| 22 April 2004 | Thursday | 01 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Who is the greatest Bengali?
Waiting for disaster
Why is Rabri Devi called Rabri? It was a custom at least in her family to ask the mother what she wanted to eat just after the painful labours of childbirth. Her mother asked for rabri and thus was a future chief minister of Bihar named. Luckily her mother's sweet tooth craved for variety. Rabri's sisters are called Jalebi, Rasgulla and Paan.
All three are housewives. Could a Rasgulla Devi have become chief minister of Bihar? I rather think not. Too Bengali. But Jalebi would have been fine: it's national. The sons were not as sweet.
They were given more divine, or at least heroic, honorifics, possibly because they were considered boons. The three are called, familiarly, Prabhu, Sadhu and Subhash. By all accounts the only thing holy about Sadhu Yadav is that he is a holy terror.
Both Rabri and Laloo were born in extreme poverty, so I do not grudge them their current comforts. As Zsa Zsa Gabor once pointed out, the only thing worse than being nouveau riche is being nouveau poor.
For a year after he became chief minister, Laloo Yadav lived in the impoverished hut where he had grown up in Patna. Today, the foremost couple of Bihar share adjoining bungalows on a spot where, it is said, the old rulers of Kalinga once had their palace. There is sufficient space for a palace.
The first home of Bihar is zoned off from the jagged din of an edgy city. Security has its attendant advantages. A walk through the residence is a journey.
In the fading light of a summer evening I amble past some 150 cows, chewing cud in utter peace, waiting to be milked. The cows have a team of private masseurs. They also produce milk worth about Rs 10 lakhs a month. Wheat and vegetable gardens succeed the cow farm. There is a fish tank. Laloo Yadav is taking his evening constitutional in the fields after yet another day of helicampaigning.
He is undressed for the occasion. A lungi draped over his swelling waist is all he needs. He proudly shows me his grain before he moves on for a bath and some clothes fit for television. He is unperturbed by mosquitoes as he sits on a chair for the interview; behind him is the trunk of a shisham tree that has been converted into a likeness of the god Surya by art students.
The interview is in English; or at least some of it is. When work is over we move towards a porch with an awning, two rows of chairs, and a television set. Laloo provides a generous commentary to the news.
Groups of loyalists troop in, sit down, drink tea offered by waiters in British Raj turbans and leave when an imperious signal tells them that the audience is over. The groups change but the conversation does not. They all offer flattering estimates of how the enemy will be destroyed in the coming elections.
Rabri Devi joins us; she has just finished her first road show in the Yadav heartland of Maner. She is calm where her husband is loud, bright where her husband is shrewd. She is not very literate, but literacy is measure of poverty, not intelligence.
She seems a little more cynical of the tales flatterers tell, but she keeps her counsel. The head of the Patna Chamber of Commerce offers us singharas cooked in ghee followed by idli-sambar. I can barely struggle through the first course of this high tea but Laloo compensates.
When I leave after nearly three hours at the residence, there is a nagging feeling of something not quite right, or perhaps something not quite wrong, through the evening. Then it strikes. The lights have not gone out even once in the first home. I suppose they dare not.
Opinion polls are an upper caste conspiracy. A mild suggestion that life might be less optimistic than the loyalists had guaranteed, with opinion polls as evidence, evokes a vociferous denial. Laloo Yadav raises his face before raising his voice, and dismisses opinion polls as urban nonsense.
Well, if he did not believe in opinion polls did he believe in the bookies? They were offering a mere 15 paise to a rupee on Atal Behari Vajpayee becoming prime minister again, which is about as certain as a bet can get.
Rupees five was being handed out for every rupee on Sonia Gandhi becoming prime minister. I told him some other odds. Only 25 paise was being paid out for BJP getting 175 seats, another safe assessment; while you could make Rs 1.20 for every rupee on BJP getting 200 seats, which meant that this was very possible too. Who set these odds, asked Laloo? The bookies were casteist supporters of the BJP. I changed the subject.
The question is provocative, the answer unabashed. How, I ask Laloo Yadav, is he going to rig the election in the age of electronic voting? In the old days Laloo would joke that a favourite genie of his lived in the ballot boxes, and magically changed the results to ensure his victory wherever there was any doubt. But that was a private joke.
His formal answer is offered very formally. There is no rigging in Bihar. Such an accusation is nothing but propaganda by the upper castes. A sharp lady I met in Hazaribagh, which is now in Jharkhand, was more eloquent through her laughter. All the goons, she said, were busy improving their punching speed on their mobile phones.
Likewise, every candidate is very pious and spends only what the Election Commission permits it, said Laloo. However, in fairness, one could hardly expect Laloo Yadav to disqualify himself by admitting the truth; moreover, every serious candidate overspends.
I asked a person close to Laloo how he manages electoral finances. "He gives money in stages, and tries to make sure that it is not spent by the candidate immediately on sofa sets and refrigerators. He also pressures candidates to raise their own money. Agar sab paiswa de diya to candidate ka involvence nahin hoga, naa..."
There is a definite feel-good factor in Jharkhand, which was part of Bihar in the last elections but has spun off into a separate independent state. Jharkhandis are feeling very good about leaving Bihar. The difference is visible the moment you touch down. In three years they have brought their highways into the modern age. They insist that you drive to feel the difference.
In Bihar, the highways are patchy; the state roads an insult. We made the mistake of trying to drive through Bihar Sharif. Someone should do a documentary on what they call a road. It is a mid-18th century track weighed down by mid-20th century vehicles. There are no potholes, because there is no road. Our vehicle hurtles across stone until we bump onto a highway. Relief. It isn't an autobahn but at least you move.
The most desolate spot in Patna is Sadaqat Ashram, the beautiful bungalow bequeathed to the Congress by Dr Rajendra Prasad. This is the smithy where men of iron forged the idea of a modern India.
I last visited the Congress headquarters of Bihar more than ten years ago, and it was in a state of constant bustle, the rooms and lawns full of functionaries, workers, ticket-seekers. We drive through the gates at 10 in the morning, at the height of a general election. There is not a single person around. The party flag is frayed and colourless, for no one has bothered to change it in years. One office is open, but there is no one inside.
At the far end of the building is a comfortable domestic scene: a man, possibly an employee, is seated on a chair, reading a Hindi newspaper; nearby, a woman is doing chores. He looks startled, even perturbed, by the appearance of a vehicle. To stop would be embarrassing, not to him, but to the memory of a great institution. We drive on.
The irony is that Laloo Yadav simply stole this election from the Congress while the misled party watched, helpless, listless, lifeless. Congress seats were halved although its votes had doubled, as opinion polls are now confirming. A further irony is that with the Congress out of the picture, its vote is striding back to the NDA rather than staying with its allies.
Laloo may have been right when he pointed out that the Congress vote was not transferable. That makes sense. It is a national party, and a Congress alliance works only if the Congress leads, not if the Congress follows.
"Hey Ganga Maiya, tohe piyari chadhaibo, sainya se kar de milanwa..." Every old Bhojpuri film had at least one scene of the heroine worshipping at the banks of the Holy Ganga as it swept majestically past Patna. It was to Mother Ganga that the young heroine came when she prayed for a lover, offering her devotion in return. These days the heroine would have to walk four kilometres from Sadaqat Ashram.
When Laloo Yadav became chief minister more than a decade ago, the Ganga still flowed below the Ashram and by the cremation ghat where the last rites of the great Jaya Prakash Narayan were completed. The Ganga has literally silted up, and been replaced by fields on which crops are being sown by those who have seized the land illegally.
The absence of the river is startling to someone who is familiar with Patna. The whole city would pour into the sweeping river at the Chat Puja in winter. Laloo and Rabri once were among those many thousands; now they offer puja in the fish tank at their residence. The whisper is becoming a murmur and the murmur, say Laloo's opponents, will become a roar on election day: when the Ganga turns away from the city, its rulers pay the price.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.
Who is the greatest Bengali?
Who is the greatest Bengali of all time? The BBC's Bangla service says, after conducting an opinion survey of its listeners, that Bangladesh's founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the greatest. The finding has widened the gap between Bangladesh's two major political parties.
The Bangla Service of the BBC asked its listeners, numbering about 12 million in Bangladesh and India's West Bengal state, to submit names of Bengalis whom they consider the greatest of all time - without specifying the fields of contributions.
Some 1,000 listeners from Bangladesh, West Bengal and the Bengali diaspora responded through email and by post, says Sabir Mustafa, a Bangladeshi who heads the Bangla service. Eventually, the BBC radio prepared a list of 20 Bengalis, out of 143 names that came in, as the greatest of all times and announced the list through a countdown over 20 days, beginning on March 26, Bangladesh's independence day, and ending on April 14, coinciding with the Bengali New Year's Day.
The founding president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, topped the list. Other names on the list included those of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, "rebel poet" Kazi Nazrul Islam, the Lahore Resolution fame leader of the Pakistan Movement, A. K. Fazlul Huq, Shubhash Chandra Bose, who raised an army to wage rebellion against the British in India, pioneer of Muslim female education and women's rights in Bengal Begum Rokeya (1880- 1932), Jagadish Chandra Basu (1858-1937), who is credited with the ground-breaking scientific work on the life cycle of plants, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, Raja Rammohan Roy, Mir Nisar Ali Titumeer Huseyn Shaheed Suharwardi, who rose to become the prime minister of Pakistan.
The extended list of 30 includes Abdul Kader Siddiq, commander of the Kaderia Bahini of freedom fighters, who secured 21st position. Col (rtd) M.A.G. Osmani, who led a war as commander-in-chief, is placed next to Siddiq. Golam Azam, former Amir of the Jamaat-i-Islami, is placed 24th on the list and former prime minister Sheikh Hasina occupies the 27th place.
Chitta Ranjan Das, (1870-1925), one of the protagonists of secular Bengali nationalism, shares the 31st position with, of all the people, cricketer Saurav Ganguli!
The urban middle class in Bangladesh appears to be sharply divided over the survey report. The opposition Awami League is trying to project the survey report as the final 'verdict of history.'
Those who are opposed to the AL are painting the BBC as a partisan villain. The Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD), the student front of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has rejected the opinion poll.
Waiting for disaster
Kawish writes that a large number of breaches in the ill- designed Left Bank Out fall Drain network played havoc with the tail-end district of Badin during monsoon rains last year by killing at least 80 people, rendering hundreds others homeless and flooding standing crops on thousands of acres.
It deplores that despite the lapse of almost a year, neither the rain victims have been compensated nor the breaches have been plugged. If the breaches are not plugged before the coming rainy season, last year's tragedy may repeat itself.
The daily urges the authorities concerned to take recent rain as a wake-up call and plug the breaches on a war footing. It also asks the Sindh government not to further delay payment of compensation to the rain victims.
Hilal-i-Pakistan says that after an inordinate delay in the enforcement of the Police Order, it has been recently decided that the control of police department will be handed over to district governments and every district Nazim will write the annual confidential report of the police chief of his area. The move is said to be aimed at strengthening the district government system which was introduced three years ago with the objective of devolution of power.
However, the daily comments, nothing, except the names of some designations of government officers, has changed since the introduction of the devolution programme and the attitude of officers towards people and their grievances has remained unchanged.
And the performance of the police department has shown no signs of improvement which is evident from ever-rising crime rate and continued human rights violations by the custodians of law.
The paper says that revolutionary changes are needed to make the department more efficient and less anti-people; merely authorizing district nazims to write the ACRs of police chiefs of their areas will not serve the purpose.
Ibrat writes that the recent reconciliation between two warring tribal groups at a jirga in Jacobabad and the killing of seven members of a family in Khairpur took place on the same day. The two incidents suggest that the administration has failed to ensure peace in rural areas of Sindh which is leading people to stick to mediaeval traditions.
Awami Awaz points out that discharge of poisonous affluent is killing the Manchhar Lake, one of the greatest natural reservoirs of freshwater in Asia. It is not only causing an environmental disaster but also depriving a large community of fishermen, who are known for using boats as homes, of their only source of livelihood.
The situation needs immediate attention of the federal and provincial governments, Environment Protection Agency and international conservation agencies.
Halchal says that resistance against the US-led coalition has entered a new, and for the invaders, disturbing phase in Iraq and Israel has killed Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi after the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Palestine.
The United States and Isreal are trying to pursue their aggressive policies through the use of brute force which may trap the former in a Vietnam like situation and is bound to escalate hostilities between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Middle East imbroglio calls for international mediation, a role of the United Nations in Iraq and resumption of the Israel-Palestine dialogue.