spent almost a decade in the in-dustry, building a distinct body of work with close to 20 films, the last three of which have grossed over rs 100 crore

at the all-too-critical box office The boy who was obsessed with Mumbai mov-ies, watching Vhs tapes of old movies while being fed by his mother, dancing

to its songs for the pleasure of his mother, Chand Burke, a former actor from Lahore in Pakistan, and even per-

grand-forming a scene from Deewar for his first

acting class while in college in america,

can now call out his own collection of iconic characters: the demonic alaud-din Khilji, the mindblowing police of-ficer simmba, and the electric Dharavi Gully Boy, all in one year

ranveer has always been acutely aware of Mumbai cinema’s power to capture the collective imagination of the nation, and the ability of its heroes

to define its eras, beginning with the Nehruvian triumvirate that embraced the romance of post-Independent India There was raj Kapoor’s wide-eyed social-ism, Dev anand’s smooth urbanity, and Dilip Kumar’s deep-seated tragedy Cut

to the sixties when shammi Kapoor huffed and puffed with his raw sexual-

The

H y b r i d S t a r

C o v e r S t o r y

In a world of ageing Khans

who’ve had a particularly

terrible 2018, the whispers

about Ranveer Singh being

the new Khan on the block

are becoming louder

T

By Kaveree Bamzai

getty images

25 MARCH 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 27

ity and even rawer mannerisms,

reduc-ing the polite 50s to a cinder here was a

hero who was not afraid of winning,

war-ring, and wooing with energy, one pelvic

thrust at a time as India changed, so did

the hero who articulated this angst

sud-denly nothing was good enough—there

was unchecked crime on the streets, the

politician was morally corrupt, families

were becoming dysfunctional, and there

was poison in the air Yet, hindi movie

audiences have never been equipped

for too much reality, so all this had to be

channelled through the clearly posh

per-sona of amitabh Bachchan even in his

darkest moments, we (and the camera)

looked up to him to know how to

negoti-ate our modernity, from the breadth of

our flares to the length of our sideburns

Cut to three decades dominated by

three men with a common surname,

each appealing to a different

constitu-ency with consistconstitu-ency and charm aamir

Khan’s intellectual earnestness, shah

rukh Khan’s charismatic corporate star,

and salman Khan’s muscular man child

The evolution of the three Khans, their

personal lives, public spats, and

profes-sional accomplishments have held India

spellbound But the nation has changed,

unleashing forces as positive as they can

be pessimistic Where there were once

easy definitions, there are divisions;

where there was once a definitive

nation-al identity, there are multiple diversities;

and where there was one audience, there

are now as many as there are platforms

as we enter into the third decade of the noughties, could ranveer singh be the superhero of our paradoxical times?

Film scholar rachel Dwyer believes he

is already a superstar, able to retain his originality while assimilating elements

of other stars “he’s educated and spoken in real life but plays a lower class person with as much success as amitabh Bachchan did his off-screen wackiness is like Kishore Kumar’s but his style is more that of a Kapoor he is part of a star couple on and off screen, well-matched with Deepika Padukone, but he gels well with other actresses.”

well-Will he be the only superhero? she isn’t

so sure of that “The other well lished male star is ranbir a good actor,

estab-versatile and can convey a great range of emotions he has chosen some rather odd films but will be around for many years as he’s not just a young hero.”

Yet, in a world of ageing Khans who’ve had a particularly terrible 2018, the whispers about ranveer being the new Khan on the block are becoming

louder salman Khan’s Race 3 (2018)

underperformed at the box office by the superstar’s superlative standards,

aamir Khan’s Thugs of Hindostan (2018)

was an awful film for which the star had to apologise, and shah rukh Khan continued to repeat his movie missteps

with a bloated Zero (2018) Film scholar

Nasreen Munni Kabir avers: “everyone

has their time in the sun and everyone

is of their time The fame and following

of all three Khans is set in stone Nothing will change that But every generation wants its heroes, people they identify with a new face brings new hope and renewed aspirations We can like the Khans and also like ranveer, but it’s about who is more relevant in the here and now? and what does it say about the here and now.”

Indeed, India is not the country it was when the Khans began or even when they were at their peak The business of Bollywood heroes is one of diminishing returns The Khans at their finest could never repeat amitabh Bachchan at the height of his fame any new star will find

it impossible to imitate the universality of

the Khans The audience is far less ant of ordinary scripts being bolstered by star power It is much more demanding of compelling stories It has an increasingly schizophrenic attitude to the consump-tion of glamour—those whose contro-versies it follows are not necessarily those whose movies it watches and it has a di-verse array of media to choose its enter-tainment from so an unheralded Vicky Kaushal can seemingly come out of no-

toler-where with a well-made war movie, Uri:

The Surgical Strike (2019) and it goes on

to make rs 240 crore and counting and equallya consistently good but low-key ayushmann Khurrana can score a

rs 140 crore box-office hit with Badhaai

Salman Khan in Race 3 (2018) Aamir Khan in

Thugs of Hindostan (2018) Shah Rukh Khan in Zero (2018)

Ho! (2018) about his mother’s pregnancy

and be an audience darling

In today’s Bollywood, nothing is

certain even if you bare your bottom,

dance frenetically around Paris, and

mouth ridiculous dialogues pretending

to be cool and with it, you cannot get a

Befikre (2016) to succeed, even though

it is directed by Mumbai’s most

power-ful producer aditya Chopra ranveer

singh realised this when Befikre that was

studio designed to make him slip into

shah rukh Khan’s shoes flopped ranbir

Kapoor, the other star touted to replace

the Khans, had realised this earlier,

when his movies with the two Kashyap

brothers [abhinav Kashyap’s Besharam,

(2013), and anurag Kashyap’s Bombay

Velvet, (2015)] brought his hard-won

early stardom crashing down to earth

ranveer is aware of the fickleness of

stardom but he is both hungry for more

and careful about its orchestration a Pr

analyst who doesn’t want to be named

calls him a natural actor but a

con-structed, method star Indeed, ranveer

is forever in performance mode, boom

box for company, energy on high, and

an effusive embrace for everyone even

journalists who have interviewed him at

length have rarely been invited into his

private space, his “apna time”, be it his

home or his vanity van as sociologist

shiv Viswanathan notes: ‘he is outgoing

but suggests a little black box of the self

inside In a deep way, he is the one

per-petual performance, off and on screen.’

ranveer’s preparation for his roles

has become almost as iconic as that of

aamir Khan he is now preparing for his

next role, as Kapil Dev in Kabir Khan’s

’83 on the World Cup winning captain It

is four months of intensive training, says Khan, learning how to bowl like Kapil Dev Balwinder singh sandhu from the

1983 squad is his team coach and Kapil will also be giving his inputs Khan calls him a chameleon, adding “he’s that rare actor today who is able to totally and completely transform himself into the character he is portraying his face seems

to change every character From Khilji to simmba to Gully Boy, we just don’t see the same person—they are three differ-ent and unique people on screen.” he looks for the key in every character and struggles until he locks down on it—

one remembers meeting him while he was preparing to play Khilji worrying about what accent to use, given that he was born in Bengal and then adopted by his uncle Jalal-ud-din Khilji whose an-cestors were Turks who had migrated to

present day afghanistan eventually, he would lock himself up in his new flat in Goregaon for 21 days to isolate himself and find the darkness within

ranveer takes his celebrity status most as seriously as he does his acting

al-The flamboyant suits, the witticisms, the networking From the time he would go

to parties with his boom box to get ticed in a sea of newbies to now, he can

no-be the life and soul of every celebration—

witness his wild dancing at sonam poor’s wedding reception with father of the bride anil Kapoor equally well-or-chestrated is the image he has presented

Ka-to the public as one half of Bollywood’s premier power couple since his Lake Como wedding to Deepika Padukone

she is higher paid, has worked longer in

the industry, and is clearly the bigger star

he is comfortable enough in his skin to accept that and revel in it—the perfect man in the age of #MeToo, so much so that he has even moved into her house post-marriage to blend seamlessly into her new life From picking her up from restaurants with paparazzi in full atten-dance to colour coordinating their air-port looks, ranveer never misses a beat

in playing the part he has assigned self—knight in shining armour to the

him-“most beautiful girl in the world” and where images go, words and emojis fol-low, with the couple routinely exchang-ing messages on Instagram with each other and the world You are unstoppa-ble, she gushes You are my superpower,

he responds awww Talk about a match made in social media heaven

Viswanathan finds in ranveer a bridity of styles which makes him fas-cinating ‘he is the upstart, the Johnny-come-lately and yet he can easily be the aristocrat used to power and riches he conveys a restlessness which is poten-tially performative Yet he is fluid enough

hy-to be past and present in a way few heroes can be his sense of experimentation al-lows you to tolerate his awful mistakes,’

he notes so whether it is launching full throttle into a condom ad in 2014 or al-lowing himself to be roasted (along with arjun Kapoor) by all India Bakchod in a comedy act in 2015 that went sour, ran-veer shows his inherent risk-taking abil-ity, much like most of young India.Backed by hard work—who can top

a prep of ten months training with

rap-pers Divine and Naezy for Gully Boy—

and ranveer’s irresistible rise seems set to continue even in an increasingly crowded field where a new star boy is born every year Yes, ranveer’s time has come, but in an industry built on the shifting sands of public likeability and artistic integrity, how long will it contin-

ue in an era that cannot distinguish tween a star and an influencer? Where audiences can celebrate the parts of you that resonate and reject what does not.Unconditional hero worship is dead The universal hero may soon follow n

be-Ranveer's time has come but in an

industry built on the shifting sands of

public likeability and artistic integrity-

how long will it continue in an era

that cannot distinGuish between a star

and an influencer?

C o v e r S t o r y

Right on time Nationalism is back as a persuasive theme

in this General Election

By PR Ramesh and siddhaRth singh

Politics

n February 14th, at a post-lunch meeting in Delhi between top leaders from the bJP and a handful of advertising wunderkinds, there was a sense of urgency they quickly got down to discussing ways to pitch before voters the gains of the federal schemes launched

by the narendra Modi Government the goal of the brainstorming exercise was to come up with pithy and incisive lines to hard-sell Modi and his message in the run-up to the 2019 General election the sales pitch would highlight electrification, housing, rural aid and a raft of achievements of the bJP-led coalition that swept to power five years ago after a ten-year gap the party estimates that

220 million people benefited from various welfare programmes over the past five years add to it 110 million members of the bJP and they have a sure-shot win in the General election—so went the calculation the thrust of the campaign was unambiguous: woo those who stand to gain from Gov-ernment handouts In 2014, the bJP secured a simple majority by winning just over 170 million votes.the grandees of the ruling party and the advertising pros were soon upbeat about the prospects

of the high-wattage poll campaign although they all knew only too well that translating simple math into electoral triumph required enormous hard work and grit

It was then that the meeting was interrupted by a chilling bit of news from afar: from Pulwama

in Kashmir, where a suicide bomber had rammed his explosives-laden SuV into a CrPF convoy, killing many people the toll kept rising even as the meeting ended, and it wasn’t until much later that the Government received confirmation of the deaths of 41 CrPF personnel In retaliation, on February 26th India launched an aerial attack on a camp in Pakistani territory that was apparently run by Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), which had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan downplays any deliberate effort on the part of the bJP to whip up frenzy over national security “It is not a slogan for the bJP in this election It is a matter of grave concern for the right-thinking people of this country because of the Pulwama attack,” he tells

Open in an interview he emphasises the fact that we have a powerful leader in Modi who led the

nation through the tough phase after the Pulwama attack and this is destined to have an impact

on the elections “thanks to the aerial strikes that we launched on Pakistani soil against a terrorist camp in response to the killing of CrPF men and the diplomatic offensive that followed resulting in the release of [Wing Commander] abhinandan Varthaman after Pakistan captured him, the Prime Minister’s bold stand will be appreciated by voters,” he adds the Centre claimed that Varthaman was released due to its clever diplomatic moves that prompted an isolated Islamabad to de-escalate tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours

Whatever the bJP may say, that it wanted national security to be on top of the poll campaign agenda was clear from Prime Minister Modi’s speech in Churu, rajasthan, on February 27th, where

he lapped up nationalist sentiment in a huge and highly televised rally More speeches, columns and online posts by other leaders stressing on a ‘strong, defiant’ Indian leadership followed

hamburg-based Dr Sangeeta Mahapatra, who closely follows social media and offline campaign trends in India, elaborates on the shift in strategy that revved up the bJP’s campaign machinery “each political party can tailor the national security slogan—which way they want to play this high-value concern, and the kind of terminologies, images, and format of messaging to be used—as per their targeted online audience this is already happening with the bJP and the Congress trying to win the politics of perception with online messages full of loaded language on who is more concerned about national security.” Mahapatra, associate, Institute of asian Studies, German Institute of Global and area Studies, goes on, “In the past few weeks, we have seen their messages on national security serving three main purposes through the use of virtue words like patriotism: it can boost their image as the protector

of the country, who is above all criticism; it can be used to discredit detractors and critics as being weak

or subversive or exploitative; and, it can help deflect attention from issues that can hurt electorally.”

national security, according to more analysts Open spoke to, is extremely attractive as an election

slogan thanks to its high emotional appeal, rather than a topic like development In fact, in the days after the Pulwama terrorist strike, there was intense speculation about the course India would adopt the consensus was that Modi had ‘locked’ himself into an unenviable corner where he had no op-

O

www.openthemagazine.com 31

tion but to strike at Pakistan equally strong was the speculation

about the nature of the response the expectation was that there

would be some action across the Line of Control (LoC) similar to

the one seen in the wake of the uri terrorist atrocity in 2016

In-stead, India dramatically escalated the response by using the air

Force to strike at a location well into Pakistani territory—balakot

in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province

In the weeks after that strike and the near-crisis between the

two countries, the opposition’s response, say analysts, has been

haphazard and chaotic Its allegations range from demanding

“proof” of the strike to claiming that Modi has used the episode

to his political advantage apparently, neither of the two charges

has gained any significant traction

the other question was that of the bJP making use of the strike

in its campaign So far, in one sense, this has remained muted,

ac-cording to various observers For one, news of the strike across

dif-ferent platforms was so widespread that no claims were necessary

about India’s resolve or that of the Government that carried it out

It was one of those rare one-sided events where opposition parties

could only snipe at the edges while being forced to overtly support

the ruling party Opposing the idea of being firm on terrorism

or not giving an adequate response would have been political

suicide With the election Commission’s stringent conditions on

what can and cannot be said on the matter, even if the bJP cannot

publicly claim credit for the balakot strikes, it is too closely

associ-ated with the decision for anyone to question it

Mahapatra argues that if one follows the topics trending online, the Pulwama attack and India’s aerial strike on Pakistan seem to

be a rallying cry against a common enemy and have fuelled otic fervor these topics can dominate the polls of 2019 as talking points within the larger concern over national security, she says

patri-“the bJP has already made it clear that they will use this incident

to demonstrate their capability as a strong Government vis-a-vis an irresolute, feeble uPa under the Congress,” she says this is evident from the recent Facebook posts of Finance Minister arun Jaitley, who put the spotlight on the matter and appealed to the people

to elect a strong leader In a Facebook post on March 12th, Jaitley argued that with the 2016 surgical strikes across the LoC and the aerial strikes of February 26th, the Prime Minister has introduced what he described as the Modi Doctrine ‘Do we fight the terrorists merely on the strength of intelligence information, preventing at-tacks and diplomatically isolating Pakistan? In such cases, will we

be able to ensure a hundred per cent success? the odds are loaded against us on this ground even if the terrorists succeed only once

a year, they make their point Our intelligence and security have

to succeed hundred per cent that is a big challenge alternatively, the surgical and air strikes evolved a policy that we must attack ter-ror at the point of its origin In both cases we succeeded Pakistan realised that there was a severe cost involved if the State continued

to patronise terror the world welcomed our proactive approach

Pakistan was diplomatically isolated Its traditional friends were not willing to stand up and defend it,’ he wrote in a post meant to

Politics

tHe opposition And tHe Ruling pARty HAve been vying to seAl pRe-poll p CAMpAign MAnifestos debAtes on jobs, tHe AgRARiAn CRisis And tHe e

insteAd, tHe foCus HAs sHifted to A teRRAin wHeRe bjp HAs tHe CuRRent

The most formidable regional alliance against the BJP is the one in

Uttar Pradesh between Mayawati’s BSP and Akhilesh Yadav’s SP In Tamil Nadu, the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress has tied up with MK Stalin’s DMK to take on an alliance between the ruling AIADMK and BJP

getty images

25 MARCH 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 33

educate bJP cadres on national issues

Mahapatra adds that the Congress has tried to dent Modi’s ibility by poking holes in the Government’s claims of effectively neutralising JeM “Social media messaging works best in a charged climate and that is what is happening now; both the parties are using emotive videos and texts with captions containing what is called ‘high-inference language’—something that has high persua-sive power this helps to mobilise public opinion in their favour and against their opponent by making itself a key actor in the war game, a party can project itself as being hawkish and strong enough

cred-to destroy the enemy this can have mass appeal,” she forecasts

Ith the eLeCtIOnS approaching—to be held in seven phases from april 11th to May 19th—the oppo-sition and the ruling party have been vying with each other to seal pre-poll pacts with regional and national parties In some cases, the talks are still on the most formidable alli-ance is the one in uttar Pradesh, cobbled together by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the bahujan Samaj Party (bSP) the original idea was

a grand alliance of three parties—SP, bSP and the Congress sides small players talks between the parties, which first began in november 2017 only to be stalled, were revived after the Congress and the Janata Dal(S) managed to form a government through a post-poll alliance in Karnataka in June last year that was the mo-ment when the opposition sensed that there could be a revival of

—anti-bJP forces On October 3rd last year, less than two months fore the opposition victories in the Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and rajasthan assembly elections, Mayawati was to meet Congress veteran Kamal nath at the latter’s 1 tuglak road residence in Delhi

be-at 9:30 pm to discuss a sebe-at-sharing agreement the plan fell through because the bSP had demanded assembly seats in some traditional Congress strongholds in Madhya Pradesh, which was unaccept-able to the latter In 2017, the Congress had fought an unsuccessful electoral battle in a tie-up with the SP against the bJP, which won

325 of the 403 seats in the state assembly Priyanka Gandhi, who is now Congress general secretary in charge of eastern uttar Pradesh, was instrumental in stitching up that alliance

Contrary to expectations, the Congress, which has entered into a pre-poll pact with its ally nCP in Maharashtra, could not create the larger alliance it had hoped for to take on the bJP and the Shiv Sena in the state It failed to rope in the bharipa bahu-jan Mahasangh led by Dalit leader Prakash ambedkar and the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana of farmer leader raju Shetti ambedkar is now part of the Vanchit bahujan aghadi coalition which has allied with asaduddin Owaisi’s all India Majlis-e-It-tehad-ul-Muslimeen (aIMIM) Maharashtra sends 48 members

to the Lok Sabha, the second-largest number after uttar Pradesh

In tamil nadu, though, the rahul Gandhi-led Congress was able to tie up with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) while the bJP aligned with the ruling Dravidian party, the all In-dia anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (aIaDMK) tamil nadu accounts for 39 Lok Sabha seats In neighbouring Karnataka, the dismal performance of the Congress-JD(S) government could work in the bJP’s favour In Kerala, the only state where the CPM-led Left Front is in power, the stakes are high for the Marxists, who face challenges this time from traditional rival Congress as well

as the bJP, which, despite having won no Lok Sabha seats from the state till date, has seen a rise in vote share In andhra Pradesh, where simultaneous state elections will be held along with Sik-kim, Odisha and arunachal Pradesh, an anti-bJP coalition has shown no signs of gaining in political momentum In Odisha, where naveen Patnaik-led biju Janata Dal has had a long inning, the bJP, which has made gains in local polls, anticipates that it can improve its tally drastically this time around on the back of anti-incumbency and pro-nationalist sentiments

While in bihar, opposition unity against the bJP-Janata Dal (united) combine remains weak, in Jharkhand, the Congress seems hopeful of sealing a pre-poll pact with regional allies In Delhi, the Congress and aaP, traditional rivals with overlapping votebanks, failed to reach a seat-sharing pact In the north-east, the bJP has managed to win allies over the past few years and sees

no threat to those alliances despite the furore and drama over the Citizenship (amendment) bill regional allies in nagaland and assam that had distanced themselves from the bJP and whose leaders had resigned from key positions are now back in the saddle In Punjab, the bJP has placated the Shiromani akali Dal with 10 of the 13 seats from the state

In West bengal, where the once-dominant Left Front led by the CPM had been pushed to a distant third in the past few elections,

e-poll pACts And Coin inCisive

e eConoMy HAve tAken A bACk seAt

AdvAntAge: nAtionAl seCuRity

Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray and BJP’s Amit Shah announce their alliance

in Maharashtra, the state with the second-highest Lok Sabha seats

W

getty images

including local polls, the bJP hopes to make more gains, especially

in tribal areas and bordering districts the ruling trinamool

Con-gress in the state had won 34 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2014—

when the bJP managed to win the Darjeeling and asansol seats

trinamool Congress chief Mamata banerjee is part of a loose

con-glomeration of 21 opposition parties that have vowed to defeat the

bJP, whom they call a pro-hindutva entity, in the national polls

he tWO Great controversies to hit the

Govern-ment in the past two years—that will likely impact

the election outcome—centred on the issue of

unem-ployment, especially in the wake of demonetisation,

and the distress in the agricultural sector

reports emerged, suggesting the ‘suppression’ of a national

Sample Survey Office (nSSO) survey report for 2017-18 the

con-tents of this report, which were leaked, painted a grim picture of

unemployment at 6.1 per cent, a four-decade high the issue took

a political colour, with the Government coming under fire for

doing precious little to generate employment anecdotes began

surfacing about highly qualified candidates applying for clerical

and other positions that did not require such qualifications this

was very quickly dubbed an ‘unemployment crisis’

a similar story panned out in the agriculture sector here a

combination of low growth and a steep deflation in the prices

of agricultural commodities led to cries of an ‘agrarian crisis’ at

2.51 per cent growth from 2014-17, the progress of the sector was

indeed low this was matched by a decadal low in the growth rate

of rural wages the trick, of course, is that when the two figures are

viewed together, they tell one story, but when they are disjointed,

another story, far more critical of the Government’s performance,

emerges Politically, the latter proved handy to the opposition

the fact of a 10-year-low in rural wage growth is indeed cause for

worry but there was little interest in probing the cause Its link to

low growth and poor productivity in Indian agriculture—the

eco-nomic basis of the problem—has not been addressed In the past,

rural wages were artificially propped up by creating a wage floor

with programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi national rural

employment Guarantee Scheme (MGnreGS) the latter was

dependent on huge budgetary outlays to fund it In the uPa years,

this led to fiscal slippages and affected economic growth While

the Modi Government has increased outlays for this programme,

the structural link between low productivity in the farm sector and its effect on rural wages is a tough economic problem to solve.One piece of evidence that sits uncomfortably with claims of very high unemployment is the economic growth story Official statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth—itself a sub-ject of controversy—suggest that the average GDP growth for the five years of the Government, with the final year being a projection, averaged 7.3 per cent even if one takes this with a pinch of salt and considers only the three quarters of Fy2018-19, the figure aver-ages to 7.2 per cent the disaggregated, quarter-by-quarter growth when compared to the relevant period of the previous year remains below expectations by a notch or two but it remains one of the highest growth rates in the world and certainly within the bounds

of average Indian growth rates when viewed from a decadal spective the explanation given by private sector economists is that the quarterly growth slowdown was due to factors like high oil prices in mid-2018 and due to the fallout of the shadow banking sector crisis last year Since then oil prices have fallen and banks have taken over some part of the lending that was carried out by the shadow banks In purely macroeconomic terms, some part of the explanation for slow growth rests with what are called ‘base effects’, which are statistical quirks and not due to some crisis

per-It is hard to believe that a country can continue to grow at 7 per cent rate but generate no employment the real issue is the nature of employment: with structural changes in economies worldwide, the nature of jobs has changed dramatically in the last decade In every respect—from adjustments to these changes

on the part of those seeking jobs to their reflection in statistical systems that capture these changes adequately—India has lagged behind Social security systems that can mitigate these chang-es—such as unemployment insurance—are non-existent the consequent noise in the political domain gets elevated as a result.how will this impact the bJP’s chances in 2019? the golden rule of Indian politics is that ‘everything is local’ as regional parties stress on bread-and-butter local issues, politics gets more

‘localised’ and the debate about jobs, the ‘agrarian crisis’ and the economy now appears muted the impetus that an alliance of regional and national opposition parties would have given to airing these issues is now lacking

again, the result of all this is that some part of the debate has shifted to another terrain where the bJP has an advantage: national security n

“the bjp and Congress are already trying to win the politics of perception with online messages full of loaded language on who is more concerned about national security”

Sangeeta Mahapatra scholar, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

“national security is not a

slogan for the bjp in this

election it is a matter of

grave concern for the

right-thinking people of this

country because of the pulwama attack”