MODI OR GANDHI?

BY SUNNY THOMAS

The other day, a television editor asked me in right earnest, Whom do you like to see as the next Prime Minister, Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi?  

I am very clear about what I want in life – not even once have I asked my wife, What do I want? 

I said emphatically, Robert Vadra or Nitin Gadkariji. 

Why? The editor persisted. 

Robert Vadra can provide one DLF house for every Indian. 

And Nitin Gadkari?  

Nitin Gadkariji can make every Indian a Director in his company, even if it is a dubious one.  

The Indian Parliament is ever in an uproar. Every MP and every Minister wants to be seen on television. Instead of historic sessions, we now have histrionic sessions, and our television editors are makers of (virtual) reality.  

The remarkable thing about Sushma Swaraj is that she always wins! The Sushma folklore is full of the victories she won for herself and her party. In 1999, she won a convincing moral victory from Chikmagalur, though Sonia Gandhi snatched away the real victory.    

The climax of the FDI drama in Parliament was the moral vistory of Sushma Swaraj as she herself admitted! But few realised it is the moral victory of her party for 2014, as the voting pattern indicates. Some called the M&M game played by Maya and Mulayam as a game of hypocrisy. It is a game of alignment that will decide who will be India’s next Prime Minister. 

BJP has lost its Vajpayee advantage of fielding a candidate who is most acceptable to most of his countrymen. By projecting someone who is adept at name calling and degrading campaign rhetoric, the party is ensuring its moral victory for 2014. In their anxiety to create history, some television channels have already placed Narendra Modi in PMO, with allies, like Jayalalithaa and Naveen, and party MPs queing in for plumb Cabinet posts.   

The battle lines are already drawn for 2014, with Mulayam, Maya and Mamata reluctant to be seen even voting with Modi party for fear of losing their votebanks. To be counted, the Invisible Party of India, the Marxists, should merge with BJP and play a constructive role.   

To avoid lies getting into your nervous system, one must skilfully use the remote when you spot a politician on television channel. Some channels air live (political) animal shows and the most excruciating part of it is the vulgar female smiles while the debate is on. For three consecutive years, the students of The Times School of Journalism voted CNN-IBN as the Most Professional Channel, and if there is ever a Cerebral Channel for cerebral panel discussion, it is Headlines Today. NDTV 24x7 is the anscestral home one loves to visit; and for instant energy and revitalisation, one should go to Times Now. 

 Congress seldom takes a holiday from scams and BJP from scam-mongering. But they are bedfellows growing fond of each other by every passing day. Don’t be surprised if you find Robert Vadra and Nitin Gadkheriji playing chess or drinking champagne near some mango groove of DLF Enclave.  

There is nothing Catholic about abortion. Nor is stupidity purely Irish. Law makers universally are stupid, not because they lack intelligence but because it is humanly impossible to envision every situation the law may have to deal with. It is compounded by the stupidity of doctors, the stupidity of the police, the stupidity of the interpreters of the law. And finally when someone has to be blamed, blame it on the Catholic Church that believes human life is God-given and hence sacred. We don’t need a court verdict to figure out what transpired: the doctors do not want to be caught on the wrong side of the law, nor were proactive enough to take instant remedial measures. At the hands of human ineptitude, the law meant to protect the sanctity of human life turned out to be a hapless instrument to snuff out human life!  

AJMAL KASAB’S JOURNEY

SUNNY THOMAS

The tragedy of Ajmal Kasab lay not in what he did but in what he believed. He was brainwashed into believing that by killing innocent people who have done him no harm, he could go to heaven! The greater tragedy is there are hundreds of Ajmal Kasabs willing to cross the border to go to heaven. The story of traumatized lives – traumatized for life – that cannot be told in words is only an episode of the tragic drama, plotted and scripted in Pakistan but enacted on our soil.  

At the moment, there are 40 to 50 terror training camps operating between Muzaffarabad and Lahore.  They are waiting for American troops to go so that another wave of terror can be enacted. Terror training is a three-tier operation: The recruitment camps indoctrinate for the first 30 days, then the arms training camp imparts perfect training not only in AK 47 but also in radio telephony and navigation, and finally the launching campus give them strategic lessons ready to use. 

The world is about to witness a cherubic army, who look like angels but are demons incarnate, raining terror on cities, strategic installations, and crowded public places. Al-Qaeda’s appetite for children is well documented. A recent video showing five-year-old children with assault rifles and handguns outraged the sensitivities of the civilized world. It was filmed at one of the terror training camps in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region by East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).  

Most of the children are forcibly recruited – abducted from school, on streets, or at home – or are driven by crushing poverty. Orphans of jihadis come with a vengeance to avenge the spilling of their fathers’ blood. Death factories have trained over 5000 Pakistani children as suicide bombers, some of them as young as eight years.  

ETIM has been fighting to create an independent Islamic state in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. Already, they have committed over 200 acts of terrorism, only some of which have been reported in the media. And they have been sending jihadis to fight alongside al-Qaeda and Taliban. According to German intelligence, the five suspects charged with the bombing plot in Frankfurt are trained in Waziristan.   

The latest news of child combatants comes from Syria. In a horrific example of demonic cruelty, a 12-year-old boy in Yemen was asked to deliver a gift package to his father. When the father opened the door, the bomb inside the package exploded, killing the father who was an outspoken critic of terrorism and the boy. A child rights activist explains that children can be recruited at far lower costs and it is enough to tell them they will go to Paradise if they die!

      

The militants are better informed and strategically placed in the Afghan-Pakistan border that the Pakistani army is often helpless. Remember, the attack on Pakistan’s nuclear installations came when news reached Al- Qaeda that the army was preparing for a military operation in North Waziristan! 

The legend has it that when Raja Jamboo Lochan saw a tiger and a goat drinking water side by side in a pond, he decided to build a city, which was named after him but was corrupted and called Jammu instead of Jamboo. So it was where the strong and the weak lived peacefully for centuries. Mythologically speaking, Kashmir used to be a huge lake, which over centuries got drained into the ever deepening Baramulla-Khadiniyar gorge.

  

It would have been hard for anyone living in Kashmir just a couple of decades ago to imagine that their Paradise on earth, known for its unique culture and communal harmony, would be reduced to a theatre of operation for the militants! Conversely, it would be straining one’s imagination for anyone living in Kashmir today to be told there was once a Paradise called Kashmir!   

How did human civilization come to this sorry pass? When education that enlightens and technology that enriches remain the exclusive domain of the rich, and the poor are left high and dry – as nations and individuals – it is inevitable that `barbarians’ would destroy civilization. The Roman Empire was brought down by barbarians. The New Empire, too, could be brought down by `barbarians’, if sensible leaders do not come forward to reach out to the have-nots in their billions. It is possible that some lunatic could blow up the planet because he believed that by doing so he could go to heaven!   

  

LOVE, HATE & FUNERAL!

SUNNY THOMAS

Was it the funeral of love or was it the funeral of hate that Mumbai just witnessed? Your answer would depend on which part of India you belong to! Understandably, a Bihari’s or Kashmir’s verdict will contradict a middle class Maharashtrian’s verdict, especially if the latter has benefited from the elimination of competition in employment and the former disadvantaged because of lack of level playing field.  

Hitler had a story to tell which most of us may have forgotten by now. When Hitler’s mother was gravely ill, a Jewish doctor refused to treat her because they were poor, and she died. The consequence was half a million Jews were exterminated in Germany. The darling daughter of a former Maharashtra chief minister committed suicide in the 1960s because she was jilted by a young Merchant Navy officer from Kerala. Sukarno of Indonesia and Mao Zedong of China’s Long March fame were denied permission to take the hands of the girls they loved by their parents. Personal insults often spark political movements. There is always an untold story behind hate. There is nothing called pure hate! 

For our television channels, funerals are grand opportunities for sprucing up TRPs. Some channels were treating us with `Kejriwal and nothing but Kejriwal; the whole Kejriwal and nothing but the whole Kejriwal`! The same channels were focusing on the crowds and the VIPs who descended on the scene, showing the same footage of crowds and VIPs again and again, insulting the intelligence of the viewers.  

The remote is the best friend of the television viewer because when insulted beyond measure, he could always find liberation in some intelligent channels. Rahul Kanwal’s Headlines Today stole the march over other channels in interpreting, with a cerebral touch, the exit of a phenomenon, by an eminent panel whose views merit attention.  Panel discussions are a humbug in most channels and there comes frequently one Miss Vanity who is an insult to the intelligence of the 1.2 billion people of India, whose main job is to shout down other panelists! In contrast, Headlines Today panelists (in subsequent days) consisted of Vir Sangvi, Dipankar Gupta, Alyque Padamsee, Sudhir Telang, and others.  

   

How would Indian television journalists fare in comparison with their global counterparts? Tim Sebastin of Dhoha Debates, BBC’s own David Frost and the late Italian sensation Oriana Fallaci have created a genre with inimitable personality touch. Their prodigious homework turned their interviews into world-class products viewed by millions.  

Fallaci who started as a celebrity interviewer at the age of 16 to help pay her college fee, finally ended up interviewing Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi, the Shah of Iran. The La Fallaci style of interview became something of a cult in North America — adversarial, emotional and extremely lengthy. She described her interviews as "coitus" and "a seduction" and spoke English, French and Spanish, as well as Italian to circumvent interpreters. 

In 1968, she was shot and seriously wounded, and wrote several bestselling books. Oriana Fallaci, died of cancer aged 77, the cancer that had killed her father, mother and one sister.

David Frost started when he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge and hosted top-rated shows on both sides of the Atlantic. British politicians were incensed when BBC’s That Was The Week That Was was aired in 1962-63 but soon it achieved cult status. David Frost has written 15 books and produced eight films.  

The legendary BBC journalist Tim Sebastian is the founder and chairman of the Doha Debates. The Bloomberg TV India broadcasts every Saturday The Outsider With Tim Sebastian. He is the moderator of the New Arab Debates the Doha Debates, and the The Outsider Debates, and was the first presenter of BBC's HARDtalk. An Oxford graduate, he is the author of eight novels and two non-fiction titles. 

Television journalism is a field that attracts young talent. Perhaps Rahul Kanwal’s generation can do a lot produce Tim Sebastians and David Frosts and Oriana Fallacies!  

NOSTALGIA, UTOPIA & OBAMA!

SUNNY THOMAS

Elections are mostly about mood swings. Mitt Romney tried his best to swing the mood of America by his money power, making the 2012 Presidential election the costliest in history. He tried working on racial prejudice and even religious prejudice and proved how vulnerable are democracies to prejudices! Prejudices work not only in America but elsewhere in the absence of a strong leader.   

`He is an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, and what’s more, he is a Muslim’ – the term almost synonymous with a traitor after 9/11. Some evangelists were working overtime with all their missionary zeal to defeat the demon called Obama! 

Unfortunately, the White man’s prejudice ruled supreme, turning it into a racial contest. But the women of America, who proved wiser when it comes to voting, stonewalled the democracy, not to let it be subverted by prejudice.  It is often the nameless, faceless, powerless millions who tilt the balance of power and create history.  

The happiest because of an Obama win are the poorest of the poor who do not have to subsidise the richest of the rich who want to discontinue the health benefits of the poor. So many of the poor Americans will be driven to despair if the health benefits are snatched from them, which Romney would have done to let the rich enjoy their opulent living on the empty stomachs of the poor.  

  

In the last 60 years, America has changed so drastically that the political and social landscape that once existed is beyond recognition today. In the conservative 1950s, a few political families ruled the country and it was oligarchy unchallenged in democratic garb. Today high-technology driven America of Silicon Valley, Microsoft and Apple has redefined the nation, talent-scouting Chinese, Indian, Hispanic immigrants in their thousands. Add to that the educated Blacks coming out of their ghettos to claim their pride of place.

       

 The Republicans are a bunch of conservatives who live in the nostalgia of the 50’s and want very much to turn the clock back, jettisoning illegal immigrants like Obama! The Democrats, in contrast, offer a Utopia of the Great American Dream. It’s much like the India scenario where Congress and BJP offer Utopia and Nostalgia respectively. But it’s the narrative that matters or how effective is your story-telling. 

As for the American republic, nothing much is going to change because of an Obama victory. The Republican-dominated House of Representatives will block with a vengeance any social benefits that the Administration will be planning. 

The America President’s free domain, constitutionally, is in the foreign policy – to decide how many more civilians should be killed by US drones and when to call the American troops home. Most Presidents tend to be aggressive because Arab countries and Afghanistan are their only theatre of action (Arabs have oil and Afghanistan is strategic). A peacenik President is often criticized as a weak President, and a globe-trotting President, as a talking shop President.   

   

 Armageddon could be only months away if Israel plans an adventurous strike on Iran’s nuclear installations! Then it could be third world war, fulfiling Einstein’s prophecy: ``I do not know what the third world war will be fought with, but the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones.’’

Obama saved capitalism with history’s greatest bail-out, he saved American honour by Osama bin Laden’s head; and now he could banish American unemployment to a great degree. In the campaign, America saw his determination, strategy, intelligence, communicative skill and team building in defeating American prejudice, which could have cost his job. 

Three cheers to President Obama, and good luck on his second term!