by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
A protest by Kashmiri youth in Srinagar in August. (AP)
By Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh,
New Delhi : The biggest challenge and the top priority in Kashmir are to deradicalize Kashmiri youth and militants and prevent it from turning into a Syria of India, says Dineshwar Sharma, the newly-named interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir.
An old Kashmir hand, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) for two years from December 2015, Sharma says his mission to bring an end to violence would also include talking to anyone “even a rickshaw puller or a cart puller” who can contribute so that peace is ushered in the state “as soon as possible”.
He says he is personally pained to see the path Kashmiris, particularly youth, have chosen that would only destroy the society.
“I feel the pain and sometimes I become emotional also. I want to see this kind of violence ends as soon as possible from all sides. The youth of Kashmir like Zakir Musa (Kashmir Al Qaeda chief) and Burhan Wani (slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander) get hype when they talk about (establishing Islamic) Caliphate,” Sharma told IANS in an interview, referring to the new-age Kashmir militant commanders.
He said the way youth of Kashmir were moving, “which is radicalization”, would ultimately “finish the Kashmir society itself.
“I am worried about the people of Kashmir. If all this picked up, the situation will be like Yemen, Syria and Libya. People will start fighting in so many groups. So, it is very important that everybody, all of us, contribute so that suffering of Kashmiris end.
“I will have to convince the youth of Kashmir that they are only ruining their future and the future of all Kashmiris in the name of whether they call it azadi (independence), Islamic caliphate or Islam. You can take examples like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen or any country where such things are going. They have become the most violent places in the world. So, I want to see that it doesn’t happen in India.”
The former IPS officer, who led the spy agency’s “Islamist Terrorism Desk” between 2003 and 2005, was named on Monday to open talks in a bid to end the nearly three-decade-old insurgency in Kashmir.
When the IB was investigating the fledgling modules of the Islamic State in Kerala, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in 2015, Sharma is widely known to have advocated a policy of arresting the problem by counselling and reforming, instead of arresting the potential recruits of the global terror network.
The soft-spoken intelligence veteran is known to have established friendly relationships with arrested militants in a bid to reform them when he was Assistant Director IB from 1992-94 – the time when militancy was at its peak in Jammu and Kashmir.
Serving in Kashmir as an IB man, Sharma was instrumental in the arrest of then Hizbul Mujahideen commander Master Ahsan Dar in 1993 after he broke away from Syed Salahuddin – the Hizb chief based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
He recalled how he had met Dar in Srinagar jails and how the militant commander asked him to bring his daughter and son to meet him in the prison. “I actually took them to meet him.”
Asked If he had identified the way to reach out to the youth in Kashmir, Sharma said he was still working out the modalities.
“I am open to talking to everybody. Anybody who believes in peace and wants to come and give me some ideas how to go about, I am willing to listen. He can be an ordinary student, ordinary youth, a rickshawwala or a thelawala with some good idea. I will consider that.”
He was asked if he had started reaching out to Hurriyat leaders, who have maintained silence over his appointment even though they had dropped hints in their statements about engaging in “constructive” talks with the government of India after some of their aides were arrested in terror funding case.
Sharma cautiously replied: “Let me see. I am ready to talk to everybody. Anybody who wants to contribute to peace.”
Replying to a query that radicalisation of Kashmiri youth was a more recent phenomenon than the problem of Kashmir itself, Sharma said the state was almost at peace before the 2008 unrest over a land row and the 2016 wave of violent street protests after the killing of Burhan Wani.
“Somehow the minds of youths and students have been diverted somewhere else. That is the point of address. I have seen the violence in Kashmir from very close quarters. I was posted in Srinagar. So the kind of violence I have seen, I am really pained. I am very sad.”
Commenting on the previous attempts by the government of nominating peace emissaries and other initiatives to solve the problem, he said he would “desperately like to try some new ideas”.
“I am studying the reports (of previous interlocutors) but other than that I am trying to see some new ideas.”
Kashmir is not Sharma’s first assignment of brokering peace. In June this year, he was tasked to initiate a dialogue with insurgent groups in Assam, including the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and those representing Bodos.
Asked over any difference between his previous peace brokering assignment and the new one, he said; “The big difference is that there is not any involvement of Pakistan and any third country in the northeast.”
(Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in and rajnish.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Writer Nayantara Sahgal
By Saket Suman,
New Delhi : She grew up during India’s fight for freedom under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi and is among the country’s foremost writers with feminist concerns. But Nayantara Sahgal, a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, says that contemporary Indian history is being fantasised, the minorities are under threat and there’s a long fight ahead to preserve the “true meaning of India”.
“In the BJP-ruled states, history is not just being rewritten. It is being fantasised. The Mughal empire is being ruled out of it. (Jawaharlal) Nehru has been wiped out of it. A fictitious narrative is being created in place of history, just as mythology is being promoted as science.
“The threat to the minorities and attacks on them, especially Muslims, and all others who do not fall in line with the ruling (party’s) ideology are destroying India’s great achievement of unity in diversity and the democratic freedoms and equality that Indian citizens have enjoyed since independence,” Sahgal told IANS in an email interview from Dehradun, where she is settled.
“We, for whom India is a secular, democratic, inclusive republic — whose citizens have grown up in freedom — can never settle for less, and the protests against the crushing of dissent and debate are coming from many different groups: Writers, historians, scientists, students, professors and Dalits. One cannot despair of an India that refuses to bow down to any form of dictatorship. But there is a long fight ahead to preserve the true meaning of India,” she added.
Sahgal, along with a host of leading literary stalwarts, returned her Sahitya Akademi award in 2015 to protest against rising intolerance in the country. While many joined the silent protests with black gags and bands that rocked the Rabindra Bhavan (which houses the Sahitya Akademi here), there was “an equal music” from the other end of the political spectrum.
Those opposed to these spontaneous protests questioned the motives of the protesting writers, dubbed them as politically motivated by people with “vested interests” and questioned why these writers couldn’t show the “social reality” that they are protesting against through their writings.
Two years later, Sahgal is out with her novel “When The Moon Shines By Day” (Speaking Tiger/Rs 399/168 pages). It is a fitting response to the contemporary state of affairs, and is billed as a “dystopian satire” that draws a telling portrait of our times. In this extremely symbolic work of fiction, Sahgal achieves the rare feat of critical imagination and elegantly wraps it around “her deepest concerns”.
And, therefore in the novel, a character finds her father’s books on medieval history disappearing from bookstores and libraries. Her young domestic help, Abdul, discovers it is safer to be called Morari Lal on the street, but there is no such protection from vigilante fury for his Dalit friend, Suraj. Kamlesh, a diplomat and writer, comes up against official wrath for his anti-war views.
Sahgal said that all writers tell different stories, out of differtent backgrounds and urges, but maintained that her own “background has been political so politics is my natural material”.
“Writing, for me, has been a way of expressing my deepest concerns, through both fiction and non-fiction. My novels have been set against the political situations of their times, and have reflected the aspirations and shortcomings of India since independence. In that sense they have been about the making of modern India. Reflecting the times we are living in, my new novel is about the unmaking of modern India,” Sahgal explained.
Reflecting on her early days, she recalled that she grew up during India’s fight for freedom. Her family was involved in the struggle, and her father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, died during his fourth imprisonment under British rule. At independence in 1947, India, Sahgal contended, a deeply religious country of many religions chose to become a secular democratic republic, rejecting a religious identity and making religion a private affair. The constitution guaranteed every Indian the right to freedom of expression, worship and lifestyle.
“This is no longer the case. These freedoms are now under attack and the present government seeks to give India an exclusive Hindu identity, calling it a Hindu rashtra,” she lamented.
“When The Moon Shines By Day” is a rather unusual title. She explained that the moon obviously does not shine by day nor does the sun shine by night. “Something is wrong if one is forced to agree with such propositions, or be punished for refusing to agree,” she quipped.
Apart from the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, Sahgal has also received Britain’s Sinclair Prize for fiction in 1985 and the Commonwealth Writers Award (Eurasia) in 1987. She was also a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington, from 1981 to 1982.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi
By Mohd Asim Khan,
New Delhi : The idea of holding simultaneous polls to Parliament and the state assemblies — for which Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others have been strongly pitching — is good but has very low practicality in the real world, former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has said.
He also slammed the government’s move to introduce electoral bonds, which would only make political funding more opaque and end public scrutiny.
“The idea (of simultaneous polls) is good, and the two major reasons cited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi are also valid, but it is fraught with huge practical problems. Its practicality is low,” Quraishi told IANS in an interview.
“To begin with, you need a constitutional amendment. Then you will have to reduce the terms of certain state assemblies and extend those of certain others. You will need political consensus for that, which will not be easy as many would not agree to reduce their terms,” he said.
Quraishi has also touched upon the issue in his latest book “Loktantra Ke Utsav Ki Ankahi Kahani”, that was released recently by Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu in New Delhi.
While unveiling the book, Naidu, too, pitched for simultaneous polls to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, and even went ahead to say that elections to the local bodies and village panchayats can also be clubbed with these.
He reiterated — as said by Modi earlier — that perpetual elections cost the exchequer a bomb and also hamper development due to the model code of conduct that kicks in when the poll dates are announced.
However, Quraishi, who as the Chief Election Commissioner has seen the process of elections very closely, is not very enthusiastic about the idea.
Asked about the Centre’s power to dismiss elected state governments, and if this should be curtailed, Quraishi had another poser: “Alternately, what if the central government falls much before its term? We saw the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government fall in just 13 days. And we have had central governments that just lasted around a year.”
“Will you again stoke the entire country, all the states and UTs, which might be having stable governments, into election? So, again I would say this idea is fraught with practical problems.”
He said that there has been a parallel view that perpetual elections are good.
“I heard a senior parliamentarian saying that the public likes continuous elections. The media also likes it for their TRPs. Then I heard someone saying in Pune ‘Jab jab chunav aata hai, ghareeb ke pet me pulav aata hai’ (The poor get to eat well during elections),” he said.
On electoral bonds, Quraishi said that vis-a-vis transparency in political funding, the Modi government said one thing and did the opposite.
“The Finance Minister (Arun Jaitley) in his Budget speech said that in the last 70 years we have not been able to achieve transparency in political funding, and that fair and free elections are not possible without transparent funding. Very good. But what he did was totally the opposite.
“Electoral bonds se bada nuksan hoga (electoral bonds would cause much harm). Earlier, parties had to submit details of donations above Rs 20,000 to the Election Commission. The idea was that the public must know how much a corporate house gives to a political party.
“So if a certain corporate house received a big contract, licence, etc, from the government, the public would know that it is quid pro quo, a return of favour for their donations. However, now the parties are not bound to disclose their donations received through electoral bonds. Only the government would know who donated what or who got what. This has ended transparency,” Quraishi maintained.
He termed as ridiculous Jaitley’s contention that the donors want anonymity.
“What does it mean? Naturally, the donor would want anonymity so that the public does not know why they got favours from the government,” he said.
He said that another damaging move from the government was removing the cap on corporate funding.
“Earlier no corporate house could donate more than 7.5 per cent of their profits to political parties. That cap has been removed now. Does it mean that now companies will only work for running political parties? This is farcical,” the former CEC said.
He said the move to cap cash donations from Rs 20,000 to Rs 2,000 is not likely to have any impact either, as parties would break the donations in smaller amounts.
“At best, it would just increase their clerical work,” he said.
(Asim Khan can be contacted at mohd.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Shivraj Singh Chouhan
By V.S. Chandrasekar and Brajendra Nath Singh,
New Delhi : Seeking a hat-trick of election victories, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is confident he suffers from no anti-incumbency against his government nor are intolerance and cow vigilantism issues for him in the state that goes to polls next year.
For him, the image and performance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are advantages which he will seek to drive home to the electorate along with his own performance in the last 12 years. “The opposition is jealous of his (Modi’s) competence, talent and popularity.”
Chouhan, 58, who has been declared the Chief Ministerial face by BJP President Amit Shah, acknowledges that Congress is the main challenger but feels it is not a force that is a threat to him.
“If you ask this question to a leader, then he will obviously say there is no anti-incumbency. But I am saying from the bottom of my heart that even after 12 years there is no unrest among people,” Chouhan told IANS in an interview.
“Now we have two advantages. One is Modiji and his leadership. And the other is the achievements of the state government. Due to him, India’s stature has gone up in the world. Like all Indians, every citizen of Madhya Pradesh too feels pride. Apart from this his schemes are there. The Ujjawala scheme has turned out to be a miracle. In just one district in Madhya Pradesh, we have distributed around 90,000 gas cylinders. Obviously we will reap benefits from his image of performer,” he said.
Citing the resolution of the Doklam standoff with China, Chouhan said, “There is pride in every Indian heart that Modiji has ‘straightened China’. This reflects in the people’s mind. Through the surgical strikes the message went that ‘We can set things right’. Due to Modiji, the feeling of national pride and self-pride have gone up in people’s mind. Obviously, due to all these there will be no anti-incumbency. People feel there is a powerful government at the Centre.”
Asked about issues like intolerance and cow vigilantism figuring in the national discourse, the Chief Minister said it was not an issue in Madhya Pradesh except that there is a ban on beef and strict action will be taken against anyone breaking law.
“One or two small incidents may have taken place but the whole state cannot be blamed for that. If something had happened, we have taken quick action. Law and order is our priority and nobody will be allowed to break it,” he said.
He said the state has been “tough on Naxalites and dacoits”. “The SIMI network has been finished. Madhya Pradesh is a peaceful place where people live in harmony. There is no question of discrimination. Even in the Chief Minister’s house we celebrate all the festivals together of all the religions and communities.”
Asked about support to forces of fundamentalism, Chouhan said neither the BJP nor the RSS supported such forces. “Individuals may be involved in such activities. We take action according to law.”
He hit out at opposition parties for targeting the Prime Minister and using strong language against him. “The opposition is jealous of the competence of Modiji, his talent, his devotion towards the country and people and his overall impact. That is why they are targeting him all the time.”
He recalled former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s advise that one should outshine the other by drawing a bigger line and not erasing the existing line.
“Instead of being jealous about Modi, friends in opposition should draw a bigger line. But they don’t have the capability. That is why they target Modiji. And by targeting him they stoop low. They can’t fight the Prime Minister on the ground. That is why they play with words and go to the extent of abusing him.”
Asked about whom he saw as the opponent, Chouhan acknowledged that Congress is the main challenger. “But I don’t think about them or their leadership. It is their look out. They need to create their leadership. We are banking on development and our work. The way the Congress leaders are talking and making remarks, only God can save them.”
(V.S. Chandrasekar and Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at chandru.v@ians.in and brajendra.n@ians.in)
—IANS
